The French Connections of Jacques Derrida (review)

REVIEWS debated topics such as capital punishment (William Connolly's "The Will, Capital Punishment, and Cultural War"), contemporary national sentimentality and the traumatized body (Lauren Berlant's "The Subject ofTrue Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics"), the corporate sponsorship ofthink-tank types ofdiscourse (George Lipsitz's, "Academic Politics and Social Change"); communitarianism and cultural practices (see especially Judith Grant's and Paul Apostolidis's assessments ofthe historical role played by cultural studies); nationalism, colonialism, postcolonialism , and their respective politics, which the third section ofthe book takes up (the section includes a great piece by Priscilla Wald, "Imagined Immunities"); finally, the American dream and other national values and themes, and their fate in today's political space defined both conventionally and unconventionally (in the sense in which conspiracy theories, analyzed by Dean herself, indirectly open up a space of symbolic fantasies and struggles). To sum up, Cultural Studies and Political Theory attempts, in Dean's words, "to provide a portal through which [the] possibilities" and the "realization" potential ofpolitical/theoretical analysis "might be accessed and expanded." It certainly succeeds in this attempt, and so does What's Left ofTheory in its own way. Apropos ofthis success, I find the picture on the latter's front cover befittingly ambiguous. The image features a one-way road sign sticking out of flood water, which spreads out all around extending to the horizon. There is in the picture, in other words, a sense ofdirection as well as ofdisorientation, but I would personally like to take the latter as indicating, as Dean says, potential and possibility (possibilities) rather than confusion or, worse, failure. Christian MoraruUniversity ofNorth Carolina, Greensboro JULIAN WOLFREYS, JOHN BRANNIGAN, AND RUTH ROBBINS, eds. The French Connections ofJacques Derrida. Albany: SUNY P, 1999. ?vii + 229 pp. A collection ofeleven essays, focusing on a contemporary figure as central as Jacques Derrida, would seem to be a particularly interesting but also a demanding project . With its title, announcing the exploration ofDerrida's connections, the book inscribes itselfin a Derridian web ofconnections, while attempting to avoid redundance , or repetitions, in a field ofstudies which has become quite large. Derrida has obviously had an enormous impact on contemporary intellectual life, in particular in the United States. This series ofessays, although published in Albany, has nevertheless been conceived among British specialists ofthe French philosopher. In 1995, the University ofLuton hosted an encounter around "Applied Derrida ," which gave birth to two volumes ofessays prior to this one, both published in 1996: a book edited by the same team, and ajournai hosting another set ofarticles, edited by one ofthe team's members, Julian Wolfreys. This collection completes the larger, three-volume project, which brings to light about forty essays representing enlarged and revised versions ofthe papers given at the original conference. The three editors ofthis volume undertook quite a task: they attempted to bring forth, in their own essays (which apparently were not presented at the conference), and in editing those of the other contributors, how vastly the connections have spread and could spread, betweeen Derrida and a number ofFrench authors. The possibility of exploring these links certainly reflects Derrida's own interest in Vol. 26 (2002): 172 THE COMPAKATIST authors such as Mallarmé (see the first chapter with Michael Temple's essay). In the field of these connections, Mallarmé appears quite typically as one of the authors revived by a certain literary trend, a certain orientation in philosophy. In this regard, Derrida's own numerous analyses of a variety of authors are a testimony of our times, ofhow every single period chooses its own authors from the past, rediscovering them in a new light, and also, how Derrida in particular develops interests in a certain literary trend, linking it to a predecessor, deconstructing the traditional perceptions of the latter, and also, how he announces the unforeseen, especially in the case ofhis contemporaries. Casting light on Derrida's connections may be designed to illuminate how contemporaries live and think, especially in France and more particularly, in the highly intellectual environment ofthe Paris intelligentsia. Derrida may thus exemplify, in the case of his studies of Mallarmé, how a new perception of the past is born (Mallarmé seen as a "trickster," a "troublemaker...