Dissemination

The English version of Dissemination [is] an able translation by Barbara Johnson. Derrida´s central contention is that language is haunted by dispersal, absence, loss, the risk of unmeaning, a risk which is starkly embodied in all writing. The distinction between philosophy and literature therefore becomes of secondary importance. In Disseminations —more than in any previous work— Derrida joins in the revelry, eaving a complex pattern of puns, verbal echoes and allusions, intended to ´deconstruct´ both the pretension of criticism to tell the truth about literature, and the pretension of philosophy to be the literature of truth.