Critical Excess: Overreading in Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, Žižek and Cavell (review)

Critical Excess begins, citing the eighteenth-century thinker Chladenius, by outlining the key ambition of hermeneutics, namely, to avoid misunderstanding and misrepresentation, to account for the multiplicity and ambiguity of meaning while at the same time regulating and delimiting the field of acceptable interpretations. What Colin Davis calls ‘overreading’ is a practice of interpretation that resists such hermeneutic regulation and delimitation. In different ways, each of the five thinkers discussed in Critical Excess have come to read literary or filmic texts in a manner that is exorbitant or exceeds hyperbolically the conventional protocols that govern critical understanding or the scholarly interpretation of what a text might legitimately be said to mean. Davis’s book, then, is an attempt to assess the status of this practice of overreading and to evaluate its successes and failures, its gains for broader understanding, and its potential limitations. This perhaps rather modest attempt to evaluate the exorbitant claims of overreading in the work of five thinkers immediately opens on to far more wide-reaching critical and philosophical questions regarding the fraught relation of philosophy to literature within the wider European tradition from Plato onwards. Davis is highly sensitive to the fact that, when an ostensibly philosophical thinker comes to make interpretative claims about literature or film, the relative positioning of philosophy and art is always at stake in ways that are decisive for the more general status that is accorded to both. The encounter between overreading and the interpretative hygiene of hermeneutics is therefore not simply a concern of literary or film criticism. It concerns also the more general relation of philosophy to literature within recent and contemporary thought. It allows for a sustained interrogation of the diverse ways in which, against the Platonic philosophical devaluation of artistic and literary practice, so much modern thought (in the wake of Heidegger in particular) has come to place literature alongside philosophy in the quest for understanding. At the same time, Davis’s book demonstrates, in exemplary fashion, the extent to which practices of overreading have come to constitute one of the key techniques of the philosophical thinking that has emerged in the wake of the closure or deconstruction of metaphysics. In each of the five chapters devoted to each individual ‘overreader’ he offers fair-minded and judicious assessments of their hyperbolic interpretative claims in order to demonstrate that the excessive claims of overreading can, when successful, challenge received categories and bypass the limitations of conventional wisdom. He shows how exorbitant and hyperbolic interpretation can, at its best, expose the singularity of texts in ways that allow for an encounter with the radically new, or with hitherto unknown territories of thought and understanding. Davis has produced a work of highly original and important literary theory that draws on the more modest techniques and scholarly protocols of what he rather self-deprecatingly dubs the ‘pedestrian critic’. Yet, in so doing, he has demonstrated the extent to which the techniques of literary criticism and scholarship can make indispensable contributions to contemporary literary and philosophical debate.