Derrida's Reading Research Articles

Absolute alterity: E. Levinas and J. Derrida

The article deals with a notion of absolute alterity in E. Levinas and J. Derrida. It questions the origin of that notion by stressing its temporal aspect. The “phenomenon” of death as absolute alterity allows to find out here at work both phenomenological and speculative strategies. The article shows position of Levinas as the junction of these two strategies. It presents in detail speculative moment of Levinas thought, which usually slips researchers’ attention, discusses the “dialectic”, which allows to move from the absolute alterity of death to the absolute alterity of other person in ethical relation. Derrida reads Levinas’ claim for absolute alterity in horizon of finitude: every other (one) is every (bit) other. In response to uniqueness of the event deconstruction appears as interpretative, aporetical experience. That means that it must take place in the interval that separates calculation and incalculable, universality and singularity. So it is experience of the undecidable. The article investigates Derrida’s strategy of deconstructive reading and raises the question: does not the deconstruction itself take the place of undeconstructible alterity (absolute alterity)?

Exploring ‘the Impossible’: Jacques Derrida, John Caputo and the Philosophy of History

In this paper I explore one possible motivational (quasi-) philosophy for historians continuing to write history in the wake of Derridean deconstruction. This philosophy of history is structured around one of the alternative terms for deconstruction in Derrida's work, namely the notion of ‘the impossible’. Throughout this paper I will be concentrating on John Caputo's interpretation of Derrida's work and, in the process, addressing some alternative (mis)readings of deconstruction (i.e. those at odds with my own reading and that of Caputo's) as they relate to the development of a philosophy of history and historical praxis generally. Specifically, I will argue for the importance of Caputo's exegesis of—and reflections on—‘the impossible’, as well as his own closely related notion of ‘a hermeneutics more radically conceived’, as important starting points for the development of a viable philosophy of history after the postmodern turn; a philosophy of history that is undecidably future oriented as opposed to closure oriented. I will argue that the implications of Derrida's work, and particularly of Caputo's reading of Derrida (and, in my estimation, Caputo is the most stimulating and suggestive interpreter and developer of Derrida's thought currently writing), opens up vital possibilities and challenges for historians in the production of their histories. Following Caputo, I will argue that a philosophy of history that is ‘open’ to and structured around exploring ‘the impossible’ is inescapably religious and messianic in structure—albeit in the Derridean sense of ‘religion without religion’ and ‘messianicity’—thus re-emphasizing the axioms of faith and belief vis-à-vis the role and work of the historian rather than—although not in opposition to—relativism and scepticism. In the course of this argument I suggest some possible distinctives of a philosophy of history that is shaped by a passion for ‘the impossible’—as opposed to appropriating it as just another method—as well as Caputo's associated desire for a hermeneutics more radically conceived and consider how they might, in turn, mould the types of histories produced by historians.

Reading Derrida Reading Derrida: Deconstruction as Self‐Inheritance

Derrida argued at great length early on in his career that texts live on in the absence of their author. The question remains, however, of precisely how this survival takes place. In this paper I argue that the life of Derrida’s own œuvre is sustained through his particular practice of self‐inheritance. I justify this claim by focusing on one moment in the text Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, in which Derrida inherits from himself through self‐citation. In citing himself while at the same time modifying his citation, Derrida sets into motion a deconstruction of his own text that he does not seem to anticipate. It is this movement of deconstruction that enables Derrida’s text to live on.

Deconstructin(g) Jazz Improvisation: Derrida and the Law of the Singular Event

Taking as its point of departure the improvised jazz-text collaboration between Ornette Coleman and Jacques Derrida at the 1997 Paris La Villette jazz festival, this article critiques the dominant positioning of Western law and jazz as that which is either completely devoid of improvisation (law) or founded solely upon such (jazz). By reading Derrida’s texts on law and justice in tandem with his views on invention, the impromptu nature of improvisation is confronted and its relation to both jazz and law is interrogated. In his work on law and invention, Derrida probes the problematic relation between the singular and the general in order to challenge the supposed uniqueness of invention, along with the universality, which is said to propel occidental law. These observations, when applied to the critical study of improvisation, disrupt the prevailing understanding of the “extempore” and illustrate how improvisation so defined can be neither total in jazz nor totally absent in law. Instead, the singular (extempore) event exists solely as aporia in both fields. This unpacking of the aporetic nature of singularity reveals not only the inevitability of legal invention, but also the necessity of the “jazz form”. Beyond this, however, and perhaps shedding some light on Derrida’s participation in the “improvised” event described above, there exists an openly responsive dimension to the both jazz and law. This dimension, although never complete or absolute, glances towards the singular other and keeps alive the possibility of creativity, ethics, democracy and justice in Western law and society.

Deconstructive Justice and the “Critique of Violence”: On Derrida and Benjamin

This essay presents a critical interpretation of Derrida's deconstructive reading of Walter Benjamin's text, “Critique of Violence.” It examines the relationship between deconstruction and justice, and the parallel Derrida draws between deconstructive reading and Benjamin's account of pure violence. I argue that Derrida blurs Benjamin's distinction between the political general strike (which simply inverts state power relations) and the proletarian general strike (which non-violently disrupts such power relations). As a consequence, Derrida criticises Benjamin's metaphysical complicity with the violence that lead to the Holocaust. Derrida's deconstructive reading of Benjamin, I conclude, underplays its Marxist dimensions, privileging the theological and textual dimensions of Benjamin's thought over the political and historical.

Site and Sound

Cinephiles who have the pleasure of reading any or all of Jacques Derrida's writings are infallibly reminded of the title of the venerable British journal, Sight and Sound. As if following the implications of its title, they recall how the review was built upon the distinction of the image and sound track of the talkie from the turn of the Great Depression up to now. The cinephile in us immediately grasps in Derrida a tracked style that, as in the viewing of film, requires that utmost attention be paid to the differences and elisions of words; to where they are uttered; no less, too, to spacings between words seen and heard and epigraphs or citations that cause the matter to be seen and felt as if it were moving in a montage. The viewer who reads Derrida takes pain to note how various voices-off seem to inhabit words when they are seen and spoken. These voices are transcribed in the written material and subject it to the art of montage. Derrida has often suggested that the power which cinema brings to the art and politics of reading and seeing is immense. It is a truism to say that cinema has entirely changed the way writing is read. The truism holds further if a tradition of cinematic writing is recalled by way of Andre Malraux's art of verbal montage that brings to the printed pages the effects that Eisenstein had championed in his teaching and theoretical essays. Malraux's own remarks on the cinema, paired with the film version of L'Espoir, attest to a tradition that reaches back to Bufiuel, poet, theorist and cineast in the 1920s, in which the best images were those which vermiculate as both images and writing.'

The Kind of Writing

In a now much-read critique, Derrida claimed to show the weakness and the supposed contradictions of Lévi-Strauss's interpretation of writing and his characterization of modern industrial society by the pathology of written communication. Lévi-Strauss is tweaked however for everything at odds with what is normally understood as Lévi-Straussian analysis. It is my contention in this article to argue that, by misconstruing Lévi-Strauss's actual theoretical and epistemological contribution to general knowledge, Derrida's reading of Tristes Tropiques is exemplary and influential in that it joins together all the essential didactic elements of ‘deconstructionist’ criticism, and seems to be what exactly ‘lit-crit’ deconstructionism is all about, which in the last analysis turns into an arrogant scholastics that only ignorance or deliberate misinformation could allow.

Essential history: Jacques Derrida and the development of deconstruction

1. The Success of Deconstruction: Derrida, Rorty, Gasche, Bennington, and the Quasi-Transcendental 2. A Consistent Problematic of Writing and the Trace: The Debate in Derrida/Husserl Studies and the Problem of Derrida's Development 3. Derrida's 1962 Interpretation of Writing and Truth: Writing in the Introduction to Husserl's 'Origin of Geometry' 4. The Development of Deconstruction as a Whole and the role of Le probleme de la genese dans la philosophie de Husserl 5. Husserl's Circuit of Expression and the Phenomenological Voice: Speech and Phenomena 6. Essential History: Derrida's Reading of Saussure and His Reworking of Heldeggerean History.

Doing critical management research interviews after reading Derrida

Purpose – The paper invites us to reconsider the processes at work in the conduct of qualitative interviews, especially in the context of management studies; it emphasises, in particular, the paradoxes that arise from the inescapable interdependency between interviewer and interviewee.Design/methodology/approach – The author reflects upon his own experiences of conducting interviews with managers whilst studying for a PhD, and suggests alternative ways of thinking about what goes on during such exchanges.Findings – Interview techniques are not necessarily the neutral tools they might seem to be.Originality/value – The deconstructive insights about interview processes provide a way of thinking about qualitative interview research that might be more consistent with the insights of certain “critical” management studies.

The Figure Of Memory In Chilean Cinema: Patricio GuzmÁn And RaÚl Ruiz

The Figure Of Memory In Chilean Cinema: Patricio GuzmÁn And RaÚl Ruiz

Review Essay: Mourning Humanism, or, the Idiom of Haunting

Postmodernism’s critique of modernism [as a misguided positivism] is well-taken; unfortunately, postmodernism does not offer a viable independent alternative to modernism. As a perspective founded primarily on critique and opposition, postmodernism is always parasitic on that which it critiques. In presenting a world where public discourse is nothing but deceit, postmodernism precludes the possibility of any community whatsoever.

Unheard of

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. All further references to this edition of The Oxford Literary Review will be given in the main body of the text. 2. See my ‘Auditing Derrida’, Parallax (2004) 10, pp. 3–18, with which the present essay might be paired. In the first section of ‘Auditing Derrida’, I explore in greater detail various connections in the etymological and lexical chains which include ‘audit’, ‘auditory’, and ‘auditorium’, all of which suggests the auratic, theatrical, and juridical aspects of a hearing, those that remain or return in order to establish parergonal conditions which threaten to destabilize the very discourse and practice of today's audit culture. 3. I use the term ‘medium’ here in the sense developed by Samuel Weber, notably in his essay ‘The future of the university: the cutting edge’, in Institution and Interpretation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 220–35. See pp. 230–1. It is interesting, here, that Weber sees traditional academic scholarship as advancing in pursuit of the not-yet-known, as if the unknown could be construed as just the negative other of knowledge, which then becomes an instrument in overcoming or mastering the unknown as not-yet-known. But with widespread effects of virtualization in the contemporary period, notably those which begin to unsecure the institutional site of the university as a definite place – a campus – ‘the unknown becomes, as it were, the element or medium of knowledge, not merely its negative other’. This is because ‘virtuality emerges not as a possibility to be realized or actualized’ in a ‘present’ or a ‘known’, but becomes instead the very condition of knowledge. Yet, albeit in different language, a similar thing might be said of judgement in the arts and humanities, going back at least as far as Kant. 4. The ‘event’ or ‘experience’ of teaching as deconstructible is something I attend to in my essay, ‘Teaching deconstruction: giving, taking, leaving, belonging, and the remains of the university’, Diacritics, 31 (2001), pp. 89–107. Here, the aleatory and unforeseeable aspects of teaching imply new or unrecognized kinds of responsibility and negotiation not simply bound to notions of the autonomy or (academic) freedom of the classical subject, whether master or pupil. The argument here draws in large part on a reading of Derrida's ‘Otobiographies: the teaching of Nietzsche and the politics of the proper name’, in The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), pp.1–38. 5. As the present essay unfolds, I relate this videotaping of the proceedings at Cork to Derrida's analysis, in a 1993 interview with Bernard Stiegler, of the complex interplay of evidence and testimony, illustrated notably in terms of the videotape shown during the Rodney King trial. 6. The allusion here is to Derrida's ‘Otobiographies’, which I discuss more fully in my essay ‘Teaching deconstruction’. 7. For a further treatment of the terms and ideas found here, see once again the opening stages of my essay ‘Auditing Derrida’. 8. Jacques Derrida, ‘Demeure: fiction and testimony’, published together with ‘The Instant of My Death’ by Maurice Blanchot (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). See pp. 27–8. Further references are given in the main body of the text. 9. Jacques Derrida, ‘The university without condition’, in Without Alibi (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 202–37. See pp. 214–5. 10. Jacques Derrida, ‘“Le Parjure,” perhaps: storytelling and lying’, in Without Alibi, pp. 161–201. See p. 196. Further references are given in the main body of the text. 11. Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), pp. 93–4. Further references are given in the main body of the text. 12. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 211, p. 216. Further references are given in the main body of the text.

Iris Marion Young's Imaginations of Gift Giving: Some implications for the teacher and the student

The paper discusses Iris Marion Young's idea of asymmetric reciprocity that rethinks typical understandings of gift giving. Iris Marion Young's proposals for asymmetric ethical relationships have important implications for democratic contexts that seek to take differences seriously. Imagining oneself in the place of the other or expecting from the other what one expects from oneself levels out differences between people and hinders possibilities of interaction. The conditions of asymmetry and reciprocity of Iris Marion Young's communicative ethics, as well as that of the unexpected as understood within situations of gift giving, bring about new readings of learning and teaching situations. The paper discusses issues of power and knowledge that have important ethical implications for how the relationships between the teacher and student could be imagined and how the teacher and student imagine themselves. Following Derridean underpinnings to Young's notion of asymmetric reciprocity the paper questions pedagogic attempts that seek to minimize the asymmetric positions of the teacher and the student and challenges educational practices based on the reproduction of knowledge and reproduction of persons. The paper follows Young's arguments against Derrida's reading of asymmetry as being one sided. It argues that such a reading does away with the idea of teaching and learning altogether as teaching necessarily involves acts of responding. It continues to argue that Young's conceptualizations of gift giving as reciprocal and asymmetrical open up alternative understandings of the pedagogic relationships between teachers and students.

Notes on the Augenblick in and Around Jacques Derrida's Reading of Paul Celan's "The Meridian"

AbstractJacques Derrida wrote twice, in 1984 in "Shibboleth" and in 2002 for his Paris seminar lectures, about "The Meridian," Paul Celan's Georg Büchner prize speech that forms the most elaborate exposition of the poet's poetics. In both readings Derrida, in one way or the other, deals with the question of time. In "Shibboleth," at stake is the notion of date; in the seminar lectures, the "other's time." Through the Greek, Christian, and Jewish experiences involved, the present article takes the notion of Augenblick as a fil conducteur.

".. . the new-old enigma, of sovereignty"

“... the new-old enigma, of sovereignty” Jimmy Casas Klausen (bio) Jacques Derrida. Rogues: Two Essay on Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. xvi + 175 pp. $20.95 (paperback). ISBN 0804749515. The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, released mid-March 2006, makes use of the term “rogue” on eight occasions. In typical fashion, “rogue” appears next to “state(s)” in seven of those occurrences.1 Six of those seven times, the term appears in some connection to “terrorist(s)”; on five of those six occasions, “rogue state(s)” and “terrorist(s)” are connected by an “and” or “or,” and usually “WMD” or some reference to nuclear arms technology is in the same or an adjacent sentence. On that remaining instance among those six, the text’s drafters suggest more substantial relations than “and” or “or” might convey: first, rogue states “support and harbor” terrorist groups; second and consequently, terrorists and rogue states are equivalent in that the “United States and its allies in the War on Terror make no distinction between those who commit acts of terror and those who support and harbor them.” Probably strategically, it remains unclear whether all or only some rogue states “support and harbor” terrorists, whether, that is, “support and sanctuary” to terrorists define the rogue state necessarily and sufficiently.2 Yet this complication need not matter inasmuch as they are equivalent, therefore interchangeable, qua enemy in the War on Terror. Jacques Derrida would no doubt have taken pleasure in the many turns of this newest National Security Strategy, and in a sense, although his death arrived a year and a half before its appearance, he already has. For Derrida’s own text Rogues: Two Essays on Reason — essays on reason and rationality, sovereignty and democracy, the worlds of globalization and its non-equivalent, mondialisation — not only has something to say about rogue states, but also takes the figure of the turn as a guiding leitmotiv. His figure, though, is not the sinuous twist of a hooded, tortured body. It is rather a turning around an axis in such a way as to describe a circle, sphere, or earthly globe. This turn is meant to conjure up at least two figures: the autarkic, autoaffectionate, self-centered self-enclosure of ipseity; the turning-on qua turning-against oneself that Derrida calls “autoimmunity,” which destroys ipseity by immunizing itself against autarky so as to open up to the other. Though his turn may differ, Derrida is no stranger to Bush & Co.’s sort of turn and devotes some fine analysis to its predictably semblable precursors. When I first read Derrida’s Rogues, which consists of two lectures published in France as Voyous in 2003, it was the first essay that stuck with me, the one entitled “The Reason of the Strongest (Are There Rogue States?),” the one that demonstrates that nation-state sovereignty enacts roguery in the very move of nominating others as “rogues” because this charge carries along with itself the implicit arrogation of a power to mete out punishing, roguish violence: that is, the sovereign power to accuse and then to chasten is itself a rogue power.3 But as I reflected further, I concluded that the second piece, “The ‘World’ of the Enlightenment to Come (Exception, Calculation, and Sovereignty),” yields just as promising insights for political theory. When made to cast its glow backward, one formulation in particular from the second lecture helps to assuage a certain unease I have been suffering over Derrida’s so-called “late” work, the writings from the last decade and a half of his life. Allow me to defer the relief and instead to specify first my unease: I wonder whether the ease with which Derrida’s late work is read as continually emphasizing aporetic structures has not led us toward an abyss. Derrida is not unaware of this tendency to over- or mis-read certain aspects of his late work. He writes in an endnote of one egregious instance: Several friends recently brought to my attention a recent publication . . . whose author pontificates, without verifying anything, on what I’ve written and taught for a number of years...

Cited: Derrida on Anthropological Prejudice in Austin and Husserl

I read Derrida’s “Signature Event Context” as an extension of his programmatic anti-anthropologism as expressed, for example, in “The Ends of Man.” I argue that Derrida’s deconstruction of the serious-non-serious opposition in SEC and of the failure-success opposition, and his attempt to save “green is or” from Husserl’s dismissal, is problematic, and that this throws into focus the limits of Derrida’s extreme anti-anthropologism. While Derrida’s criticism of Austin’s exclusion holds, Dethda identifies citationality and failure too closely. He does not consider other ways (than through intention) to defend the serious-non-serious opposition. I show that a defence of this opposition is available, which does not run afoul of the citational theory of language offered in SEC, but that does require more anthropologism than Derrida is willing to endorse. Derrida’s emphasis on citationality would therefore not require an anti-anthropologism as radical as Derrida’s in order to hold on to this criticism of Austin. The anti-anthropologism of SEC attempts, I argue, to judge the context of the anthropological from within the context of the “grammatological,” while the latter is premised on a break with the former. This provides a general characterisation of what makes the aforementioned deconstructions problematic.

The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and the Later Gadamer by Timothy Clark

MLR, 101.4, 2oo6 I073 question the implications of these varying constructions of 'representative' feminine types. Her awareness of her problematic position as author of a text on the represen tation of women in collective biographies leads her to question feminist criticism's approach to the past-particularly its emphasis on literary women-forcing the fe minist reader to consider feminism's selectivity and tendency to overlook or dismiss women who do not conform to certain expectations. Feminist criticism has, in a sense, been as selective as the authors of female prosopographies in determining who has 'made it' as awoman. Booth suggests that Virginia Woolf encouraged the trend of dis missing from history certain previously eminent women, a tendency which, the book argues, is continued by feminist critics today. In this respect, Booth's eminently read able and enjoyable narrative not only offers insight intomaterial largely overlooked by previous scholars, but also highlights the need for a new critical perspective that calls into question the process through which women have been defined and labelled, and the problems associated with portrayals of representative types-whether nineteenth century depictions of ideal Victorian womanhood, or more recent portrayals of early feminist heroines. How to Make it as a Woman is thus an important contribution to feminist studies, highlighting the fact that feminist criticism still has some way to go in terms of recovering lost women's voices from the past. UNIVERSITYOFWALES SWANSEA JESSICA COX The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn inHeidegger, Derrida, Blan chot and the Later Gadamer. By TIMOTHY CLARK. (The Frontier of Theory) Edinburgh:EdinburghUniversity Press. 2005. xvi+ i86 pp. ?50. ISBN 0 7486-I929-I. The main aim of The Poetics of Singularity is to redraw the limits of critical reading and move away from the dominant 'culturalist turn' inmodern criticism. The prob lem is indeed acute, as Clark notes: 'Awriter who finds herself describable as, say, "gay", "Iranian" and "Christian" will have critics striving to explain all she writes in terms of the self-making of that identity' (p. I7). The critical bid to define identities with some kind of label, hyphenated or otherwise, often unwittingly undoes the act of authors being 'different' or 'unique'. Clark's analyses of Heidegger, Gadamer, Blan chot, and Derrida usefully point away out of this situation and take readers on an occasionally difficult but always rewarding journey. His link toArendt's concept of 'natality' is innovative inasmuch as this ties the literary into the human in away that does not lapse back into a simple humanism; we read texts for the first time whenever we read them, and limiting them purely to contextual indicators (whether authorial, historical, or cultural) misses the power of literature to awaken a new sense of reality. This sense of looking at the world with fresh eyes is clearly indicated by Clark's readings of the four theorists. He treats their texts delicately, and teases out their sin gular elements while teasing out their relevance to the development of his argument. It is a pleasant change to find readings of Heidegger or Derrida that do not contain certain indicators ('post-structuralism', for example, appears only in counterpoint to Blanchot's hermeneutics), although this is perhaps taken too far by Clark. His brief rejection of Heidegger's nationalism is a case in point: 'the inherent logic of singular ization must lead to the reader's own rejection both of any lingering nationalism in Heidegger but also of studies of his thought that are too hasty to explicate it in terms of the cultural categories it thoroughly undermnines' (p. 6o). His intent is clear, and up to a point Heidegger's texts must be approached as 'texts' rather than, shall we say, 'works', but the imperative 'must' indicates too strenuous a rejection of contextualization. This leads to perhaps the most serious flaw in the book, although it is does not 1074 Reviews significantly affect the overall argument. In his bid tomove away from the 'cultural ist'method of reading, occasionally Clark lapses into a knee-jerk reaction rather than a considered response. For instance, the claim of 'institutional Americanism' in the first chapter is unnecessary and does little to...

Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting by Harald Weinrich, Steven Rendall

8I4 Reviews Smith are essays that aremore or less well known and more or less celebrated, by Ann Wordsorth, Antony J. Cascardi, Ian Maclean, Jane Marie Todd, Irene E. Harvey, Timothy Clark, and Jill Robbins. When evaluating such a collection, one is prompted to ask what are the guiding principles presiding over its organization, structure, and content. The explanation advanced byMaclachlan is only half-reassuring on this count. In the preface, he tells us that 'I have adopted two simple principles: that the essays included should not previously have been collected in book form, and that they should be substantial pieces illuminating important and potentially difficult aspects of Derrida's work.' The second part of the rationale here seems substantive; but the first appears to be almost entirely arbitrary. The question then becomes one of whether the book has managed to gather together a sufficiently instructive and sufficiently broad or influential range of essays. That itwill not necessarily contain the most instructive or the most influential ismore or less guaranteed by the first part of Maclachlan's rationale. This said, it is useful to revisit many pieces reprinted here. Now, after Derrida's death, itmight well be a good moment to start reconsidering how it is that a certain 'Derrida' and a certain 'critical thought' associated with deconstruction were put into currency. In this respect, this collection is a useful starting-point for further work. In turning, once more, toAnn Wordsworth, say, it is good to be reminded of the preci sion of the early work on Derrida (a precision that, sadly, was not often maintained by some of his keenest 'readers'). Despite a prevailing view of early Derrida as a kind of neo-formalist, it is salutary to readWordsworth pointing out that 'Deconstructive reading must inhabit the text [. . .] by reading into its internal historicity', for ex ample. Or, in reconsidering Cascardi on 'Skepticism and Deconstruction', we can be reminded of the particular value that was once given to a reading of Derrida in the light ofWittgenstein (a reading that was given its greatest examination in the work of Henry Staten, not included here). The Derrida-Searle debate is revisited here in IanMaclean's I985 essay, 'Un dialogue de sourds'. That essay, initially appearing in Paragraph, is also revealing of that journal's presiding ambitions, and again, a useful reminder of where we were in themid- I980s. It is helpful here to read this alongside Wordsworth and Timothy Clark, both of whose pieces initially appeared in the Oxford Literary Review, also from the I980s. At times, one is recalling a period asmuch as anything in these mid-Ig8os works. The pieces are relatively familiar, if in some cases less well remembered. The final one, Smith's 'Memento Mori', by the editor's own admission, appears to be rather tangential to themain thrust of the book, even if itmight be clearly read as an example of work by one who is saturated with Derrida. Where, then, does the book leave us? Itworks, at best, as a kind of prompt: recalling an epoch of great ferment and the seriousness (often po-faced, we might admit); yet also-and this ismuch more important-starting a chain of reflection that might be continued in other collections through which we can begin towrite the history that was Jacques Derrida. UNIVERSITYOFWARWICK THOMASDOCHERTY Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting. By HARALDWEINRICH. Trans. by STEVEN RENDALL. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. 2004. vi+254pp. $35. ISBN 0-80I4-4193-5. This is an oddly compelling, if at times confusing, book. Its subject is the art of forgetting, conceived as a counterpart to the more established rhetorical arts of me mory, and its canvas is Western literary culture from (before) Homer up to our own MLR, I0I.3, 2oo6 8I5 day. First published inGerman in I997, it is here translated by Steven Rendall, and stands as a kind of monument to the dying art of Romanistik: that peculiarly German humanistic marriage of philological analysis and broad-brush historicist erudition. Although it argues, in large part, for the necessity of forgetting, the study reads as an elegy for the very book-learning of which it is also a...

Reading Derrida's Adieu

jane gallop is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her publications include Living with His Camera (Duke University Press,2003) and Anecdotal Theory (Duke University Press, 2002).

“Another Insistence of Man”: Prolegomena to the Question of the Animal in Derrida's Reading of Heidegger

In recent years Derrida has devoted a considerable number of writings to addressing “the question of the animal,” and, more often than not, this question arises in a reading of one of Heidegger's texts. In order to appreciate more fully the stakes of Derrida's posing of this question in relation to Heidegger, in this essay I offer some prefatory remarks to the question of the animal in Derrida's reading of Heidegger. The essay opens with a careful analysis of Derrida's early essay “The Ends of Man,” in which Heidegger's “Letter on ‘Humanism”’ is read in terms of the motif of man's “proper.” Taking my point of departure from this Derridean reading of Heidegger's humanism, I return to Heidegger's “Letter” in order to uncover the manner in which Heidegger distinguishes man's “proper” from what is “improper,” namely, animality. This reading reveals that, while Heidegger offers a convincing account of the limits of metaphysical humanism, this critical account nevertheless ends up uncritically reinforcing the anthropocentrism of this same tradition. My closing suggestion is that Derrida's rethinking of animality should be understood as an extended meditation on the various consequences and effects of this dogmatic anthropocentrism in Heideggerian and post-Heideggerian thought.