The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Derrida (review)

This book, a member of the Cambridge Introductions to Literature series, is an elegant and complex account of Derrida’s writings ‘in relation to’ literature. The reader looking at the cover asks herself whether the world needs another introduction to Derrida and/anything under the sun; then as she reads, struck by the book’s styled and nuanced articulation, wonders whether it is in fact an introduction at all. It chooses not to retread the philosophy, for yet more students to run on these tyres, but to look at the ‘critical proximity’ that Derrida is said to engineer in his writing between certain philosophers and certain writers. It is this ‘between’ that is the subject of the book. Beginning with an account of the ‘Life’, Hill shows the main facts of the biography and their implantation in the academic literary and social scene of Paris (Chapter 2 Contexts). The relation to Sartre, to structuralism, to the phenomenology of Husserl, to linguistics and to post-structuralism is sketched out in ways that permit a clear and concise account of Derrida’s way into his own writing. From L’Écriture et la différence we move to the work produced in a kind of cooperative or co-ambiance with Tel Quel, on Mallarmé, Blanchot (Leslie Hill is the author of distinguished work on Blanchot), then to Joyce, Freud, Ponge and Genet. There is nothing mechanical about the construction of this book; we do not move from literary name to name, but through text and text to what are nevertheless conclusions: Derrida’s work is turned to the future, it leads out rather than closes off. The fluidity of this book’s writing is itself a neat way out of the paradox implied in my last sentence — can one conclude about a philosopher much of whose greatness consists in looking forward into, not back over seminal works? It is paradoxical that Hill’s subtle edgy writing should have its home in a publishing framework which rejects what to my mind is the very premise of Derrida’s work: philosophy and literature are not a seamless whole, but nor can they be treated as separable. And that it is a framework in which Hill seems not unhappy to reside. In that way, at least, he seems to this reader at any rate unfaithful to his subject: Derrida taught philosophy all his life; all his life he looked at the way philosophy was written because it could not be separated from the philosophy itself. So to prise off the ‘literary’, as this book with all its excellence implicitly does, is to get stuck back again into the pedagogic mud, that traditional separation which Derrida helped us out of.