Jacques Derrida, Theory and Practice – his 1976-77 ENS lecture course – is reviewed at NDPR by Edward Baring, author of the excellent The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945-1968.

Jacques Derrida’s Theory and Practice, a seminar he taught at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) over the academic year 1976-1977, has all the signs of being a highly provocative text. As the publisher’s blurb notes, here Derrida engages with the Marxist tradition, long before any purported “political turn” or his ground-breaking Specters of Marx (1993). The promise of provocation is only heightened by the fact that Derrida frames his engagement with a reading of the antihumanist Marxist Louis Althusser, who was his colleague at the ENS and thus the teacher and mentor of many of the students he was addressing in the course…