In Memory of Jacques Derrida (review)

Part of a remarkable generation of students at Oxford in the late 1970s who appropriated the Oxford Literary Review as a challenge to the prevailing attitudes towards reading literature and philosophy, Nicholas Royle has become a preeminent interpreter of the work of Jacques Derrida. With an ear for the English language that is worthy of Cixous's reinvention of French, in his work on telepathy, the uncanny, Forster, Bowen and Shakespeare, Royle has spent 30 years listening to a reverberating sea of idioms that mark at once the history of literature and a literary experience that exceeds language. As Royle suggests, literature remains a study of the dead who have yet to speak to us fully: their words have a ghostly future, the 'not now' of a past that is still ahead of us, we readers and lovers of literature (pp. 75, 143). This collection of pieces, dating from 2002 to 2008, is marked by the death of Jacques Derrida in 2004. This work is also more than a collection and less than a book. Each piece shares a surprising resonance, a persistent revisitation, drawn out by what Royle calls the iteraphonic, 'inadvertent verbal echoes or repetitions' that are apparent when one writer uses 'the same word, phrase or image as another' (p. 148). These echoes and repetitions, found most startlingly between Derrida and Shakespeare, gesture not to a memorial or mourning of Jacques Derrida, but rather to a different time of mourning, to a 'not now', that has always been leaving us anticipating, dreading and listening to the dead speaking without rest (pp. 33, 60, 142). Royle conjures Derrida —'an unbelievable Cheshire cat, unlocatable, smiling, loving' —throughout (p. 165). From the note telling us that in 2003, already ill, Derrida had said that he would try to come to Sussex but 'not now', Royle dwells on Hamlet's 'if it be not now, yet it will come' (pp. 34, 31). At the end of one piece, we hear Derrida's 'response', given at a conference in July 2004 (p. 53). At the end of another piece, written four years after his death, Derrida responds with a long handwritten letter from 1996 (p. 174). It is Royle's achievement —wrought with great care —that Derrida is still responding. I cannot do justice to this work, to Royle's meditation on the phrase 'woo't' (which Hamlet and Cleopatra use in response to the death of another), nor to the necessary failing and urgent resistance evoked in Derrida's injunction that one must forget well ('il faut bien oublier'), prompting Royle to think of 'literature as forgetting' in which we all 'forget, identify with forgetting, share forgetting with the other' (p. 149). In the midst of challenging the readings of Shakespeare, of contesting the domestication of the term queer, of tracing the current language of politics and institutions, Royle offers something rare in academia, blighted as it is by an unavoidable and melancholic amour propre, a testament to a 'beloved friend' and the love that inspires the best and most lasting academic work.