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How are we to interpret Jacques DerridaGs writings now, after so much commentary has been devoted to his thought and his own astonishing productivity has come to an end? In this groundbreaking book, Joshua Kates extends his earlier contextualizing of DerridaGs work in relation to Husserl by arguing that we must begin from a frame different from that provided by Derrida himself. His work must be inserted into already existing fields, thus Gfielding Derrida.G By placing DerridaGs texts in the context of broader fields (such as interpretations of modernity and analytic philosophy of language), Kates captures DerridaGs stances with a new concreteness and an unprecedented scope, forging links to vital debates across the humanities today.

This essay returns to part 2, chapter 4 of Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar's landmark text Reading Capital to interrogate some of the historiographical concepts upon which literary studies continues to rely, especially that of the period. Althusser's profound critique of the period remains cogent, this article argues, for a field in which individual events and texts and large-scale social and political formations are often bound together by no framework other than their putative belonging to one and the same block of time—that is, a period. Aiming to reform this concept in order to institute a more complex historiography, Althusser invents a version of what came to be known simply as "theory." (Théorie was the name of Althusser's series at Maspero, in which Reading Capital and many of his subsequent works appeared.) Thus, while this essay, on the one hand, discloses the limits of Althusser's own practice of theory (in its ambivalent relation to structuralism), it concludes, on the other, that no genuine reworking is possible of the historical horizon we all presuppose, apart from the revival of theory or one of its avatars or successors. As in Althusser's example, theory's task, as yet unfulfilled, is to recast thought and knowledge's relation to time and history.

Attention to literature, it is commonly believed, is attention to how what is said is said, along with what is said. Whether understood as New Critical irony, deconstructive textuality, the referential density of literary discourse in the new historicism, or the overdetermined signifier of cultural studies and ideology critique, the foregrounding of the way in which discourse comes to expression - to the point of breaking the confines of the volume and surmounting the identity of the author - distinguishes literature as an object, and literary studies as a discipline, from all others, such as philosophy or history.