N. Royle, In Memory of Jacques Derrida

ROYLE, Nicholas, In Memory of Jacques Derrida, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2008.
ISBN 978 0 7486 3296 1

RÉSUMÉ

In Memory of Jacques Derrida is a remarkable account of one of the greatest thinkers of our time. We are still coming to terms with the astonishing richness of Derrida's writings, as well as with the impact of his untimely death in 2004. In a sense it may be said that we are all ‘in memory of Derrida', regardless of whether or not we have read him. The essays gathered in Nicholas Royle's book offer a series of lucid and incisive readings of Derrida's work, as well as an elegiac tribute in more personal terms. In the midst of his many extraordinary works, Derrida is constantly engaged with a series of topics that form the basis of this book: the strange place of ‘death' in thinking, writing and perception; a new kind of attentiveness to the importance and paradoxes of mourning in love and friendship; questions of legacy, inheritance, the ghost and the gift; and the nature of memory, remembering and forgetting. In his writings on mourning (what is mourning? when does it begin, or end?), Derrida makes frequent reference to arguably the most powerful exploration of the topic in the western literary tradition: Shakespeare's Hamlet. Mourning, Derrida argues, is ‘the true subject' of this play. Royle's commemorative volume in turn makes Shakespeare a central focus for thinking about Derrida's work. Nicholas Royle writes in an autobiographical as well as critical vein: In Memory of Jacques Derrida is a poignant testament to the enigma of Derrida as writer, teacher and friend, and a provoking and fascinating elaboration of why his work remains crucial to an understanding of the contemporary world.