Geopoetics: The Politics of Mimesis in Poststructuralist French Poetry and Theory (review)

Brandt, Joan. Geopoetics: The Politics of Mimesis in Poststructuralist French Poetry and Theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Pp. 344.

In concluding Geopoetics: The Politics of Mimesis in Poststructuralist French Poetry and Theory, Joan Brandt speaks of the "spirit of hospitality" (251), conjured by Jacques Derrida and Edmond Jabès. Brandt is referring to Derrida's quasi-concept of the "New International" explored in Specters of Marx and Jabès's thinking on a "Jewish community of limits." While Jabès has gone relatively unremarked, except among French scholars in the Anglo-American academy, Derrida's suggestive figure can hardly be said to have met with anything resembling a "spirit of hospitality" on the part of the Left in the English-speaking world, since the publication of Specters of Marx in 1994.

Subsequently, the translation of Derrida's The Politics of Friendship has also had relatively little positive impact on the political programs of the traditional Left. Indeed, there is little apparent understanding in such quarters of the political potential in the work of deconstruction, which, in part, it is the purpose of Geopoetics to present. The reception of Derrida's engagement with the political is nothing new, however. It is, instead, symptomatic of a particular Anglo-Saxon misreading of particular strains of French political thinking. Brandt's aim is to explore the history of that misreading in specific contexts, from the 1960s to the publication of Specters of Marx. Her aim is also to show how the work of Derrida and others in what is loosely termed "deconstruction" belongs to and exceeds a radical anti-mimetic project related to literature begun by the members of Tel Quel.

As Brandt demonstrates through her careful reading of the rise and fall of Tel Quel, politics on the Marxist Left, whether traditionally or more radically conceived, has had an inescapable tendency to be a politics of the program. Such political agendas have not moved beyond their programs and have, as a result, found themselves stalled by reaching the limits of their logic. Since the 1960s at least, such political programs have been concerned with reading within the limits of a Leftist, specifically Marxist paradigm, and toward a limit governed also by that same image. What cannot be made to fit within such limits, as projections of its own representation, has remained unacknowledged in the project of Marxism. (In Britain in the 1960s and early 1970s, for example, radical feminism found itself confronted by a Marxism unwilling to open itself to questions of gender, as Michèle Barrett's work has made explicit.) The program of the Left has all too often been concerned with shaping a discourse and praxis in its own image, without, of course, being able to acknowledge the full implications or contradictions inherent in its mimetic procedures.

It is thus with some sense of irony that, having first read Joan Brandt's magisterial study of the question of the political on its publication in 1997, I am now reviewing it after the various debates and acts of critical hostility surrounding Specters of Marx. The irony comes down to this: four years after the publication of Geopoetics and eight years after the publication of Specters, there are still few signs that thinkers on the Left have taken seriously either Derrida's sustained consideration of the spirit of hospitality or the promise of a "New International." That these gestures on Derrida's part are largely perceived as Messianic is more telling about the Left's reliance on teleological-representational models than it is of the ways in which Derrida's thought opens itself to the question of the political beyond a specific goal or limit.

Geopoetics offers a necessary corrective to the lack of sustained consideration by outlining both a deconstructive politics and a politics of deconstruction. Brandt does this by an examination of the way in which deconstruction moved beyond the work of Tel...