Search

These are three pieces on reading (‘surface reading’, teaching and learning to read) that take lessons from Flaubert, Derrida, Billy Collins and Rousseau.

The article retraces the author’s experience, beginning in the early 1970s, of French Theory. It was the experience of a fulgurance, which continues to draw its force of renewal from a future it ca...

Taking an improbable caracol or snail as a guide to thinking about translation, this essay ponders the sensation of tongues touching and entwining, like hermaphroditic mollusks making love. Advancing in successive whorls, rather than along the straight line of argument, it touches on, among other things, the translator’s modesty or “invisibility”; on the chance of the lucky find or fortuitous encounter; on the “passion for translation” (Derrida); on modern foreign language instruction that harbors the vain ambition to suppress the experience of translation; and on Virginia Woolf’s snail on the wall.

Derrida's seminar The Death Penalty is to an important extent taken up with unpacking the significance of the fact (a ‘stupefying fact’, he calls it) that there is in our Western tradition no philosophy as such against the death penalty. This essay follows the seminar into the heart of its engagement with that legacy, where it traces out the condition of its own interested abolitionist stand. This condition is named ‘the heart of the other in me’, which is the pulse of every finitude, every ‘my’ life. It also gives the impulse in this essay to follow the thread of the ‘heart’ across the seminar's readings of Rousseau, Genet, Hugo and Camus.

The ‘word of war’: twice the expression occurs in Antony and Cleopatra and, each time, it stands in for the proper name of Antony, the very Antony who, in the play’s first lines, is chided by one of his men (the lovingly named Philo) for turning his General’s ‘goodly eyes (. . . ) upon a tawny front’, in other words, the sultry face of Cleopatra, which has eclipsed in the ‘captain’s heart’ the real front of battle (I, 1, 1–9). And yet, despite this notorious lapse into the lap of ‘a gipsy’s lust’, Antony’s name remains so attached to the rumours and rigours of war that it can twice be evoked as the very ‘word of war’. First, by Octavius Caesar as he lays out to Antony griefs against his friend only lately returned from the dalliance in Egypt

Starting again. It’s a matter of starting again. Which is to say, of restarting, thus of not starting for the first time, not really starting, but continuing to start, continuing not starting, at least for a time. Starting over. And over. Continuing, not starting. Continuing interruptions, which is to say, continuing to interrupt, continuing from interruptions, continuing the interruptions: interruptions without interruption. The phrase ‘to start over’ often holds out consolation for some great loss, some devastating interruption. To ‘start over’ in the aftermath of a disaster is what is wished for the survivors when their grief is still too sharp to permit them to wish it for themselves. There is something to ‘get over’ and then one can ‘start over.’ ‘All is not over,’ they say, and that’s a promise. So then, starting again with a promise. Namely, the promise to write in view of this inaugural issue of the new Oxford Literary Review, newly housed at Edinburgh UP, and newly vested in a newly formed editorial board. Having promised to do that, one should try to keep the promise, and I promise I will try not to fail to do that, I will not try to fail, at least I will not fail to try. But how to keep this promise? How not to keep it? Keep starting over.

The essay reviews features of Derrida's reading of Rousseau in De la grammatologie. It asks in what sense Derrida does justice to "Rousseau." It is a matter cutting away, of decoupage, to reach what is "irreducibly proper," which consists, Derrida demonstrates, in a blind spot. A blindness to the paradoxical "logic" of supplementarity insists across Rousseau's oeuvre no less than through his "life." How can a blind spot be what is most proper? At once it belongs and does not belong to the author's signed work; le supplement is properly intended by his discourse, but in order to become legible this intention has to deviate through a point it cannot intend. This necessary deviation is a condition both of possibility of proper meaning and of its impossibility as proper. To do justice by undoing a text around its blind spot is to respond to this articulation of possibility with impossibility. The essay concludes by taking up Derrida's phrase "The Age of 'Rousseau'" to ask after "The Age of 'Derrida'" now unfolding in the blind spot of its history.

peggy kamuf has translated several works by Jacques Derrida and edited two volumes of his essays, A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (Columbia University Press, 1991) and Without Alibi(Stanford University Press, 2002). The author most recently of Book of Addresses (Stanford University Press, 2005), she teaches French and comparative literature at the University of Southern California.

As far as I know, there is no accurate count of all the interviews Derrida has so far granted, in one circumstance or another, since 1968, the date cited in many bibliographies for his first published interview in a now vanished journa1.' These were, in any case, very rare throughout the 1970s, and began to proliferate only after 1980. In 1992, Points de suspension: Entretiens, a collection of twenty interviews assembled and presented by Elisabeth Weber, included in appendix a list of an additional sixty-seven interviews then published or broadcast. In the recently published De quoi demain, a book that itself has the subtitle of 'Dialogue', Derrida's interlocutor, Elisabeth Roudinesco, estimates in a note that he has' taken part in about a hundred interviews' . This figure probably falls well short of any thorough count, presuming one could be made that included all the interviews Derrida has frequently granted to newspapers when he travels abroad, to obscure journals, or even student publications. Above all, any such accounting a hundred, two hundred, five hundred presumes that the genre 'interview' is a self-evident one, and therefore easily discernable from every other genre of writing, speaking, or engaging with interlocutors. But this assumption and its attendant or supporting presuppositions encounter serious challenges in all of Derrida' s work, challenges that are not only theoretical, as we say, but quite practica1. Just to point provisionally to one symptomatic indicator of the challenge, there is the dialogic orpolylogic form of texts published under Derrida's name alone, for example 'Restitutions' in The Truth in Painting or 'Droit de regards', which often proceed as most interviews do: through questions and responses, with the 'interlocutors' sending the ball back and forth, etc.3 For the moment, however, and before saying more about plurivocality in Derrida's thought in general, I'll rely first on fairly standard, conventional markers of the interview in order to make some initial remarks about Derrida's practice of that genre or mode.

Given Time [Donner le temps] was the general title of the series of the Frederick Ives Carpenter Lectures that Jacques Derrida gave at the University of Chicago in April 1991. What follows is a translation of the first lecture, which has been revised and augmented. It puts in place several of the works (Marcel Mauss's The Gift and Charles Baudelaire's "Counterfeit Money" among others) that will be the object of detailed readings in the subsequent lectures. The complete text of Donner le temps has just been published in French and is forthcoming in English translation. 1. Madame de Maintenon's sentence is remarkable enough to have attracted the attention of the editors of the Littre. It is their version that I cite. There are those who will be

Considerant la reception anglo-americaine de l'ecriture «theorique» d'H. Cixous et plus largement du feminisme francais, l'A. tente d'evaluer les concepts philosophiques et politiques mis en jeu par la re/traduction de l'Autre dans son oeuvre

Translator's Note.-"Racism's Last Word" is a translation of "Le Dernier Mot du racisme," which was written for the catalog of the exhibition Art contre/against Apartheid. The exhibition was assembled by the Association of Artists of the World against Apartheid, headed by Antonio Saura and Ernest Pignon-Ernest, in cooperation with the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid. Eightyfive of the world's most celebrated artists contributed paintings and sculpture to the exhibition, which opened in Paris in November 1983. In addition, a number of writers and scholars were invited to contribute texts for the catalog. "Le Dernier Mot du racisme" serves in particular to introduce the project of the itinerant exhibition, which the organizers described briefly in their preface to the catalog