ABSTRACT
Jacques Derrida’s attention to the paradoxes or aporias of Western thought reveals the uncertainties, instabilities, contradictions, and impasses implicit in our intellectual, socio-political, and cultural traditions. What is crucial to remember is that Derrida neither poses deconstruction as a proper name nor as a transcendent interpretative gesture. Derrida’s early work is an extended mediation on how the boundaries of philosophical discourse are created and sustained, as well as how philosophy conceives of language as a means to arrive at concepts such as “truth” and “presence.” Beginning with the privileging of speech over writing that Derrida reads in one of the founding texts of Western philosophy, he proceeds to cast a rather large net that ensnares everything from poetry to architecture. Derrida displaces the “origin” of both speech and writing in a concept of “arche-writing,” a trace. Derrida’s interest in what he terms the “spatial arts” receives its most extended discussion in The Truth in Painting.
