Brief Notices

Jacques Derrida, Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde. Paris: Galilée, 2003. 414 pages.

Jacques Derrida, Béliers: Le dialogue ininterrompu: entre deux infinis, le poème. Paris: Galilée, 2003. 80 pages.

Note: Appearance among these brief descriptions of recent publications that have arrived too late to find an appropriate reviewer in this issue does not preclude more detailed review in a later issue of M L N.

The bibliography of Jacques Derrida is, not unexpectedly, complex. This is in part due to the sheer quantity of his publications; his book-length texts since 1962 now number more that 100 titles. (Éditions Galilée, his primary publisher since 1973, now includes a "Du même auteur" of major works at the end of each new volume that runs to three densely printed pages.) But the complexity is also a function of the range of Derrida's affiliations, his complex network of friendships, loyalties, and commitments on both sides of the Atlantic. This means that his works can first be published in translation and under many different imprints.

Thus a version of Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde first appeared in English from the University of Chicago Press (2001) under the title The Work of Mourning. It is one more testimony to the friendships and fidelities noted above, and was an outgrowth of a conference held at DePaul University on the themes of mourning and politics in the work of Derrida. This volume, honoring "friendships in the wake of passing," was the initiative of Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, whose perceptive introduction is reproduced here in the French edition. The elegiac texts—ranging from letters of condolence and eulogies to memorial essays and meditations—are, as the introduction persuasively suggests, in various ways related to Derrida's important publications devoted to friendship, memory, death, and mourning: Glas, Fors, Mémoires—pour Paul de Man, Spectres de Marx, Donner la mort, Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas, Politiques de l'amitié, and others. In each Derrida bears witness to the singularity of a friendship and to the absolute uniqueness of each relationship; and in each instance he is acutely aware of the questions of tact, taste, and ethical responsibility involved in speaking of the dead: the risks of enlisting the occasion for one's own purposes, political calculations, personal vendetta, and the expiation of guilt.

Chaque fois unique has been expanded from the English edition by the addition of an Avant-propos by Derrida and two additional essays consecrated to thinkers whose deaths occurred after the publication of the original volume (Gérard Granel and Maurice Blanchot). The detailed biographical and bibliographic notes (prepared by Kas Saghafi) have been up-dated and expanded, forming a 78-page appendix. The book, through the accidents of friendship, influence, and collegiality, presents an intellectual map of Europe and the U. S. over the past half century. The sixteen figures commemorated in this volume—as authors, critics, philosophers, and academicians—all occupied more or less significant places in the public sphere: Roland Barthes, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, Max Loreau, Jean-Marie Benoist, Louis Althusser, Edmond Jabès, Joseph N. Riddel, Michel Servière, Louis Marin, Sarah Kofman, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Lévinas, Jean-François Lyotard, Gérard Granel, and Maurice Blanchot. The reflections on their loss and irreplaceability in turn throw new light on the evolution of Derrida's own thought over the past twenty-five years and the recurrent themes that it has orchestrated.

The second volume, Béliers, is the text of a lecture in memory of Hans-George Gadamer delivered at Heidelberg in February 2003. In many ways it is a supplement to the larger volume of memorials, another "adieu." In his preface to Chaque fois unique Derrida says that the smaller volume is a "véritable introduction" to that collection. But Béliers, as the title suggests, is also an extended "roving" commentary on a single poem of Paul Celan, "Grosse, Glühende Wölbung" (in Artemwende, 1967), a text very close to...