ABSTRACT
The relationship between literature and philosophy is of particular interest to Jacques Derrida, a philosopher by training who has turned his attention to both the concept of literature and to literary texts. He has deconstructed the conceptual opposition between literature and philosophy and philosophy’s historical claims to superiority by foregrounding their common ground — writing or textuality. The distinction between literature and philosophy is as old as philosophy itself which from the beginning declaimed its superior status. Before postmodernism, the relative values of literature and philosophy were gauged by their respective abilities to access truth. In Plato’s philosophy, truth is literally a metaphysical concept because it rests in the eternal Forms, accessible to the soul outside the physical world, and recoverable only by the philosopher. The opposition of literature and philosophy is highly susceptible to deconstruction, which foregoes crude one-upmanship in favour of a two-pronged campaign against the Platonic hierarchy.
