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  • Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts ed. by Andrew J. Mitchell, Sam Slote
  • Damon Franke (bio)
Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts, edited by Andrew J. Mitchell and Sam Slote. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013. xviii + 332 pp. $90.00 cloth; $26.95 paper.

As part of the State University of New York Series in Contemporary French Thought, the compilation Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts yokes all of Jacques Derrida’s writings on James Joyce alongside twelve essays by twelve major Joycean practitioners of deconstruction. Edited by Andrew J. Mitchell and Sam Slote, this handy compendium begins with a cogent overview of the Joyce/Derrida [End Page 516] critical nexus that strategically introduces the ensuing essay chapters at key points in its critical-historical spectrum. The four-part structure of the book (I. Texts by Jacques Derrida; II. Returns; III. Departures; and IV. Recollections) not only evokes Finnegans Wake and thereby mirrors one of its major recurrent ideas of being in the wake of Joyce but also appropriately surveys the possible fields of study for Joyce vis-à-vis Derrida. As a result, the book has a deep and suggestive coherence not often found in collections.

In the thesis-driven and deftly synthesized introduction, Mitchell and Slote weave together the multiple and contradictory impulses toward totalization and its limits shared by literature and philosophy. For the editors, the “Derrida/Joyce relation stages this deconstructive play of totality and equivocation, situating itself at the fecund limit between them” (2). Since all “the major themes of Derrida’s thinking of meaning—citation, grafting, postality, mediation, technology, and the signature—play predominant roles in his reading of Joyce,” Mitchell and Slote believe the relationship of these two figures will help us understand “the equivocal situation of this existence,” defined in part as “to never be whole while seeking to be whole, to be written ourselves while at the same time writing” (12, 15). Bearing directly on the means by which Derrida reads Joyce, the “Returns” section of the book is the most rich and suggestive. In this section, the editors have each included one of their own essays providing details of Derrida’s significant engagements with Joyce’s work beyond the explicit treatments. Slote looks at the structural parallels between Derrida’s Glas and book II.ii of the Wake in terms of Derrida’s search for something resistant to the relentlessness of Hegelian dialectic.1 Through equivocation, paronomasia, and whimsy, Joyce “overloads the possibility of dialectic resolution” (142). Mitchell’s essay, a version of which first appeared in the JJQ,2 concerns the way two of Derrida’s theses for The Post Card3—”the impossibility of complete arrival and the reversibility of the time of inheritance” (157)—characterize Shaun the Post.

Readers of this journal know Derrida’s two landmark essays on Joyce from the 1980s: “Two Words for Joyce” and “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce.”4 Both of these texts have been translated into the familiar English versions, and Derrida published them together as components of the book “Ulysse” Gramophone. Mitchell and Slote have collected new translations of these complete and definitive Derridean texts by François Raffoul (the SUNY Series editor) and Geoffrey Bennington, who had also translated the earlier version of “Two Words for Joyce” (22–86).5 Raffoul additionally translated the jacket information and introduction to Derrida’s book, both of which are included in the present collection (19–21). A new little gem follows these familiar texts with the first English translation [End Page 517] of Derrida’s last writing on Joyce—the 2001 introduction to Jacques Trilling’s James Joyce ou l’écriture matricide.6 Titled “La Veilleuse,” Derrida’s essay has been translated as “The Night Watch,” though this elides some of the title’s French connotations.

One of the lost semes in the title “The Night Watch” is “woman,” and this pointedly speaks to the issues at stake for Derrida: whether maternity can be effaced by writing and whether it resides with paternity as a “legal fiction” (96, U 9.844). In her chapter about this essay in the “Returns” section of the book, Christine van...

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