Rodolphe Gasché

Rodolphe Gasché (born 1938) holds the Eugenio Donato Chair of Comparative Literature at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.

Career

Gasché obtained his doctorate from the Freie Universität Berlin, where he has also taught. Before going to Buffalo he taught at Johns Hopkins University.

Work

Gasché is well known for bringing a very deep and thorough training in German and French philosophy to his analyses of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. Early in his career, Gasché translated Derrida's major essays into German. After moving from Paris to Baltimore to take up a post with Johns Hopkins University, Gasché was among a group of young intellectuals who authored pathbreaking articles in the journal, "Glyph". However, it was his book, The Tain of the Mirror (Cambridge, MA: 1986), which introduced the special brand of rigor and depth that Gasché continuously offers to a wide circle of American readers. The Tain located the thought of Jacques Derrida within the philosophical tradition (particularly of phenomenology) at a time when his Anglophone reception was largely dominated by literary theory that focused on Derrida's flamboyant terminology without deeply probing its philosophical meaning. Gasché has also written extensively on other philosophical and literary topics, including the work of Georges Bataille, Paul de Man, Martin Heidegger, and Immanuel Kant, as well as German idealism, German Romanticism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and critical theory.

Bibliography

• The Stelliferous Fold: Toward a Virtual Law of Literature's Self-Formation (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2011)
• Europe, Or The Infinite Task (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).
• Views and Interviews: On "Deconstruction" in America (Aurora, Colorado: The Davies Group Publishers, 2007).
• The Honor of Thinking: Critique, Theory, Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).
• The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant's Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
• Of Minimal Things: Studies on the Notion of Relation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
• The Wild Card of Reading: On Paul de Man (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London: Harvard University Press, 1998).
• Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London: Harvard University Press, 1994).
• The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London: Harvard University Press, 1986).
• System und Metaphorik in der Philosophie von Georges Bataille (Bern: Lang, 1978).
• Die hybride Wissenschaft (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1973).

See also

• List of deconstructionists