Abstract

This is a book about the between: the place that "does not occupy any space", between phenomenology and structuralism. Silverman writes from this place between Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, on one side, and de Saussure, Piaget, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, and Barthes, on the other. His writing draws from all of the figures mentioned, yet does not align itself with any one of them. The place between phenomenology and structuralism is both historically and conceptually beyond both traditions: what Silverman says about the writing of Foucault and Derrida might as well be applied to his own, that is, that this writing "might be described as a post-phenomenology post-structuralism". But this is not the amorphous location of a loosely constructed eclecticism; it is a carefully conceived philosophical doctrine designed for two interrelated purposes.