Chapter 3 - Work
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
A double session
Early in 1969, some eighteen months or so after the appearance of L'Ecriture et la différence (Writing and Difference) and De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology), Derrida was invited to give a paper at a meeting of the Groupe d'études théoriques (or Theoretical Study Group) recently set up by the Paris avant-garde literary journal Tel Quel. This was an important occasion; and it gave Derrida the opportunity of presenting what remains his most fully developed account of the relationship between philosophy and literature and of that famous leading question: ‘What is literature?’
Before Derrida began speaking, each audience member was handed a single sheet of paper, on which there stood two quotations, in differing typefaces. The first, much the longer of the two, was an extract from Plato's Philebus, running across the upper third of the handout, and continuing down the left-hand side, while the second, slotted into the lower right-hand corner, consisted of a brief, relatively little-known prose text by the late nineteenth-century French poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98) (D, 201; 175). A number of additional quotations from the poet's work were chalked up in white on the blackboard, supplementing Derrida's handout, which was typed up in black on white. An old-fashioned chandelier illuminated proceedings. Derrida's talk was untitled, for reasons he went on to explain; a second session, also untitled, had been scheduled for the following week.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Derrida , pp. 33 - 114Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007