Rodolphe Gasché holds the Eugenio Donato

Eugenio Donato

Armenian-Italian deconstructionist, literary critic, and “philosophical critic”. Raised in Egypt, and educated in France, he played an important role in teaching Americans how to read post-structural theory....

 Chair of Comparative Literature

Comparative literature

Comparative literature is an academic field dealing with the literature of two or more different linguistic, cultural or national groups...

 at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York

State University of New York

The State University of New York, abbreviated SUNY , is a system of public institutions of higher education in New York, United States. It is the largest comprehensive system of universities, colleges, and community colleges in the United States, with a total enrollment of 465,000 students, plus...

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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

Johns Hopkins University

The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...

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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

Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...

 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

Georges Bataille

Georges Bataille was a French writer. His multifaceted work is linked to the domains of literature, anthropology, philosophy, economy, sociology and history of art...

, Paul de Man

Paul de Man

Paul de Man was a Belgian-born deconstructionist literary critic and theorist.He began teaching at Bard College. Later, he completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in the late 1950s...

, Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...

, and Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....

, as well as German idealism

German idealism

German idealism was a philosophical movement that emerged in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s, and was closely linked both with romanticism and the revolutionary politics of the Enlightenment...

, German Romanticism

German Romanticism

For the general context, see Romanticism.In the philosophy, art, and culture of German-speaking countries, German Romanticism was the dominant movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. German Romanticism developed relatively late compared to its English counterpart, coinciding in its...

, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and critical theory

Critical theory

Critical theory is an examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two different meanings with different origins and histories: one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism...

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See also

• List of deconstructionists