Derrida Wordbook

Book excerpt: A glossary of words associated with Jacques Derrida accommodating the far-reaching implications of his work This cornucopia of words and definitions intervenes at crucial points of tension across the entire range of Derrida's publications, including those published posthumously. It offers sustained expository engagement with a series of 67 key words - from Aporia to Yes - having significance throughout Derrida's thought and writing. Touching on the literary, as well as on political, aesthetic, phenomenological and psychoanalytic discourses, and tracing how Derrida's own practice of close reading shadows faithfully the texts he reads before producing a breaking point in the logical limits of a given text, each word, the essays illustrate, is not a final word. Instead, each shows itself, through close reading that places the terms, figures, tropes, and motifs in their broader contexts, to be a gateway, opening on to innumerable, interconnected concerns that inform the work of Jacques Derrida.