The French Connections of Jacques Derrida offers stimulating and accessible essays that address, for the first time, the issue of Derrida's relation to French poetics, writing, thought, and culture. In addition to offering considerations of Derrida through studies of such significant French authors as Mallarme, Baudelaire, Valery, Laporte, Ponge, Perec, Blanchot, and Barthes, the book also reassesses the development of Derrida's work in the context of structuralism, biology, and linguistics in the 1960s, and looks at the possible relationships between Derrida's writing and that of the Surrealist and Oulipa groups. Derrida is introduced as one whose work is as much poetic as it is philosophical, and who is strikingly French and yet not unproblematically so.