1. Sufficient to recount that Derrida was nominated for an Honorary Doctorate at Cambridge; the proposal challenged by (among others) two members of the University who arose to declare non placet at the preliminary hearing; and the award eventually confirmed - after much agitated canvassing on both sides - by a sizable (nearly two-thirds) majority when the matter was put to the vote in May 1992.

2. See for instance the extraordinary episode that Derrida narrates in his footnote to Limited Inc. (2nd edn., Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988), pp. 158-9.

3. Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl's "Origin of Geometry": an introduction, trans. John P. Leavey (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987); "Speech and Phenomena" and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press,1973); "Plato's Pharmacy", in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: Athlone Press, 1981), pp. 61-171; Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri C. Spivak (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1975).

4. Derrida, Of Grammatology (op. cit.), p. 158.

5. Ibid., p. 158.

6. Richard Rorty, "Philosophy as a Kind of Writing", in Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp.89-109.

7. See Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The authority of interpretive communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980).

8. Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978) and "Parergon", in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 15-147.

9. See especially Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

10. Ibid., pp. 207-71.

11. Derrida, Limited Inc. (op. cit.), pp. 29-107.

12. Derrida, "Plato's Pharmacy" (op. cit.); "The Double Session", in Dissemination (op. cit.), pp. 173-286; "The Law of Genre", trans. Avital Ronell, Critical Inquiry, Vol. VII, No. 1 (1980), pp. 55-81; "Coming Into One's Own", in Geoffrey Hartman (ed.), Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 114-48 and "To Speculate: on 'Freud'", in The Post Card: from Socrates to Freud and beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 292-409.

13. See for instance Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987) and John R. Searle, "Reiterating the Differences: a reply to Derrida", Glyph, Vol. I (1977), pp. 198-208; also John M. Ellis, Against Deconstruction (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989).

14. See Derrida, "Signature Event Context", Glyph, Vol. I (1977), pp. 172-97 and Limited Inc. (op.cit.).

15. Christopher Norris, Jacques Derrida (London: Fontana, 1987).

16. J. L. Austin, How to Do Thing with Words (London: Oxford University Press, 1963).

17. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992); J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).

18. Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences", Writing and Difference (op. cit.), pp. 278-93; p. 292.

19. Derrida, Of Grammatology (op. cit.), p. 55.

20. Rodolphe Gaschè, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the philosophy of reflection (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).

21. See Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in hermeneutics, ed. D. Ihde (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974).

22. See especially Rorty, "Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism", in Consequences of Pragmatism (op. cit.), pp. 139-59.

23. Derrida, "Parergon", in The Truth in Painting (op. cit.), pp. 15-147.

24. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Chatto & Windus, 1930).

25. Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (London: Chatto & Windus, 1951).

26. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 18-9.

27. de Man, Allegories of Reading (op. cit.), p. 31.

28. de Man, "Pascal's Allegory of Persuasion", in Stephen J. Greenblatt (ed.), Allegory and Representation (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1981); "The Epistemology of Metaphor", Critical Inquiry, Vol. V, No. 1 (Autmn 1978), pp. 13-30; "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant" (op.cit.).

29. See for instance Ora Avni, The Resistance to Reference: linguistics, philosophy, and the literary text, (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1990); Andrea Nye, Words of Power: a feminist reading of the history of logic, (London: Routledge, 1990); also Nye, "Frege's Metaphors", Hypatia, Vol. VII, No. 2 (Spring 1992), pp. 18-39.

30. Rodolphe Gaschè, "Indifference to Philosophy", in Lindsay Waters (ed.), Reading de Man Reading (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).

31. de Man, Foreword to Carol Jacobs, The Dissimulating Harmony (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. vii-xiii; p. xii.