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Invoking Derrida: Authorship, Readership, and the Specter of Presence in Film and Print
- New Literary History
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 42, Number 3, Summer 2011
- pp. 519-536
- 10.1353/nlh.2011.0033
- Article
- Additional Information
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This article investigates how questions of presence intersect with those of readership and authorship in Derrida's work. Through an examination of Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman's film Derrida alongside several of Derrida's own texts, most importantly "The Deaths of Roland Barthes," the article contends that Derrida uses differing rhetorical techniques to underscore his authorial "absent presence" in person and in print—drawing attention to distances within the first context and intimacies within the latter. In order to demonstrate the interdependency of these questions of authorship with those of readership, I root this investigation in my own singular position as a "third generation" reader of Derrida. As a reader who came to Derrida's work after his death, I demonstrate the unique way in which his "absent presence" functions for readers who have only encountered him through his texts.