“Without a knowledge of Grammatology the American scholar has a simply inaccurate view of the French critical advance-guard,” Spivak writes. “For in the final analysis, Derrida, even as he questions the notion of ‘correction’, corrects the common assumption of the two mutually opposed French critical tendencies-phenomenology and structuralism. He argues that both spring from the view of time fostered by the necessarily unscientific metaphysics of presence. This role of exposing the common assumption shared by combatants in a controversy raises Derrida’s importance above merely the French scene. Derrida finds his place in the most clear-sighted European intellectual atradition of the ‘critique’ in the Kantian sense.” As his work progresses, Derrida elaborates the risk that even his own work would be questioned by the most radical elements of his thought.
