''Writing and Difference'' (french: L'écriture et la différence) is a book by the French philosopher
Jacques Derrida. The work, which collects some of the early lectures and essays that established his fame, was published in 1967 alongside ''
Of Grammatology'' and ''
Speech and Phenomena''.
Summary
Cogito and the History of Madness
The collection contains the essay ''Cogito and the History of Madness'', a critique of
Michel Foucault
Paul-Michel Foucault (, ; ; 15 October 192625 June 1984) was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and ho ...
. It was first given as a lecture on March 4, 1963, at a conference at the ''
Collège philosophique'', which Foucault attended, and caused a rift between the two,
[Powell (2006), pp. 34–5] possibly prompting Foucault to write ''
The Order of Things'' (1966) and ''
The Archaeology of Knowledge
''The Archaeology of Knowledge'' (''L’archéologie du savoir,'' 1969) by Michel Foucault is a treatise about the methodology and historiography of the systems of thought (''epistemes'') and of knowledge (''discursive formations'') which follow ...
'' (1969).
[Carlo Ginzburg (1976), ''Il formaggio e i vermi'', translated in 1980 as ]
The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller
', trans. Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), xviii.
Violence and Metaphysics
In "Violence and Metaphysics," Derrida comments on the writings of
Emmanuel Levinas
Emmanuel Levinas (; ; 12 January 1906 – 25 December 1995) was a French philosopher of Lithuanian Jews, Lithuanian Jewish ancestry who is known for his work within Jewish philosophy, existentialism, and Phenomenology (philosophy), phenomenology, ...
. He honors Levinas for his ethical philosophy of openness to the
Other. Indeed, he goes along with the idea that to live for the Other is the highest good. But he challenges the idea that only
face-to-face interaction
Face-to-face interaction is social communication carried out without any mediating technology. It is defined as the mutual influence of individuals’ direct physical presence with their body language and verbal language. It is one of the basic ...
can be ethical. Whereas Levinas sees written communication as dead and unresponsive, Derrida argues that writing can be just as valuable a space for ethical encounter. He writes, in characteristic support for writing: "Is it not possible to invert all of Levinas’s statements on this point? By showing, for example, that writing can assist itself, for it has time and freedom, escaping better than speech from empirical urgencies."
[''Writing and Difference'', 102]
The Structuralist Controversy
Included in the collection is his 1966 lecture at
Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hemisphere. It consiste ...
, which changed the course of the conference leading it to be renamed ''The Structuralist Controversy'', and caused Derrida to receive his first major attention outside France. The lecture is titled ''
''.
References
{{Jacques Derrida
1967 non-fiction books
Éditions du Seuil books
French non-fiction books
Works by Jacques Derrida
Iran's Book of the Year