The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Derrida by Leslie Hill (review)

photographies, les rubriques “repères biographiques” et le florilège de textes critiques à la fin, contribuent à offrir un guide admirable. University of North Texas Michel Sirvent HILL, LESLIE. The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Derrida. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. ISBN 978-0-521-68281-7. Pp. xii + 140. $19.99. The ostensible purpose of this fairly brief introduction to Derrida—as the prefatory note and back cover both proclaim—was to examine the French philosopher ’s writings on literature and to explore his relationship to literary theory and criticism. Leslie Hill therefore finds it necessary to explain that “I have limited myself to only one of the multiple variegated threads running through Derrida’s writing” (vii). It becomes quickly evident, however, that the author is being modest for, as he effectively demonstrates in the pages that follow, it is not possible to single out one thread in Derrida’s work without taking into account the entire fabric of his thought. In this regard, Hill has indeed given us a clear, concise, deftly organized, and convincingly argued introduction to Derrida, period. This is no mean feat, given that Derrida published “well in excess of 100 volumes” and that “the scope of Derrida’s thinking is prodigious,” as the author points out at the outset (1). In this regard the effectiveness of Hill’s approach can be attributed to a judicious choice of key texts as well as that of a limited number of thinkers or writers (Mallarmé, Husserl, Blanchot, Joyce) whose work has inspired Derrida in various ways. In addition, Hill’s conciseness is due to his basic thesis, which consists of arguing that Derrida has always been consistent in his thinking, which he characterizes as an “infinite conversation between literature and philosophy” (vii). The two realms have to be seen as inseparable, moreover, especially in view of Derrida’s critical project, which amounts to nothing less than putting into question the last two thousand years of Western thinking on these two topics. To be questioned in particular is the Western habit of thinking in terms of binary opposites; thus, from Plato to Mallarmé, what has dominated throughout, Derrida argues, despite numerous shifts in emphasis or adjustments of one kind or another, is the hierarchically ordered opposition between the intelligible and the sensible: between mind and body, idea and manifestation, signified and signifier, content and form, male and female, and so on (37). Derrida’s merit, Hill shows, has been not only to bring out the fallacy underlying this logical paradigm but to conceptualize a strategy for evading it by reconfiguring the relationship of the terms constituting the prevailing “onto-logic” of Western experience. He achieves this by means of the notions of différance, of the iterability of the sign, and of the trace as non-present remainder. Perhaps the most controversial of Derrida’s radical ideas is his claim that “il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” a statement, as Hill notes, that is “problematically translated as ‘there is nothing outside of the text’” (45). It is a notion, however, that is fundamental to Derrida’s argument and “it would be impossible even to conceive experience (i.e. time, space, perception, memory, the unconscious, self and other, etc.) without recourse to some concept of (arche-) writing in so far as ‘there is no experience of 394 FRENCH REVIEW 84.2 pure presence, but only chains of differential marks’”(46). In the final account, one of the things that has always frustrated many of Derrida’s critics is his failure to produce secure and reliable points of reference for thinking our relationship to language and reality. As Hill demonstrates, however, that failure constitutes perhaps one of the great merits of Derrida’s innovative approach to these questions and it is precisely the valorization of the undecidable and undecidability that accounts for the power of his insights. In this regard, Derrida’s thinking has only gained in relevance of late, for, as neuroscientists have shown, what decides for us is inscribed within a system over which we have but little control. Hill’s brief survey of the reception of Derrida’s work provides an especially valuable conclusion to this highly recommendable...