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Acts of Literature: J. Derrida

Acts of Literature, compiled in close association with Jacques Derrida, brings together for the first time a number of Derrida's writings on literary texts. The essays discuss literary figures such as Rousseau, Mallarmé, Joyce, Shakespeare, and Kafka, and comprise pieces spanning Derrida's career. The collection now includes a substantial interview with him on questions of literature, deconstruction, politics, feminism and history, and Derek Attridge provides an introductory essay on deconstruction and the question of literature, with suggestions for further reading.

These essays examine the place and operation of literature in Western culture, and are highly original responses to individual literary texts. They highlight Derrida's interest in literature as a significant cultural institution and as a peculiarly challenging form of writing, with inescapable consequences for our thinking about philosophy, politics and ethics.

Review: A challenge to read

I'm used to reading philosophy, but I might be too dark and dour to comment on this kind of book. Given an ambiguous situation, I have major problems seeing how it might have anything to do with me. Even if comedy was an art form, I might not be funny, or even meaningful, or in any way like this book. Considering the impossible situations that I have imagined myself in, as in: If Nam was a joke, I was the straight man; this book seems to be another instance in which the main routine is like a popular, major comedy, which you don't see me laughing at. How could I be sure that there is something here as funny as a video of the routine, "Who's on first?" I still only see the questions, and the fact that Who's wife sometimes comes down and picks up his check for him doesn't make it any clearer to me.

This is not the first book by or about Jacques Derrida that I have tried to read. An interview, "This Strange Institution Called Literature" (pp. 33-75) establishes that it is possible for the editor, Derek Attridge, and J.D. to talk to each other about literature and philosophy, though few people might be aware of what J.D. means by "Anamnesis would be risky here, because I'd like to escape my own stereotypes." (p. 34). Forgetting about Nam (Nam amnesia?) might be risky for me, because I have so many things that I always consider Namlike in their stupidity to remind me, but J.D. was actually saying that recollecting his past would be risky. Anyone who thinks ought to be able to escape his prior conditions or convictions, and it's much easier if no one remembers what they are.

There are only a few mentions of Nietzsche in this book, and the index says they are on pages 9, 26n, 34, 37, 39, 81, 287, 293, 326n, but I say they are on pp. 9, 26n, 35, 37, etc. and also in the title of the essay, "Rhetoric of Persuasion (Nietzsche)" by Paul de Man, and its conclusion: "This by no means resolves the problem of the relationship between literature and philosophy in Nietzsche, but it at least establishes a somewhat more reliable point of `reference' from which to ask the question." (p. 327).

There is a chapter of this book on "Before the Law" by Kafka. In addition to thoroughly explaining everything in that short work, there are a number of suggestions, like "Under these conditions literature can play the law, repeating it while diverting or circumventing it." (p. 216). Those who are not familiar with Kafka might underestimate how much this book attempts to make the law seem less practical than Chapter 9 of THE TRIAL. "This entire chapter is a prodigious scene of Talmudic exegesis, concerning `Before the Law,' between the priest and K. It would take hours to study the grain of it, its ins and outs." (p. 217). Then J.D. offers an explanation, but then starts talking about Prague and "my officially appointed lawyer told me: . . . `Don't take this too tragically, live it as a literary experience.' And when I said that I had never seen the drugs that were supposed to have been discovered in my suitcase before the customs officers themselves saw them, the prosecutor replied: `That's what all drug traffickers say.'" (p. 218). The priest is called, "a kind of Saint Paul, the Paul of the Epistle to the Romans who speaks according to the law, of the law and against the law." (p. 219). Closer to the end, "'You are the prison chaplain,' said K." (p. 220).

Chapter 10, "From Shibboleth for Paul Celan" (pp. 370-413) is dated Seattle, 1984. Much of the discussion is of the German words used in Celan's poems. My favorite first line is of the poem, IN EINS, "Dreizehnter Feber. Im Herzmund" which is translated: "In One, Thirteenth of February. In the heart's mouth" (p. 397). It appears again on page 399, with the second line, and a discussion of "Shibboleth, this word I have called Hebrew, is found, as you know, in a whole family of languages: Phoenician, Judaeo-Aramaic, Syriac. It is traversed by a multiplicity of meanings: river, stream, ear of grain, olive-twig. But beyond these meanings, it acquired the value of a password.

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