This was excellent and insightful and complicated and I was a little terrified of it but it was entirely worth the time. The difficulty of Derrida's prose is endlessly complained about but I find it perfectly comprehensible once having adjusted - the secret is keeping in mind the first couple words of the sentence by the time it reaches its end (this is more unorthodox than it sounds).

So the notorious 'Derridean' sentences aren't so present as one might imagine. I did enjoy however: 'In the experience of suffering as the suffering of the other, the imagination, as it opens us to a certain nonpresence within presence, is indispensable: the suffering of others is lived by comparison, as our nonpresent, past or future suffering. Pity would be impossible outside of this structure, which links imagination time, and the other as one and the same opening to nonpresence'

A pleasant surprise to understand as much as I think(!?!) I did.

thank god for this bookshelf so i can take my time coming back to this. one of the concepts from saussure that continues to pester me regards how the sign's arbitrariness proves its motivation. i get that the subject is the object, but how does the aleatoric express intent? the last half the book is strictly thinking with rousseau (writing an origin story about writing origins) to unpack the metaphysical baggage of enlightenment anthropologisms regarding binarisms and the fantasy of presence. this part of the book hugely resonated with me. i was not bored anywhere in the whole book. the most fun is murkily stumbling towards a recognition of influence upon other admired thinkers: the hinge thing with nathantiel mackey and the thing and its double thing with mbembe. i wanted to power through more with *writing and difference* and *dissemination* and i absolutely would if i wasn't fastened to a loosely pre-ordained reading list.

I'm not a big fan of Derrida. He believes words have no meaning, then he writes in such a way as to prove it, at least for his own writings.

I can't even compose a review for this, as the signifier cannot properly sign the signified, which is an ethnocentric judgment anyway.

wow

This book is hugely important, and if you are willing to give it a chance (and have some kind of idea about the big strands of French academia in the 1960s) it can be hugely rewarding. That said, Derrida is NOT an easy writer at the best of times, compounded by the fact that this book covers an enormous breadth of topics and Derrida was (according to the rumor-mill) high most of the time he wrote it. That said it proposes the basic derridean structures of writing and trace things which (IMO) have been unbelievably influential in academia, from queer theory to aftopessimism. It’s a good read, but only if you are willing to put up with its b.s.