OK, thanks, Dom - I will try to get the bilingual ones (cashflow
permitting) & check the French titles of some of the others - it may be
mad, but I get a peculiar feeling reading translations of books in
languages I can read, though presumably Derrida (like Lacan et al) is
partly beyond my command of the language. Interviews are another matter,
I am not so scrupulous about them.
mj
Dominic Fox wrote:
>My pick of Derrida:
>
>For philosophical meat and potatoes, the essays in Writing and
>Difference, especially Cogito and the History of Madness (on Foucault)
>and Violence and Metaphysics (on Levinas), but also the essay on
>Jabes. Plato's Pharmacy, in Dissemination, is great too, although
>goodness only knows what a proper classicist would make of it.
>
>Try the essay Signature Event Context (on J. L. Austin, published in
>one translation in Peggy Kamuf's Derrida Reader and in another in a
>volume titled Limited Inc) for something of more or less direct
>critical usefulness. Limited Inc itself, a polemical exchange with
>Searle about Austin, entertained me greatly when I was 18, but maturer
>souls may find it wears a bit thin.
>
>Spurs (on Nietzsche) was published in a dual-language edition, with
>French text facing English. It's short, clever, funny and provoking,
>and the dimensions of the volume are such that you can slip it into
>the hip pocket of an overcoat and about a third of it will poke pinkly
>out of the top. Warning: in some parts of the country (predominantly
>Cultural Materialist campuses, say) this may get you beaten up.
>
>Signeponge (Sign-sponge / signs Ponge - on Francis Ponge) was also
>published in a dual-language edition. It's seriously weird, as befits
>its subject.
>
>I love The Post Card, with the first part's conceit of having been
>written on the backs of a stack of postcards of Plato and Socrates
>procured from the Bodleian library. (I used to have a few of these
>myself; I dare say quite a lot of people did). The essays on Freud and
>Lacan in that volume are very good also.
>
>Of the later works, The Gift of Death (on Jan Patocka and Kierkegaard)
>and Given Time: Counterfeit Money (on Marcel Maus and Baudelaire) are
>comparatively concise, cogent and readable - more "human" in style. On
>The Name has a very interesting essay on Angelus Silesius and negative
>theology (there was a time when I thought I might be going to write a
>PhD thesis on Derrida and negative theology. Seems like another life
>now). I liked Spectres of Marx more than most marxists seem to have -
>parts of it seem prophetic now, as when he talks about the fissures in
>the neo-liberal vision of economic globalisation and heaps scorn on
>the triumphalism of Fukuyama & co.
>
>The Politics of Friendship, much of which is about Schmitt and the
>concepts of "depoliticisation", "the sovereign" and "the enemy", seems
>similarly prophetic. There is much that is Schmittian about the
>current geopolitical dispensation. And, given that Schmitt was an
>unrepentant Nazi, that's a worrying thought.
>
>Memoires for Paul de Man is quite moving in places, and Derrida's
>discussion of de Man's writings in the collaborationist newspaper Le
>Soir are a model, I think, of how to deal critically and patiently
>with such things. Derrida does not exonerate de Man, but shows where
>the onus lies and how one might begin to reckon with it.
>
>For a single-volume entree into DerridaWorld, I would have to
>recommend Points..., a collection of interviews. An earlier volume of
>interviews, titled Positions, was both pitifully short and pitilessly
>overpriced, and was widely photocopied in consequence. Points... is
>rather better value for money, and has a nice picture on the cover of
>Derrida sitting in front of a piano and smoking a pipe - bouffant
>hairdo immovably intact.
>
>I have never read Of Grammatology all the way through.
>
>Dominic
>
>
>
|