Of Grammatology
The translation is a noble job, and we should be grateful to have this distinguished book in our hands... [Spivak's] situating of Derrida among his precursors—Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Husserl—and contemporaries—Lacan, Foucault, and the elusive animal known as structuralism—is very lucid and extremely useful.(Michael WoodNew York Review of Books)The tool-kit for anyone who wants to empty the 'presence' out of any text he has taken a dislike to. A handy arsenal of deconstructive tools are to be found in its pages, and the technique, once learnt, is as simple, and as destructive, as leaving a bomb in a brown paper bag outside (or inside) a pub.(Roger PooleNotes and Queries)There is cause for rejoicing in the translation ofDe la grammatologie... Just as Derrida discloses in Rousseau a writer who distrusts writing and longs for the proximity of the self to its voice, so Spivak approaches Derrida through the structure of his diction; no ideas but in the words themselves.(Denis DonoghueNew Republic)Reading Derrida was the shock of a decentering, the critical shift into a world of the interminable movement of difference, the crisis of any closure.Of Grammatologywas and remains the most tightly worked... and exemplary... demonstration of the science of this shift and crisis.(Canto)One of the major works in the development of contemporary criticism and philosophy.(J. Hillis Miller, Yale University)