Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy

Volume 10, Issue 2, Spring 2006

An Entrusted Responsibility: Reading and Remembering Jacques Derrida

Rodolphe Gasché
Pages 327-340

Thinking, Without Wonder

Unlike all the major thinkers in the phenomenological tradition, but contemporary French philosophers as well, who are indebted to this tradition, Jacques Derrida, it seems, has never explicitly taken up the venerable question of philosophy’s origin in wonder. Is one to conclude from this that Derrida’s philosophy is a philosophy without wonder? Yet, what would it mean to philosophize without wonder? Or, by contrast, is Derrida’s philosophical thought engaged in multiplying wonder with the result that there is in his thought more wonder than one thinks?