Mourning and Echolalia

The Purest of Bastards: Works of Mourning, Art, and Affirmation in the Thought of Jacques Derrida. David Farrell Krell. 2000, Penn State UP, $17.95

Richard Nixon once reportedly said of a political colleague, "He's a real bastard. And I mean that in the best possible sense." In The Purest of Bastards: Works of Mourning, Art, and Affirmation in the Thought of Jacques Derrida, David Farrell Krell, taking his cue from a line in The Post Card, pegs Derrida as "the purest of bastards"—and we can be sure, in the best possible sense. This is clearly a book of friendship and admiration, one that in at least two chapters was written during a time (1988) when Derrida's position in the Anglo-American academy was more subject to contestation, and when "deconstruction" was, on more than one occasion, hauled into the mainstream press as Exhibit A of the decadence, nihilism, and imminent collapse of at least some departments in the contemporary university. Those heady days are now behind us, and while the work of Derrida no longer inspires the same outrage, it also does not command the same sort of broad influence over the humanities as it once did. The rise of historically-inflected criticism has brought with it a new set of priorities, and the patient teasing out of textual aporias is, generally speaking, not one of them. Nevertheless, Derrida's position as the greatest post-Heideggerian philosopher is secure, and his texts—both old and new—retain their relevance as well as their power to provoke, fascinate, and teach.

For the most part, Krell's volume is content to amble along playfully at the side of Derrida's texts, reading them, amplifying them, riffing on them. The Preface, in an attempt to rope together the various chapters, cites mourning and affirmation as the principal themes to be explored, but in the volume itself these concepts are more leitmotivs than parameters for a sustained analysis. Krell outlines ten "affirmations" in one paragraph, but some of them do not fit all that snugly under that rubric. The performative act of affirming something is more than simply describing or asserting this or that. One does not affirm the square root of 81 or that Neil Armstrong was the first man on the moon. To affirm is to affirm something disputable. To affirm is to face controversy—at least potentially. Values, not facts, call out for affirmation. Krell writes, "Derrida affirms, I believe, the omnipresence of cinders and ash in seven figures of mourning in contemporary thought,"¹ but this "omnipresence" is less affirmed than noted, observed, or pointed out.

Krell is on much stronger ground when he argues that Derrida has affirmed the "beauty . . . of Kant's Critical project as a whole."² While Derrida's relationship to the philosophical "tradition" and to Kant in particular is and has always been complex, the tonality of Derrida's engagement with his predecessors has become less combative and accusatory and more affirmative in recent years. Derrida's recent work has surprised in the same way that filmmaker David Lynch surprised audiences waiting for his next perverse puzzle with his G-rated The Straight Story (1999). Of course, just as Lynch's inimitable signature was to be found in this straightforward story, Derrida's own deconstructive method and style are still present in his recent work. Krell's main consideration of Derrida's Kant occurs in the first chapter, one of the volume's strongest, which centers on a reading of frames and the concept of the parergon (ornament or adornment) in Derrida's Truth in Painting.³ The problem is that this text, from the mid-1980s, is less an example of Derrida's affirmative stance toward Kant and more an example of classic deconstruction—a patient destabilization of, in this case, the Kantian text that brings out its hidden assumptions, conceptual supplements, and moments of argumentative undecidability. If we look at Derrida's approach to...