Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology: Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard

“This is a superbly strong work that will generate much discussion. There are no comparable books that have undertaken such a rereading of the development of French theory and its emergence in response to phenomenology. Most other studies tend to focus on just deconstruction or Derrida, and many of these are already dated. None have the extensive coverage and knowledge of the French intellectual scene exhibited here.”—David F. Ferris, University of Colorado at Boulder
“This book is a carefully crafted and extremely erudite study of the forgotten connections between existential phenomenology and French deconstruction....it represents a major contribution to our understanding of twentieth-century French intellectual history, and holds many rewards for readers possessing a prior knowledge of the subject.”—The Dalhousie Review

This book aims to disentangle two terms that were conflated in the initial Anglo-American appropriation of French theory: deconstruction and poststructuralism. Focusing on Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, and Baudrillard (but also considering Levinas, Blanchot, de Man, and others), it deals with the turn from a deconstruction inflected by phenomenology to a poststructuralism formed by its rejection of models based on consciousness in favor of ones based on language and structure.

Tilottama Rajan is Canada Research Chair in English and Theory at the University of Western Ontario. She is the author of The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice and the co-editor of After Poststructuralism: Writing the Intellectual History of Theory.