Abstract
This chapter sets out to explore in a very limited fashion a number of interests in Derrida’s writing, interests such as writing, the proper name, the signature, the gift, the hymen. In considering these interests, and in beginning to unfold and trace Derrida’s thinking on the subjects in question, we will have recourse to a series of returns, so that the chapter will fold back on itself, reiterating ideas, concerns and themes.
… the possibility of this repetition is the very thing that interests me … and I should like slowly to move closer … slowly to bring myself closer to this, namely that I can no longer formalize, since the event … will have precisely defied within language … this power of formalization.
Jacques Derrida (ATVM 12)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See Mark Currie’s discussion of the narration or construction of identity in Chapter 1, ‘The Manufacture of Identities’, in Postmodern Narrative Theory (1998).
For an example of such reductive misinterpretation see Charles E. Bressler’s Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice (1994, 71–87). Bressler, in an undergraduate, introductory textbook, puts forward the entire ‘binary opposition reversal’ theory as the methodology of ’deconstruction’.
On the nature of citation and annotation, see Jacques Derrida, ‘This is Not an Oral Footnote’, trans. Stephen A. Barney and Michael Hanly, in Annotation and its Texts, ed. Stephen A. Barney (1991), 192–207.
See also Claudette Sartiliot’s Derrida-influenced Citation and Modernity: Derrida, Joyce and Brecht (1993).
Richard Jefferies, ‘Snowed Up: A Mistletoe Story’, in Literary Theories: A Case Study in Critical Performance, ed. Julian Wolfreys and William Baker (1996), 19–30. See also my essay in Literary Theories, ’An “Economics” of Snow and the Blank Page, or, “Writing” at the “Margins”: “Deconstructing” “Richard Jefferies”?’ (179–244), which pursues a number of the themes pertinent to this book as a whole. Fragments of this essay appear throughout Deconstruction • Derrida, particularly in this present chapter.
Copyright information
© 1998 Julian Wolfreys
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wolfreys, J. (1998). Preparatory to Anything Else: Derrida’s Interests. In: Deconstruction · Derrida. Transitions. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26618-0_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26618-0_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-68777-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-26618-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)