SOURCE: "vs. (Wittgenstein, Derrida)," in Wittgenstein and Contemporary Philosophy, edited by Souren Teghrarian and Anthony Serafini, Longwood Academic, 1992, pp. 134-53.

Margolis is an American author and educator. In the following essay, he discusses Wittgenstein's works in relation to those of the French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida.

I have for a long time wanted to look at Wittgenstein and Derrida together; but beginnings are difficult. Derrida, of course, solves the problem of how to begin by explaining the sly function of prefaces, that cannot seriously be supposed to introduce innocently what follows and is intact without them [in "Outwork, prefacing," Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, 1981]. Equally cleverly, Wittgenstein solves the problem of how to begin the Philosophical Investigations—which, after all, borrowing from Derrida's "This (therefore) will not have been a book" by way of a sort of Socratic postcard, was not to be a book—by beginning straight off with...