Literature

Jacques Derrida confesses to have been interested as a young man primarily in literature rather than philosophy. The literature opposition excludes by the dominating metaphysical ambitions of philosophical discourse. However, in the end, Derrida works time and again to thematise literature not as philosophy’s excluded binary opposite, but as a rival mode of theoretical engagement: literature as philosophy’s secret partner and enabler. Derrida’s conception of literature is a distinctly modern and Western one, tied to the political rise of European democracies in the nineteenth-century. And for Derrida, literature avant-garde Western literature of the modernist era takes both its form and content from that kind of necessary hesitation. He writes voluminously about literature throughout his career, and his work was first received into the English-speaking academy primarily as a kind of literary criticism, before deconstruction’s disciplinary identity as a philosophical discourse.