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Reading Derrida's Of Grammatology Sean Gaston, Ian MacLachlan
Publisher: Continuum

Derrida's suggestions for “how to read” lead to a new vision of ethics and a new concept of responsibility. Derrida published three books in 1967-Speech and Phenomena; Of Grammatology; and Writing and Difference, which outline the deconstructive approach to reading texts. When I started reading On Grammatology, I took a copy of Spivak's translation out of the library with it in case Derrida really proved unreadable. In any case, Derrida is not making a claim about language—he's making an ontological claim. I recently re-read Of Grammatology--after giving up a third of the way through the first time around--and I was surprised by what I found. I read this first, I think, after some of the short essays that first introduced me to Derrida. Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology It is probably easier to understand deconstruction while reading Derrida's essays, because he uses the method differently in each case; he does not spell it out explicitly like a formula. Derrida is not an easy read by any means. And Gayatri Spivak's 'Translator's Preface' to Of Grammatology is definitely worth a read, since she often puts things more clearly than Derrida himself, as well as being very interesting in her own right. About any of these concepts, particularly deconstruction, and assume Yale undergraduates were somehow brainwashed with Derrida. But all this brings me back to Grammatology--my second point. I never read Derrida–Of Grammatology–until my first year of graduate school at UCSB.