Margins of Philosophy

Composition and Structure

Margins of Philosophy (Marges de la philosophie) is a collection of essays and lectures by Jacques Derrida, written mainly between the early 1960s and early 1970s and first published as a volume in 1972. An English translation by Alan Bass appeared in 1982. The book belongs to the early, formative period of Derrida’s work, alongside Of Grammatology, Speech and Phenomena, and Writing and Difference.

The volume gathers a series of interventions that explore what Derrida calls the margins of philosophy: concepts, practices, and textual gestures that the philosophical tradition has often treated as secondary, supplementary, or external. Among the best known pieces are:

• “Différance” – a 1968 lecture introducing Derrida’s influential term;
• “Signature Event Context” – a 1971 paper that later became central in debates on language and communication;
• “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy” – an extended reflection on metaphor and conceptuality;
• Essays on Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas, which explore how their texts negotiate what they attempt to exclude or subordinate.

The collection does not present a linear argument; instead, each essay performs a deconstructive reading of particular figures or problems, while collectively elaborating Derrida’s critique of metaphysics and his reconfiguration of concepts such as writing, presence, and difference.

Central Themes and Arguments

Although heterogeneous in topic and style, the essays in Margins of Philosophy converge around several interrelated themes.

Différance and the critique of presence

The essay “Différance” introduces one of Derrida’s most characteristic notions. Written with an intentional misspelling, différance combines the French verbs différer (to differ) and différer (to defer). Derrida uses the term to name a process by which meaning is produced through a play of differences and temporal deferrals, rather than through self-present identities.

This notion supports a broader critique of the metaphysics of presence, which Derrida takes to be pervasive in Western philosophy. He argues that philosophical discourse recurrently privileges what appears as immediately given—such as presence, identity, origin, or self-consciousness—while relegating writing, absence, repetition, and alterity to a secondary or derivative status. Margins of Philosophy elaborates how this privileging operates not only in explicit arguments but in the textual and rhetorical structures of philosophical works.

Writing, speech, and iterability

In “Signature Event Context”, Derrida challenges traditional accounts of communication that treat meaning as a stable content transmitted from a speaker’s intention to a hearer. He focuses on writing and introduces the notion of iterability, the capacity of signs to be repeated in new contexts.

According to Derrida, a mark (spoken or written) can function as meaningful only because it can be detached from any singular context or intention and used again elsewhere. This repeatability implies that no context can saturate or fully determine meaning. The consequence is that:

• Intentionality does not exhaust what a text or utterance can mean;
• Context is open-ended and never fully closed;
• The distinction between speech and writing—where speech is often privileged as closer to thought or presence—is destabilized.

This argument extends Derrida’s earlier critique of logocentrism, the traditional privileging of spoken language as the transparent medium of reason.

Metaphor, concept, and “white mythology”

In “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy”, Derrida examines the role of metaphor in philosophical languages. He argues that philosophical concepts often arise from metaphors drawn from everyday experience, nature, or theology. Over time, these metaphors become “white”—their figurative origins fade and they appear as neutral, purely conceptual terms.

Derrida’s analysis suggests that what philosophy treats as literal, conceptual, or universal is often grounded in historical and cultural sedimentations of metaphor. He does not claim that philosophy can, or should, abandon metaphor; instead, he aims to show that philosophical discourse cannot fully master its own figurative resources. The margin in this context is the space where erased or naturalized metaphors continue to operate within philosophical concepts.

Margins, supplements, and the structure of exclusion

The idea of the margin functions for Derrida as both topic and method. The book’s title indicates an interest in what philosophy considers peripheral: prefaces, footnotes, examples, etymologies, metaphors, and other apparently secondary elements. Derrida argues that these “marginal” features often reveal the conditions of possibility of philosophical arguments.

A related notion is the supplement, which appears elsewhere in Derrida’s work and is presupposed in Margins of Philosophy. A supplement seems to be an addition to something complete, yet in Derrida’s analyses it frequently turns out that what is supplemented was never self-sufficient. For example, writing is traditionally seen as a supplement to speech, but Derrida contends that speech itself depends on structures—such as repeatability and spacing—often associated with writing. The supplement thus exposes a structural dependence masked as derivation.

Readings of canonical philosophers

Several essays in the volume offer detailed readings of major figures:

• On Husserl, Derrida explores the tension between phenomenology’s emphasis on the immediacy of lived experience and its reliance on ideal, repeatable structures of meaning, such as the ideality of the sign.
• On Heidegger, he examines the attempt to overcome metaphysics by returning to the question of Being, while showing how this project remains entangled in inherited linguistic and conceptual oppositions.
• On Levinas, Derrida acknowledges Levinas’s ethical critique of Western ontology but questions whether Levinas can fully escape the structures he criticizes.

These readings are not primarily historical reconstructions; they are textual analyses aiming to demonstrate how each thinker’s project is accompanied by marginal gestures, figures, and terms that complicate its central claims.

Intellectual Context and Reception

Margins of Philosophy appears at a moment when structuralism and post-structuralism were reshaping French intellectual life. The volume consolidates Derrida’s position as a central figure in these debates and provides many of the texts through which Anglophone readers first encountered deconstruction.

In philosophy, the work contributed to discussions of:

• The legacy of phenomenology and German idealism;
• The nature of language, reference, and meaning;
• The critique of metaphysics and foundationalism.

Beyond philosophy, Margins of Philosophy had a pronounced impact on literary theory, legal studies, and cultural criticism, particularly through the dissemination of concepts such as différance, iterability, and the critique of logocentrism. The essay “Signature Event Context” became a focal point in debates on speech act theory, including well-known exchanges between Derrida and J. L. Austin’s interpreters such as John Searle.

Reception has been sharply divided. Proponents view the book as a rigorous and innovative rethinking of philosophical practice, revealing hidden presuppositions and opening new avenues for analyzing texts and concepts. They highlight the precision of Derrida’s close readings and the way his attention to margins and supplements transforms questions about meaning, subjectivity, and rationality.

Critics have contended that Derrida’s style is excessively opaque, that his emphasis on textual play risks undermining stable reference or truth, or that his account of language leads to a problematic relativism. Some analytic philosophers have questioned the validity of his criticisms of intention and context, while others have engaged with them as serious challenges to established models of communication.

Despite these disagreements, Margins of Philosophy is widely recognized as one of Derrida’s most important works. It crystallizes several of his key ideas and exemplifies the method of deconstructive reading that would influence subsequent generations of thinkers across multiple disciplines. The collection’s focus on what is marginal, supplementary, or excluded continues to shape contemporary debates about how philosophical texts are written, read, and interpreted.