Derrida, Literature and War: Absence and the Chance of Meeting (review)

Sean Gaston's fourth book on Derrida in five years begins with a Preface, preceding a Prologue that stands in for an introduction. The Preface describes the book as an exploration of Derrida's affirmation of the chance encounter, of the brush with alterity that is constantly threatened with foreclosure by the weight of the literary-philosophical tradition. It affirms, moreover, the chance encounter as a possible 'other' of war, arguing that what Derrida calls 'la chance de la rencontre' must always contain within it the possibility of a non-encounter, an encounter that never takes place, whose non-event becomes the interval, or intervening site, of literature. The remainder of the Preface offers a brief explanation for the inclusion of a series of photographs by Jane Brown, which, serving as Brown's photographic interpretation of the text, are interspersed throughout without receiving commentary from the author. Word and image thus stage their own non-encounter. The prefatory explanation is welcome and somewhat enlightening, but it is hard to avoid the feeling that, much like the photographs, its addition is an afterthought that draws attention to a more entrenched lack of clarity. The following Prologue skips anecdotally, in the space of eleven pages, from Plato to Rousseau to Proust to Blanchot's Breton to Kojève's Hegel's Napoleon to Tolstoy, all circulating around Derrida and the question of an interval that suspends the encounter. Part 1 of the book proceeds, in much the same vein, through a series of (non-)encounters with numerous figures in the history of philosophy, to discuss the confusingly phrased concept of 'calculating on absence', which is to say the impossibility of not making calculations about what one encounters, the impossibility of there not being an encounter, even when what one encounters cannot be experienced as such. Part 2, on 'La Chance de la rencontre', is more literary, engaging with a broad range of post-eighteenth-century European writers, including Schiller, Stendhal, Conrad, and Bulgakov, on the duels and wars whose outcomes, like literature in general, withdraw from any definitive identification of their beginning and end. The sway of literature covered is as impressive as it is confusing. One figure dovetails elegantly but a bit too effortlessly into the next. Gaston wants to demonstrate the unnameability of the encounter, and every additional proper name invoked defers an explanation that is promised without ever arriving. This isn't for beginners, then, but it is engaging. Gaston reads the literature with a real deftness of touch, moving from text to anecdote in a conversational style that is very pleasantly readable, albeit novelistically so, for those versed in the language of Derrida. The bigger issue concerns whether such elliptical peregrinations still have something to offer a deconstructive approach to literature; whether the best way to repeat Derrida isn't, rather, not to attempt a repetition of his style.