The Purest of Bastards: Works of Mourning, Art and Affirmation in the Thought of Jacques Derrida by David Farrell Krell

Abstract

MLRy 98.2, 2003 541 and poetry could and do play a part in this process of corporate self-definition; but somehow one doubts ifanything can approach the sheer talismanic force of the novel as conduit for the soul ofthe nation. Clearly, one reason for this state of affairsis the fact that the novel's narrative condition (for obvious reasons) brings it close to that of historiographical writing. Moreover the novel, by tradition, has frequently been able to offera kind of stocktaking of the state of the nation. In any event, the novel seems to be deeply implicated in English and German self-understanding. That this volume reminds us of precisely that input of a literary form into broader patterns of cultural debate and national self-exploration is one of its particular strengths. University College London Martin Swales The Pur est of Bastards: Works of Mourning, Art and Affirmation in the Thought of Jacques Derrida. By David Farrell Krell. (American and European Philo? sophy) University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2000. xiii + 213 pp. $45 (pbk $17.95). ISBN 0-271-01991-3 (pbko-271-01992-1). David Farrell Krell has written: book-length studies on Heidegger, whom he has also translated, on Nietzsche (several volumes), and on memory, and now a tribute to Der? rida forhis 'affirmation'. This term is Nietzschean, referringto a spontaneity 'with no axe to grind, affirmationwithout mastery or mockery' (p. 209), and it contrasts with ressentiment,the spirit that feels it has been abused, that needs to take revenge (and the relation ofjustice to vengeance, which appears in a brief reference to Hamlet and Spectres ofMarx (p. 137), is implied throughout, relating to Heidegger's discussions of the essence of time as passing, or as transience (p. 116), and to Nietzsche on re? venge). One thesis of the book is that only 'bastardy', which involves severance from patrilinear relations of time and history, can be affirmatory,but that such bastardy is not free from mourning, a term that is given a wide sweep in Krell's work. Mourning is necessary because of what history is, but its danger is to produce a subjectivity in which resentment about the past is encrypted, blocking offthe subject from itself. It claims sources in Holderlin, another of Krell's authors; in Freud, where, of course, it is the shadow of melancholia; and in contemporary writing on trauma, which is related to the death camps, and so to Derrida's discussions of Heidegger. Krell's sixth chapter, 'Eight Labours of Mourning', cites writers that Krell takes Derrida to be working with, who have made mourning their topos: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty (whose treatment in this book is suggestive though brief), Benjamin, here not forthe Trauerspiel but for the 'Angel of History', Heidegger, Irigaray, Nietzsche, Cixous, and Empedocles of Acragas. The chapter ends polemically, with Krell's impatience at academic dismissals of Derrida. Acknowledging so much that is positive in the book, and that it all hangs together in Krell's thinking, so that he moves rapidly from one metaphorical connection to another, and deferring to the point that if Krell wishes to explain a point in de? construction, no one else can do it as well as he (as I have often found in his writing), I must also register a demurral. The pace is too fast; 213 pages contain nine chapters so that each chapter finishes at the point where having understood the contention, the reader expects development, or argument, or dissident voices; the issue of the political dimension in Derrida is not broached (compare Michael Sprinker's antho? logy on Derrida's Spectres of Marx, called Ghostly Demarcations (London: Verso, 1998), for a sense of difference), and there is too little abrasiveness in the sense of difference between writers ('there is a Heidegger who dreams of becoming a Derrida' (p. 198), as though that could cover objections to Heidegger's 'stony silence' (p. 138) about the death camps). Is it enough to answer Foucault on Derrida and the political, 542 Reviews to 'insist on the worldly engagement, and engorgement, of deconstruction' (p. ioo)? Krell has a staggering range of reference, as useful as it is intimidating, but it also...