Displacement: Derrida and After (review)

Reviews297 who adapted to their use the nineteenth-century view of die "privilege" of die historical mode over other modes of knowing. This archaeological approach may be described another way, as Eliot's dialectic of the tradition. It is an arduous method, requiring of the poet sacrifice, loss, and, as Eliot said, "great labour." Using psychoanalytic criticism, Jay suggests that Eliot's images of castration and dismemberment express not only Eliot's personal anxieties but also, more importandy, die difficult process of his creativity. Although sometimes stretched, as Jay admits, psychoanalytic criticism serves him in several ways. It enables him to relate to autobiographical elements and to elucidate hidden determinants in the poetry. It allows him to assert that Eliot's "social criticism is a poem," a view that deals with Eliot's sometimes "embarrassing" tendency to forget that the concepts of the social essays might be "creative fictions." And it underlies the most thorough, original exegesis, the three chapters diat present The Waste Land as a "modernist revision of the pastoral elegy." Observing that the elegy is by definition an art of"intertextuality ," Jay avoids presenting another explication de texte and treats the work as a demonstration of Eliot's concept that "the idea of resurrection rests latendy in the tradition ." Citing the "correspondence" between the poem and "its most illustrious forebears" — Milton's "Lycidas," Shelley's "Adonais," and Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"—Jay declares: "All of these poems [like The Waste Land] concern (at least) three resurrections: of die dead hero, of die elegy as a poetic vehicle, and of die poet's own powers." One hopes that diis revitalizing study may help to give Eliot what he would have wished: a voice in die intertextual debate of poets and critics, past, present, and future. University of Michigan - DearbornGladys Garner Leithauser Displacement: Derrida and After, edited by Mark Krupnick; 198 pp. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983, $15.00. This collection of essays is an exceptionally good test of increasingly common modes of argument and analysis deriving primarily from Jacques Derrida but uneasily allied with key concepts drawn from Freud, Marx, and feminist criticism. Though four of the seven treat aspects of Derrida's writing, the volume as a whole also represents a trying out of Derridean methods. The resulting essays are sophisticated, complex, broadly informed, and tighdy packed with arguments that oscillate, double back, and import complicated analogues in approved Derridean fashion. Gregory Ulmer compares the "moiré" effect (of fluttering or trembling) in Parisian Op Art with the "solicitation" (shaking) for which Derrida strives in his use of language. Herman Rapaport weaves aspects of Plato's cave metaphor, Shelley's "Mont Blanc," Freud's interpretation of the Wolf-Man's dream, the Derridean view of language, and much else to present a theory ofthe way the mind uses props to stage scenes which veil die "ob-scene" it cannot direcdy confront. Tom Corue/s "A Trace of Style" traces Derrida's stylistic devices and structures to illuminate die process of undoing the usual sense of "meaning" in order to pursue die linguistic trace in the Derridean sense. These include play with combinations like tr and ec as well as ambiguities, marginal differences in spelling , and a Joycean maneuvering of several languages at once. 298Philosophy and Literature Susan Handelman writes fascinatingly on Derrida's relationship to die tradition of Jewish commentary on the Old Testament in which revisionary interpretations are possible because language is regarded as the essence of reality. Thus "the passion to displace origins, the Jewish heretic hermeneutic, surfaces in Derrida, who places a radical unintelligibility at die origin ofhis thought" (p. 125). The late Paul de Man's essay finds in Hegel's Aesthetics a ground for believing that poets and philosophers must forget that the figures at die heart of their writings are not discoveries but tiieir own artificial structures that nevertheless can undo usurped political authority. Michael Ryan argues against "liberal Reason" — essentially the "reason" of Descartes — by attacking the contradictions ofits founding metaphors (which those familiar withJohn Stuart Mill may diink he exaggerates ) and pointing out (p. 158) diat "the institutions ofliberal social dieory" are "discursive fictions...