Essential History: Jacques Derrida and the Development of Deconstruction

A fundamental reinterpretation of Derrida's project and the works for which he is best known, Kates's study fashions a new manner of working with the French thinker that respects the radical singularity of his thought as well as the often different aims of those he reads. Such a view is in fact "essential" if Derrida studies are to remain a vital field of scholarly inquiry, and if the humanities, more generally, are to have access to a replenishing source of living theoretical concerns.

1. The Success of Deconstruction: Derrida, Rorty, Gasche, Bennington, and the Quasi-Transcendental; 2. "A Consistent Problematic of Writing and the Trace:" The Debate in Derrida/Husserl Studies and the Problem of Derrida's Development; 3. Derrida's 1962 Interpretation of Writing and Truth: Writing in the "Introduction to Husserl's 'Origin of Geometry'"; 4. The Development of Deconstruction as a Whole and the role of Le probleme de la genese dans la philosophie de Husserl; 5. Husserl's Circuit of Expression and the Phenomenological Voice: Speech and Phenomena; 6. Essential History: Derrida's Reading of Saussure and His Reworking of Heldeggerean History.