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  • In Praise of Excess1
  • Brian O’Keeffe (bio)

Most readers of this book will be familiar with the readers in this book—Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, Žižek, and Cavell. They have each contributed brilliantly provocative interpretations of philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature, and film. Critics have been duly provoked of course, but inasmuch as these figures are now well established as our maîtres à penser, it is rare to find anyone suggesting that their interpretations go too far, that they fail to abide by normal standards of academic accuracy and scholarly sobriety. These standards are for us, and as for them, well, brilliance shines all the brighter when rules and norms are broken, flagrantly, and without apology.

These shining lights are routinely dispensed from such standards, but it is still worth taking the risk, Colin Davis suggests, to ask whether Derrida reads too much into a work, whether Žižek gets carried away, whether Deleuze is guilty of “critical excess.” Yet it will be asked how one can say when interpretation becomes excessive. It will be objected that interpretation is not an activity governed by rules laid down by who knows what tribunal of scholarly rectitude. What is the benchmark for an academic interpretation anyway—when it says something confirmably true, when it is correct, when it provides textual evidence, when all the footnotes are in the right place, the i’s dotted, the t’s crossed? These are the right kind of objections to a book such as this (the wrong kind is to dismiss the majority of the figures considered as being “Continental” thinkers, and therefore constitutionally slapdash in their approach to scholarship). But the right kind of response to them—Davis’ response—is to offer a faithful exposition of what, exactly, these people do say, proceeding neither from the parti pris that their interpretations are worthless, nor from the overzealous position that everything in them is of equal worth. Davis’ chapters are models of clear analysis, economical when necessary, more expansive when necessary, adept at keeping the broader implications in focus while the moves and maneuvers of each thinker are tracked in their detail. But it is the tone Davis adopts that really counts: he is not relentlessly quizzical, but is nonetheless unfailingly deft at establishing [End Page 317] critical distance—not easy to do, given the rhetorical power (think of Žižek) with which his thinkers offer their interpretations. And yet, critical distance does not mean dispassion, still less a “take it or leave it” attitude. The key moments in Davis’ discourse are when he articulates a sincerely meant appeal to seek out Cavell, Deleuze, Derrida, and the rest in order to share in the intellectual joy that animates their interpretive work. Davis’ last chapter, “In Praise of Overreading,” with its allusion to Erasmus, is an irresistible plea to get more folly into academia.

The book begins with a brief account of the 1992 debate between Umberto Eco, Jonathan Culler, and Richard Rorty on the topic of interpretation and overintepretation. At stake was the threat of interpretive anarchy, a state of affairs welcomed, though not in terms of “anarchy,” by Rorty and Culler, in joint resistance to the idea that interpretation should be trammeled in any way. The idea of a more sensible hermeneutics was defended, to a degree, by Eco, on the grounds that it is not unacceptably conservative to admit the existence of interpretive norms, nor to acknowledge the priority of the text to dictate the meaning interpreters would interpret (even if such meaning remains elusive, and is not necessarily a matter of what the author meant the text to say). The remainder of the book, especially the last chapter, picks up on some of the issues broached in the course of that discussion: the question of the author, the question of intentionality, of meaning supposedly inherent in a text, of significant textual matter and non-significant textual matter like titles, copyright declarations, footnotes, and other marginalia. (Derrida’s brilliant riff on Nietzsche’s “I have forgotten my umbrella” is the particular case in point here.)

Davis resumes what is more or less the standard literary-critical line on each of these questions with admirable...

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