Later Derrida: Reading the Recent Work (review)
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err • v. [. . .] errer, from L. errare "to stray" . . .
errand • n. [. . .] "message, mission" . . .
errant • adj. [. . .] sense 2 from OFr. errant "travelling," pres. part. of errer, from late L. iterare "go on a journey," from iter "journey" . . .
erratum • n. (pl. errata) an error in printing or writing. (errata) a list of corrected errors appended to a publication.
—ORIGIN C16: from L., "error," neut. past part. of errare "err."1 [End Page 207]
Thumbing through this collection of four interweaving/interwoven essay fragments, pertaining to a sample of Derrida's "later" work —and we will come back to this "later" later —a small scrap of paper falls from the sheaf; a part appended (loose leaf), upon which a stray para-graph has been printed and framed (lest one deems it unduly errant), printed, framed and headed with the following, anonymously composed explanatory comments (outside the interior frame but inside another: the outer edges of the page itself):
Erratum, p. 117. [The compositor inexplicably repeated a paragraph from p. 114 instead of printing this one as sent to the press on disk.]
A supplementary fragment of text, both detachable and integral, has been added in redress for a(n un)certain going astray, a(n un)certain vagabondage, wandering or errancy. The letter sent arrived, but between arrival and printing something went awry, inexplicably. Someone or something (the who or the what?) has erred through (mechanical?) repetition, iterably differencing the text.
This tissue of iterability, wandering and errancy —in this case, going astray or being led astray, through repetition and difference —is perhaps paradigmatic of Herman Rapaport's own reading of Derrida's "later" work from the late 1980s to the present, touching upon ethics, politics, literature, art, and so on. In some ways Later Derrida supplements Rapaport's earlier engagements with deconstruction in texts like Heidegger and Derrida: Reflections on Time and Language (1989). However, Later Derrida offers a reading which (of necessity) insinuates itself within the body of Derrida's texts only to venture elsewhere, to read marginally, peripherally, unexpectedly, or —to avail of a different metaphorics —to loosely stitch other texts within the fabric of Derrida's own (or vice versa) in a bid to read otherwise. This is what marks both the interest and shortfalls of Rapaport's four interweaving essays, and marks them out against the glut of more conventional commentaries on Derrida's work that (will) have appeared lately or later.
The first essay, "Deconstruction's Other," deftly deploys the "logic" of antagonism —in Laclau and Mouffe's sense, where each of the antagonists precludes the self-presence of the other, as distinct from contradiction, where difference is one between two plenitudes —to articulate the articulation of deconstruction and cultural studies, in the first instance, and, more provocatively, deconstruction and metaphysics, [End Page 208] in the second. Running Trinh Minh-ha's Woman, Native, Other (1989) up or against the grain of Derrida's work, Rapaport attempts to reconfigure a transformative relationship between deconstruction and cultural studies in a bid to cast light on the former's much vaunted ethico-political import. Trinh Minh-ha's work, we are told, might afford us a glimpse at a different trajectory for deconstruction, re-forging the division between what is and is not deconstruction, what is deconstruction and deconstruction's "other," contra Gasché (2-3). Woman, Native, Other operationalises certain strategies not wholly foreign to deconstruction, whilst simultaneously upholding a set of globally sustained and proliferated metaphysical horizons. From this point, Rapaport goes on to outline what appears to be the provocative central thesis of the essay: that "metaphysics may abide in the releasement of deconstruction's undecidable aporias," thereby "overcoming" the "antithesis" between them (22).
Of course, the idea that deconstruction and metaphysics were ever antithetical in the first place sits uneasily with those of us (Derrida included) who have never held such a view. Nonetheless, whilst at one level we may suspect Rapaport's position of being somewhat disingenuous, at another level it appears to come with an institutional caveat: that...
