Deconstruction Beyond Itself

In the decade since Jacques Derrida’s untimely death, a number of books have been published that offer themselves to his memory, attempting to comprehend what it would mean to write and think in his wake and in his absence. Judged solely by its title, Zsuzsa Baross’s new book, Posthumously: For Jacques Derrida (Sussex Academic Press, 2011), appears to be cast from a similar mold. It would be unfortunate, however, for it to be misunderstood as the kind of study that it explicitly, and for the most part successfully, attempts to avoid. The book’s preface approaches a quite different understanding of the posthumous in the work of Jacques Derrida, which at first glance might appear to be comprehended as the space of a mourning subject left alone to ponder the legacy of a corpus left behind. Giving the notion of the “posthumous” a decidedly deconstructive dimension, Baross offers a far more ambitious task for her study: a reading of deconstruction from the standpoint of its own conception of the future, the logic of an anachronie that opens it to a different space or register, something that “is both unforeseen and unforeseeable by deconstruction itself” (2). In other words, what is not at stake in her study is a “critique” of deconstruction that would come to intervene from the standpoint of what is already posthumous with regard to it, presenting itself as the epigonic “post” of a writing exterior to its corpus. The operation of Baross’s book is different, more difficult, and thus much more of an intervention: it stages or puts to work a posthumous that is at once Derrida’s “own,” but which also marks an opening toward his writing and his thought’s difference with itself. Baross’s study thereby gestures toward something within Derrida’s thought that simultaneously exceeds it, and gives it back over to a future it could not anticipate, but whose very nonhorizon was always what was at stake within it.

Posthumously: For Jacques Derrida undertakes this operation through a series of critical engagements organized around an interrogation of the image—“its force, productivity, memory, its relation to writing and history” (2). After a preface that sets up the conception of the “posthumous” in Derrida, the book is then divided into three main chapters and a postscript. The first chapter approaches, through an analysis of several texts, including Specters of Marx and Derrida’s last interview (now published as Learning to Live Finally), the problem of a “heterodidactics” at work in them—that is, the possibility of a movement of posthumous “incompletion” that would at the same time be predicated on a mode of the “living on” or survivance of Derrida’s work. The chapters that follow treat the themes of the role of the cinematic image in the construction of a “memory of the future,” as well as the relation between the graphematic trait of writing and its double—the trait of drawing—in a close analysis of Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind. The result is not only a major intervention in the study of the relation between text and image but a wholly original attempt to think a dimension of the posthumous in Derrida’s corpus that has yet to be adequately confronted. Baross’s study is thus constituted by a radical fidelity to Derrida in its gesture to give back to his thought a future it could not have anticipated. It is successful in doing so not by signaling a space “beyond” Derrida, but by tracing, through a careful reading of the vicissitudes of the image, a differential within his corpus that is redeployed.

The first chapter of the book, on Derrida’s “hetero-didactics,” functions as an attempt to prepare the reader for the kind of analysis that will await him in the two other chapters that follow. Defining the posthumous in Derrida as “neither the aftermath of a fixed or stable location in time, nor a chronologically determined relation to the ‘instant’” (5), Baross positions this notion both at the heart of Derrida’s writing...