Writing and Difference explores how writing exceeds the boundaries of books and authors. Jacques Derrida's desire to 'ingrammatize' everything shows that writing aims to go beyond retaining traces of the past. His essays engage with the texts of prominent mid-20th century French thinkers to open up questions about reading, history and language.

Derrida resists the structuralist tendency to focus on recurrent patterns and stable structures. Instead, he attends to the effects of texts, their force and their capacity to disrupt. His way of reading philosophers like Michel Foucault and Claude Lévi-Strauss transforms critical categories and blurs boundaries between form and content. Derrida puts himself at a point where he does not know where his writing is going. This allows new insights to emerge through an open, questioning approach.

The book was written in the context of post-World War II France and the Algerian war. It also marks Derrida's arrival on the American academic scene. His work does not conform to established schools of thought but aims to provoke new experiences of language. Writing and Difference keeps possibilities open and resists settling differences or reaching a single conclusion.