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  • Later Derrida: Reading the Recent Work
  • Simon Morgan Wortham
Herman Rapaport. Later Derrida: Reading the Recent Work. New York & London: Routledge, 2004. x + 158pp.

In Later Derrida, Herman Rapaport collects together a series of essays in which some of Derrida’s more recent texts from the 1980s and 90s are forced into an always complex and frequently eccentric set of relationships with an array of thinkers and writers including Trinh Minh-ha, Gayatri Spivak, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud, Maurice Blanchot, and Antonin Artaud. In fact, the apparently disparate nature of the four essays comprising the body of this work provides the occasion for a highly charged and often explosive series of connections—or rather collisions—to take place. With great subtlety, Rapaport violates deconstruction according to its own logic, or rather according to a logic which begins to emerge—or which promises to come—on the “hither side” of deconstruction. This other side of deconstruction—the “other” of deconstruction—intractably remains, forcefully persists, as an inappropriable excess going beyond the “classical” reception of deconstruction as an “origin” which helps give us the historical narrative of theory—and the [End Page 309] discipline of theoretical study and debate—constructed from the perspective of la pensee soixante-huit.

Rapaport therefore sets about a violent reassemblage of Derrida, as deconstruction is forced into a series of antagonistic rather than contradictory relations with “others,” where antagonism arises, as Laclau and Mouffe have put it, “not from full totalities but from the impossibility of their constitution,” and where reading is thereby thrown into permanent crisis in the encounter of an incalculable set of trajectories, forces, positions and readings which come to be differentiated only in precarious and partial ways. Thus, while this book ventures strong and often contentious interpretations of its subject matter, its own style or disposition—unremittingly digressive, distracted, disorganized—refuses reduction to the traditional image of critique. Neither can an ultimately cohesive argument or “viewpoint” be discerned here, an exhaustive theory or reading of what might otherwise be termed “late” deconstruction. Rather, the book sets out to enact deconstruction’s “other” in a way that inevitably falls short, or which fails the test, of a thesis.

Following a winding pathway through questions of cultural and philosophical inheritance, testimony, monolinguism, and the trauma of Holocaust, Derrida is brought into an ambivalent relationship with existential philosophy and the question of the subject. In the final essay, Artaud, Heidegger, Sartre and others collide improbably yet spectacularly with the “later Derrida,” crashing at high velocity so as to leave only shards or fragments of the subject scattered across the text as a scene of wreckage. Yet this wreckage is so devastating that a coherent or self-contained theory of the subject in deconstruction falls out of the equation, as if the “later Derrida” involves an inexpressible experience of trauma which accompanies the impossible vision of the subject’s demise. The subject is both “exploded” and “disseminated” in deconstruction, losing its form in an unrecoverable number of bits, so that deconstruction of the “whole” subject gives way to deconstruction’s “other,” an other composed of these smashed (and smashed-together) body parts.

Rapaport’s Later Derrida is a brave and independent book—nearly the expression of an existential passion—but a book of which the cinder is perhaps the interminable trait. Against the unraveling backdrop of Heideggerian Destruktion, Blanchot’s near execution by the Nazis, the patricide of psychoanalysis and Holocaust, the “return” of religious fervor and the improbable persistence of an archive fever that madly burns, Later Derrida seems devoted to suiciding the proper in itself. How this drivenness-towards-death of deconstruction’s “other” might be viewed in such disparate yet powerful contexts remains difficult to decide: like the sati-suicide discussed in Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” it remains undecidedly displaced and divided between political act and private passion, tradition and subversion, never quite making sense according to the classical subject-object categories of knowledge. That this interminable trait—the suicidal trait of the cinder—fails the test of a thesis (one of “9/11” or, more recently, the Beslan school siege) might perhaps be one of the...

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