The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation

By Jacques Derrida

Book Overview

"Originally published in French in 1982, this collection is a good representation of the range of Derrida's working styles."-South Atlantic Review "No writer has probed the riddle of the Other with more patience and insight than Jacques Derrida. . . . By rigorously interrogating the writings of major Western figures, Derrida not only forces a rethinking of the nature of reading and writing but calls into question basic as-sumptions about ourselves and our world. . . . The Ear of the Other will be especially useful to people who have little or no prior acquaintance with Derrida's work. . . . Through a careful reexamination of Nietzsche's autobiography Ecce Homo, Derrida elaborates some of the far-reaching implications of twentieth-century reinterpretations of human subjectivity."-Mark C. Taylor, Los Angeles Times Book Review. "Ably translated. . . . The long 'Roundtable on Autobiography' . . . is authentic philosophical discussion, illuminating not only the preceding lecture but Derrida's work as well."-Choice.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803265751
• ISBN13: 9780803265752
• Release Date: December 1988
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Length: 190 Pages
• Weight: 0.51 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Derrida reads the subject

In the book's central essay, Derrida deftly reads a short piece by Nietzsche on the way to reading the subject in the context of autobiography, of words one says about oneself. Those words, of course, return only by way of the ear so that one can locate oneself as the hearing other--hence his essay's title, "Otobiographies." The essay raises again the questions of speech and the voice and of the individual in language--questions that run through all of Derrida's work--as it paves the way for his later writings on the name. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the question of subjectivity that has so engrossed twentieth century philosophy as Derrida's account of the subject and of the way the subject knows about and can speak about itself is original, insightful, and provocative. The volume also includes the transcripts of two roundtable discussions: one on autobiography and one on translation, where Derrida with unusual clarity articulates an accessible version of his thinking on language. Finally there is an interview entitled "Choreographies" in which the editor forces Derrida to consider again the issue of gender and the status of woman. This volume is an often-overlooked but fascinating part of Derrida's corpus that will intrigue both the specialist and someone coming to Derrida's writings for the first time.