About the Author

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was director of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, and professor of humanities at the University of California, Irvine. Several of his books have been published in their English translation by the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews

With The Post Card, as with Glas (Univ. of Nebraska , 1986), Derrida appears more as writer than as philosopher. Or we could say that here, in what is in part a mock epistolary novel (the long section is called ``Envois,'' roughly, ``dispatches'' ), he stages his writing more overtly than in the scholarly works. The uninitiated reader will find Gregory L. Ulmer's Applied Grammatology (Johns Hopkins, 1984) indispensable for understanding this performative dimension of Derrida's work. Whether this feature comes across fully in the English is open to question, though Bass is dependable as translator and helpful in his glosses. The Post Card also contains a series of self-reflective essays, largely focused on Freud, in which Derrida is beautifully lucid and direct. Alexander Gelley, Univ. of California, Irvine