This is not written for people who have a month to get a draft of their thesis done and sixty thousand dollars in student loans and girl or boy trouble and are going to be 33 in a few short weeks and feel their life slipping through their fingers. It is a work of philosophy and a poem, in Derrida's usual style; it is not a work of scholarship, for people who want facts and citations. Not "material." But if those people have the patience and can remember how they felt when they read Condillac (or hell, Ulysses)in more relaxed, youthful times--or perhaps, if they come to it in later years, as evening reading alongside the Condillac they wrote on decades ago, now in front of a geothermal furnace with a synth-gnac, they may find some joys of the impressionistic ilk here. There are great observations, of course, that you come upon siftwise--the role of "frivolity" in Condillac's work; his effort to leap out into language study by positing invisible physical laws that linguistic "connection" or analogy may follow, on the model of the recently discovered gravity &c.; his "two metaphysics," one of linguistic systems and the other of linguistic practice and play. And so Derrida's book serves as a kind of scriptural gloss, to be sung at the opening of the Condillacian salon. ( )