The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968

Edward Baring sheds fresh light on Jacques Derrida, one of the most influential yet controversial intellectuals of the twentieth century.

Edward Baring (Author)

9781107009677, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 October 2011

350 pages, 1 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.64 kg

'[This] is an outstanding historical account. The book combines a comprehensively informed sensitivity for the context with a masterly knowledge of Derrida's thought and the broader intellectual field in which he worked. Baring's work succeeds not only in enriching enormously our knowledge of Derrida's environment in those formative years of his philosophical development. With his artful philosophical readings, that are closely entwined with a contextual history of ideas, it changes our understanding of his thought.' Warren Breckman, translated from Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte

In this powerful study Edward Baring sheds fresh light on Jacques Derrida, one of the most influential yet controversial intellectuals of the twentieth century. Reading Derrida from a historical perspective and drawing on new archival sources, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy shows how Derrida's thought arose in the closely contested space of post-war French intellectual life, developing in response to Sartrian existentialism, religious philosophy and the structuralism that found its base at the École Normale Supérieure. In a history of the philosophical movements and academic institutions of post-war France, Baring paints a portrait of a community caught between humanism and anti-humanism, providing a radically new interpretation of the genesis of deconstruction and of one of the most vibrant intellectual moments of modern times.

Introduction
Part I. Derrida Post-Existentialist: 1. Humanist pretensions: Catholics, Communists and Sartre's struggle for existentialism in post-war France
2. Derrida's 'Christian' existentialism
3. Normalization: the École Normale Supérieure and Derrida's turn to Husserl
4. Genesis as a problem: Derrida reading Husserl
5. The God of mathematics: Derrida and the origin of geometry
Part II. Between Phenomenology and Structuralism: 6. A history of différance
7. L'ambiguité du concours: the deconstruction of commentary and interpretation in Speech and Phenomena
8. The ends of man: reading and writing at the ENS
Epilogue.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], History of Western philosophy [HPC], Philosophy [HP]