Book Review: Derrida, Africa, and the Middle East

Abstract

Derrida, Africa, and the Middle East. By Christopher Wise. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. ISBN 978-0-230-61417-8. Pp. xiii + 214. $95.00. In Derrida, Africa, and the Middle East, Christopher Wise presents a unique and highly significant argument for working with Derrida in the two regional contexts of his title, individually and in their overlaps. Wise makes strong cases for resonances between Derrida's writing and the Sahelian culture of Africa, as well as the Abrahamic religious traditions. Both lines of argument combine sustained, perceptive close readings of specific works with broader perspectives of how these individual works and passages fit into trends, patterns, and shifts across Derrida's oeuvre. As such, the reader takes away intensive insights into and an extensive view of the ways Derrida, Africa, and the Middle East have converged and changed. Near the end of the preface, Wise states, My final chapter, which compares Egyptian, Hebraic, Greek, and Sahelian concepts of the word, could not have been written until the problem of Derrida's Jewish bias was first addressed. Now that it has been addressed, it is my hope that this book will lead to a renewed interest in Derrida for scholars in African and Middle Eastern studies (xi-xii). This succinctly states the aim of the book, but there remain two points to add. First, it is crucial to consider Wise's claim of a Jewish bias in Derrida within Wise's commitment to the importance of Derrida for scholars working on the history, politics, ethics, and aesthetics of Africa and the Middle East. Far from condemning Derrida, Wise attempts to make the imperfections in and limits of Derrida's work explicit so that scholars can observe Western ideological blind spots concerning Africa and the Middle East and move forward in thinking through these regions with Derridean deconstruction. Second, the book does not simply renew interest, as Wise suggests. Rather, it provides precise models of what it looks like and means to think Derrida together with Jerusalem, for example, or Derrida together with Abrahamic and Sahelian notions of the word. There are eleven chapters in all. Wise opens with a chapter on the lectures, book, and subsequent responses to and critiques of Derrida's Specters of Marx, part of the 1993 Whither Marxism? conference at the University of California, Riverside. Through attentive reading of Derrida's text, including his dedication of the lectures to the African activist Chris Hani, along with analysis of the conference presenters and agenda, Wise uses this central text to establish the core ideas of his book. Subsequent chapters range from figures of the veil and Jerusalem to complex analyses of Derridean notions of trace and logos in cultural collisions and intersections in Africa and the Middle East. Throughout the book, Wise employs deconstruction techniques, but he puts these in conversation with other literary critical approaches such as the system of Christian exegesis, especially as used by Fredric Jameson on allegory. chapter called Conjuration, for example, blends deconstruction through close reading of Derrida's Specters of Marx, particularly of Derrida's use in that book of Shakespeare's Hamlet, with an argument about how Derrida's reading and Marxist applications of Shakespeare reveal his otherwise unstated assumptions about political objectives, including As such, Wise reads like an accomplished deconstructionist, yet one who insists upon the role of alternative approaches in order to identify and illuminate precisely the slippages that he asserts exist in Derrida's deconstruction work. Readers engaged with literature and the Abrahamic religions will be especially interested in arguments about Paul and veils, Jerusalem as allegorical figure, and Abrahamic-African cultural traffic. Perhaps the most striking chapter is The Figure of Jerusalem. Wise makes a compelling case that the messianicity which Derrida proposes as a universal concept for re-orienting Marxism and specifically for deconstructing geopolitics as they converge in Jerusalem is not, in fact, universal: Christians who remain loyal to their own concept of Messianic Truth, which for them is a concept that implies Messianic incarnation, may understandably feel that Derrida's assertion that his faith in a Messiah who never comes is far from being a matter of universal truth. …