An Event, Perhaps
A Biography of Jacques Derrida
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Philosopher, film star, father of “post truth”—the real story of Jacques Derrida
Who is Jacques Derrida? For some, he is the originator of a relativist philosophy responsible for the contemporary crisis of truth. For the far right, he is one of the architects of Cultural Marxism. To his academic critics, he reduced French philosophy to “little more than an object of ridicule.” For his fans, he is an intellectual rock star who ranged across literature, politics, and linguistics. In An Event, Perhaps, Peter Salmon presents this misunderstood and misappropriated figure as a deeply humane and urgent thinker for our times.
Born in Algiers, the young Jackie was always an outsider. Despite his best efforts, he found it difficult to establish himself among the Paris intellectual milieu of the 1960s. However, in 1967, he changed the whole course of philosophy: outlining the central concepts of deconstruction. Immediately, his reputation as a complex and confounding thinker was established. Feted by some, abhorred by others, Derrida had an exhaustive breadth of interests but, as Salmon shows, was moved by a profound desire to understand how we engage with each other. It is a theme explored through Derrida’s intimate relationships with writers such as Althusser, Genet, Lacan, Foucault, Cixous, and Kristeva.
Accessible, provocative and beautifully written, An Event, Perhaps will introduce a new readership to the life and work of a philosopher whose influence over the way we think will continue long into the twenty-first century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Salmon (A Coffee Story) traces the life and thought of Jacques Derrida (1930 2004) in this precise intellectual biography. Presenting Derrida as a philosopher who introduced "a new way of doing philosophy, a new language" with his theory of deconstruction, Salmon examines the personal undercurrents of Derrida's thought, including his upbringing as a "child at the margins" growing up in a Sephardic Jewish family in French colonial Algiers and the "fundamental ethic" of friendship informing his relationships with colleagues including Louis Althusser, H l ne Cixous, and Paul de Man. Salmon also considers the unusual level of fame Derrida attained, beginning with his emergence as the "new superstar of French philosophy" in the late 1960s, through the '80s, as deconstruction became globally ascendant. Emphasizing Derrida's "meticulous consistency of thought and method," Salmon offers a confident reading of the most innovative of Derrida's numerous works, including Speech and Phenomena and Of Grammatology, and his thinking's major turns, showing how he drew on and questioned axioms of philosophy, from Plato to Sartre. Salmon's ability to render the man and the mind behind Derrida's "notoriously difficult" style accessible make this volume a rich resource for both newcomers to, and fans of, "one of the great philosophers of this or any age."
