A major association copy, inscribed by Derrida to his thesis supervisor, the French philosopher Maurice de Gandillac (1906-2006), in blue ink to the half title: ‘Pour Maurice et Geneviève de Gandillac, en les priant d’accepter cet [unknown] fidèlement, Jacques Derrida’. With Gandillac’s careful pencilled underlining and a few marginal annotations to the opening chapter ‘Force et signification’.
Maurice de Gandillac was Professor of History of the Middle Ages and Renaissance philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1946 to 1977, where he exercised considerable influence over Derrida’s generation of philosophers. Indeed, his list of students reads almost as a ‘who’s who’ of post-structuralist philosophers, including Derrida as well as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser and Jean-François Lyotard, amongst others. Gandillac supervised Derrida’s diplôme d’études supérieures, the equivalent of a modern Master’s Thesis, on The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy.
L’écriture et la différence is Derrida’s seminal work presenting his philosophy of deconstruction. The work is a collection of Derrida’s lectures and essays written between 1959 and 1966 and includes some of his most famous pieces on Descartes, Foucault, Artaud, Freud, Bataille, Hegel and Lévi-Strauss. The publication includes the text of one of Derrida’s most influential lectures, “La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines”, first presented in 1966 at Johns Hopkins University’s famous conference, The Structuralist Controversy. Later, many scholars and thinkers (including Derrida) pointed to this conference -and in particular, Derrida’s lecture - as the turning point which marked the beginning of the post-structuralist movement.
