Jacques Derrida: Critical Thought (review)

There are two things that an unthemed collection of essays on a particular writer seeks to do: offer detailed critical perspectives based on informed readings; and present a range of accessible perspectives from which the newcomer to the writer will find ways in to the body of work in question. This collection certainly attempts the negotiation of these aims, and often succeeds. The writing is, without exception, clear, and the essays largely offer valuable analyses that could be seen as stimulating basic research, whilst offering indications of more particular and advanced investigations into Derrida's works and the issues raised in them. None the less, the collection does not successfully resolve its double mission, nor does it fail in an interesting, 'deconstructive' way — on several occasions, the essays are pitched at readers who do not need introductory work, and yet they consist primarily of exegesis (for example, the essay by Harvey), sometimes of writers other than Derrida (MacLean, Robbins, Smith). There is nothing wrong with these contributions, but I fail to see the purpose of anthologizing them in a volume that does purport to have a specific aim: the exploration, in detail, of key ideas in Derrida, and, often (too often?) their relation to other writers. The range of subjects covered is good (from autobiography to death, from metaphor to analytical philosophy), but the depth is sometimes lacking — simply because these are often essays about more than Derrida, and therefore there is no room to go into the textual detail of Derrida's own texts (notable exceptions on this point are MacLean, Todd, Clark), and certainly, seemingly, no room for properly critical analysis. Todd's essay, on Glas, and focusing on autobiography and its undoing, is one of the best pieces on offer, and is joined in that by Clark's examination of the notion of time in Heidegger and Derrida. The weakest point is Smith's article on death — originally published in 1998, it is about death, but does not feature the many texts Derrida wrote on that subject in the 1990s, and therefore, whatever its merits, it does not belong here. Maclachlan is aware of this issue, but his defence in the preface of its inclusion only emphasizes the problem. Overall, this is an interesting collection if you are already familiar with Derrida, even if it adds little to debates on his work. There are some usefully introductory elements (Maclachlan's introduction, Bass's compact article from 1972). Its purpose as a collection gets lost along the way. It has another, pragmatic, purpose — to bring together unanthologized texts — but too many of these are simply dated (as explorations of Derrida's thought on particular subjects), and are mostly literally dated — to the 1980s English-speaking world, so this cannot claim to be a representative collection of important essays on Derrida.