Philosophy and Non-Philosophy: The Thought and Legacy of Hugh J. Silverman by Donald A. Landes (review)

On May 8^th, 2013, Hugh Silverman died unexpectantly, several months before his 68^th birthday. In the fall of that year, a memorial symposium was held at Stony Brook University, where he had taught for many years. Eventually, this volume grew out of that symposium. One of the papers from that gathering did not make it into this volume, while the nine others did. Papers by Debra Bergoffen, Eduardo Mendieta, Ewa Ziarek, Kelly Oliver, and Lee Silverman as well as a very helpful Introduction were added to those of the symposiasts to round out this collection. In addition to an Introduction by one of the editors, an Afterword by Lee Silverman (Hugh's brother), and a Selected Bibliography of Works by Silverman, then, there are fifteen essays devoted to (in the words of the subtitle of the book under review) The Thought and Legacy of Hugh J. Silverman.

These essays are organized into four parts. Part I is entitled "Inscriptions and Textualities: Silverman's Deconstructive Practice." Inscriptions originally appeared with the subtitle Between Phenomenology and Structuralism, but in the second edition was changed to After Phenomenology and Structuralism ("Hugh took titles and subtitles very seriously!" [Landes in his "Introduction," 11]). Though other essays in this volume also consider Silverman's manner and style of doing philosophy, the ones in Part 1 do so quite emphatically. They are "Enacting the 'Between': Silverman and Continental Philosophy" by Gary E. Aylesworth, "Between Inscriptions: Intertextuality as Philosophical Method" by Landes, and "Autobiographical Textualities: Hugh J. Silverman on Writing the Self" by Galen Johnson. Part 2 is entitled "Silverman and Derrida: Justice/Hospitality/Writing." The three essays subsumed under this title are: "In Memoriam—An Undecicable: For HJS" by Michael Nass, "Of Philosophy, Friendship, and Justice" by Debra Bergoffen, and "Return to Sender: The Atopia and Non-Synchronicity of Autobiographizing" by Eduardo Mendieta. Part 3 is entitled "Postmodern Heroes, Subjects, and Responsibilities." "The Space-in-Between: The Frame and Excess in the Thought of Hugh J. Silverman" by Leonard Lawlor, "From the Death of the Subject to Stories of Natality: Foucault, Arendt, and Silverman" by Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, "The Murdered, the Journalist, and the Responsibility between Us" by Peter Gratton, and "Postmodernisms: On a Posthumous Book" by Gertrude Postl. Part 4 is entitled "Care/Time/Community: Remembering Hugh J. Silverman" and includes "Hugh Silverman's Cosmopolitan Hospitality" by Kelly Oliver, "Hugh—Taking Time and Taking Care" by Edward S. Casey, and "The Silverman Network" by Gail Weiss. Lee Silverman's personal recollection, though an intellectually inflected one, stands apart as an "Afterword."

Not only did Silverman have a joint appointment at SUNY Stony Brook in the Departments of Philosophy and Comparative Literature, he was the executive director of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature (IAPL). While the title of this collection of essays, Between Philosophy and Non-Philosophy, gestures to more than inhabiting the variable and indeed varying space between philosophy and literature, it points at least to this space. The first word in the title is arguably both the last word (insofar as any might even provisionally be granted this status) and a transitional signifier (a word facilitating traffic back and forth between philosophy and any number of other domains, practices, and histories from which it might be differentiated). It is the last word in the sense it is the one to which one must ultimately return after all has been said, on a specific occasion. It is the first word in the sense that, at the very outset, we are thrust by it outside any insular understanding of philosophical discourse, indeed, we are exposed to cross currents carrying us in different directions. Between Silverman's sojourn in Paris 1971 (Landes' "Introduction," 4-5) and the publication of Inscriptions: Between Phenomenology and Structuralism (1987) (later After Between Phenomenology and Structuralism [1997]), between this book and Textualities: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction, between...