Writing and Difference by Jacques Derrida
Published 1967 · 362 pages · 170,078 words · about 18 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Writing and Difference to read?
Writing and Difference scores 86 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 88 out of 100
- Derrida deploys a vast specialist philosophical lexicon drawn from phenomenology, structuralism, and psychoanalysis -- terms like 'archia,' 'breaching' (Bahnung), 'energeia,' 'différance,' 'eschatology,' 'apotropaic,' and 'supplementarity.' He frequently uses untranslated French, German, and Greek terms (Aufschub, Vorrat, eidos, logos) and coins neologisms. The vocabulary exceeds most literary fiction and sits firmly in the upper echelon of philosophical difficulty, comparable to Heidegger's texts in translation.
- Sentence structure: 85 out of 100
- Sentences routinely extend across 5-10 lines with multiple embedded clauses, parenthetical qualifications, and self-interrupting dashes. Derrida layers subordinate clauses that qualify and reverse their own assertions -- e.g., 'that it is necessary to state infinity's excess over totality in the language of totality; that it is necessary to state the other in the language of the Same; that it is necessary to think true exteriority as non-exteriority.' The recursive, spiraling syntax rivals Henry James and late Proust in density.
- Abstraction: 96 out of 100
- This is pure philosophical discourse operating at the highest level of abstraction. Derrida discusses Being, presence, différance, the trace, the supplement, and the closure of metaphysics with almost no concrete narrative, characters, or sensory detail. Even when discussing literature (Artaud's theater, Rousset's structuralism), the discussion immediately ascends to questions about the conditions of possibility for meaning itself. More abstract than The Waste Land or Gravity's Rainbow by a significant margin.
- Information density: 90 out of 100
- Every paragraph introduces multiple philosophical concepts, references to other thinkers (Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Freud, Foucault, Bataille, Artaud, Mallarmé, Rousset), and argumentative moves. The essays on Levinas alone engage with totality, infinity, the face, ethical violence, ontological difference, and phenomenological method in rapid succession. There is virtually no repetition for emphasis or narrative pacing -- each sentence advances the argument.
- Narrative indirection: 78 out of 100
- Derrida rarely states his thesis directly. Instead, he works through close readings of other philosophers, showing how their texts undermine themselves from within. The reader must reconstruct Derrida's own position from his deconstructive engagement with Foucault, Levinas, Husserl, and others. His argument about writing and différance emerges obliquely through essays that appear to be 'about' other thinkers. However, this is philosophical argumentation, not narrative, so the indirection is structural rather than story-based.
- Symbolic density: 72 out of 100
- Derrida employs recurring metaphorical figures -- the trace, the supplement, the mystic writing-pad, the theater of cruelty, force vs. form -- that function quasi-symbolically across the essays. The book-as-tissue metaphor from the epigraph (couture/faufilure) resonates throughout. However, these are conceptual metaphors rather than literary symbols in the traditional sense; they carry philosophical rather than imagistic or mythic weight, placing this below the densest literary symbolism.
- Ironic distance: 65 out of 100
- Derrida practices a form of philosophical irony where he inhabits a thinker's language precisely in order to show its internal contradictions -- as when he uses Levinas's own concepts against Levinas. The essay on Foucault and madness stages the irony of attempting to speak madness's silence in the language of reason. But this is methodological irony, not the sustained tonal irony of Nabokov or Joyce. Derrida is deeply earnest about his philosophical stakes.
- Resolution withholding: 82 out of 100
- Derrida systematically refuses to resolve the tensions he identifies. The essay on Levinas ends not with a verdict but with a question about the Greek and the Jew. 'Structure, Sign, and Play' closes by declaring the choice between two interpretations of interpretation is 'unthinkable' and names 'the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself.' Each essay opens aporias rather than closing arguments, making irresolution a structural principle of the book.
- Structural complexity: 62 out of 100
- The book is a collection of eleven discrete essays plus a translator's introduction, arranged roughly chronologically by publication date (1959-1967). Within each essay, Derrida follows a recognizable pattern of close reading and philosophical argument. There are no timeline jumps, POV shifts, or narrative fragmentation. The complexity lies in the conceptual density rather than in formal structure. The essays do form an implicit arc from structuralism toward deconstruction, but this requires the reader to construct it.
How Writing and Difference is regarded
Writing and Difference holds a literary regard score of 79 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.