The Derrida Dictionary (review)

In a certain sense, the story of deconstruction has always been the story of its systematization. It is, of course, compulsory for scholars in the field to bemoan the creation of the ‘Derrida industry’ as a tragic (or culpable) betrayal of this least systematic of thinkers. At the same time, however, the introductory guides, student textbooks, and anthologies — all implicitly promising to boil deconstruction down into a set of formulae that can dutifully be repeated in essays and examinations even as they deny the very possibility of such an endeavour — continue to pile up. To the cursory eye, Simon Morgan Wortham’s Derrida Dictionary might look like merely the latest product of this seemingly endless conveyor belt: what, after all, could be more complete, more totalizing, more systematic than a dictionary? However, such a conclusion would do a serious injustice both to Morgan Wortham’s excellent book and, indeed, to the complexities of Derrida’s own philosophy: deconstruction challenges the very idea of a pure or originary essence, so its own fate in the contemporary academy cannot simply be a series of contingent events that befall it from without. For Morgan Wortham, Derrida does not turn his back on systematic thought but rather tries to think the systematic in the most rigorous way possible: ‘no system can ever be fully complete or self-sufficient’, the former argues, because ‘every system depends, basically, on non-systematizable elements which in fact produce and maintain the system’s very possibility’ (p. 2). Such, briefly put, is the formidable challenge the Derrida Dictionary sets itself and which it admirably rises to meet: to do justice to the systematic and the non-systematic dimensions of deconstruction together, without negation, contradiction, or dialectical sublimation. On the one side, the Dictionary offers us as magisterial, authoritative, and comprehensive an overview as one could reasonably expect: Morgan Wortham seems to have read everything Derrida published and treats us to beautifully lucid and scholarly entries on all the major themes of his thought as well as summaries of the major publications. On the other side, though, Morgan Wortham is always careful to respect what cannot be systematized in deconstruction, what continually runs up against and overflows the limits of all systems: every entry in the Derrida Dictionary inevitably sends us ricocheting to every other entry, and, still more inevitably, back to the original texts themselves with a fresh and informed perspective. Perhaps Borges was right: the dictionary — for all its utopian dreams of an encyclopedic wholeness in which everything that can be said and thought is present — might be a more uncanny, more porous, in short more deconstructive, space than first seems. This is, in summary, an excellent book — both for everything it manages to say about Derrida and, just as importantly, for what it knows it cannot — and it will be indispensable reading for all scholars and students of deconstruction.