Derrida and Antiquity (review)

Is Derrida still cool? There was a time, not so long ago, when every self-respecting graduate student in literary fields knew how to say 'theory' in an awestruck and committed way, and to talk knowingly of the Derridean turn of their arguments. Nowadays I suspect that fewer and fewer graduates carry Glas or La Carte postale as a badge of honour, let alone hope to write their thesis in parallel columns of etymological cross-play. The decades after the death of a maître à penser traditionally mark a fall-off of celebrity — but with luck this is replaced by a more mature reflection and placement, which this edited collection offers. The lifelong engagement of Derrida with antiquity is undoubted, but few scholars are well enough trained or sharply enough motivated to explore this area. It is of great importance for understanding not just Derrida's own thought, but the development of modern French culture — Derrida shares this passion with Foucault, Levi-Strauss, Vernant, and others: modernism and postmodernism never deserted the classical, as one naive historiographical tradition would have it. By far the best exploration of this field is Miriam Leonard's own earlier book Athens in Paris (OUP, 2005), and now she has collected a fine cast list of mostly younger scholars (sprinkled with some who would love to be thought younger) to investigate through detailed studies Derrida's constant proclamation of our status as 'We Other Greeks'. This investigation involves not only the famous discussions of Plato and writing, but also the whole project of The Politics of Friendship, Derrida's booklong reflection on Aristotle, democracy, and personal politics, his meditations on Hegel, Freud, and Marx — classicists all — as well as — perhaps most interestingly — the editor's own fascinating location of Derrida between (his) Jewishness and Greekness. The volume is well edited and conceived, although inevitably there is considerable variation of quality in the twelve chapters. The intellectual backgrounds of the contributors are pleasingly diverse, with scholars of Neoplatonism rubbing shoulders with scholars of medieval studies, French, modern cultural history . . . This produces essays of quite jarringly different intellectual styles: Ika Willis's haute-modernist and politically sassy queer studies stares uncomfortably at her Bristol colleague Duncan Kennedy's careful exposition of Derrida on Aristotle on metaphor, just as Rachel Bowlby's elegant essay on Oedipus contrasts with Andrew Benjamin's characteristically trenchant, abstract, and dense contribution on the place of Greek philosophy in deconstruction. The fecundity of Derrida is perhaps best revealed in the section 'Antiquity and Modernity', where first Leonard herself looks at 'Derrida between "Greek" and "Jew"', and then Daniel Orrells writes on 'Derrida's Impression of Gradiva: Archive Fever and Antiquity'. Here, Derrida, closely read and absorbed, is brought into contact with other issues — nineteenth- and twentieth-century constructions of Hebraism and Hellenism, Freud on archaeology — to allow broad questions to emerge and be debated through as well as with Derrida. As a volume, it is a harbinger of a more sophisticated comprehension of modern French thought's passion for antiquity.