Limited Inc a b c …

Introduction

Derrida’s answer to Searle appeared in the journal Glyph in 1977 and is many times longer than the text it replies to. It quotes Searle almost sentence by sentence, makes fun of his copyright notice and renames him “Sarl” (after the French abbreviation for a limited company), so that the polemic itself demonstrates its thesis: every signature and every statement can be quoted, grafted onto new contexts and repeated. In 1988 Northwestern University Press published Limited Inc as a book, with “Signature Event Context”, an editor’s summary of Searle’s reply and a new afterword, “Toward an Ethic of Discussion”, in which Derrida rejects the charge that deconstruction licenses arbitrary readings.

Connections

Responds to

• Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida1977 · John Searle

More works by Jacques Derrida

• 1963Cogito and the History of Madness
• 1967Of Grammatology
• 1967Speech and Phenomena
• 1968Plato's Pharmacy
• 1971Signature Event Context