The work, which collects some of the early lectures and essays that established his fame, was published in 1967 alongside Of Grammatology and Speech and Phenomena.

The collection contains the essay Cogito and the History of Madness, a critique of Michel Foucault.

Whereas Levinas sees written communication as dead and unresponsive, Derrida argues that writing can be just as valuable a space for ethical encounter.

By showing, for example, that writing can assist itself, for it has time and freedom, escaping better than speech from empirical urgencies.

"[3] Included in the collection is his 1966 lecture at Johns Hopkins University, which changed the course of the conference leading it to be renamed The Structuralist Controversy, and caused Derrida to receive his first major attention outside France.