ROYLE, Nicholas, In Memory of Jacques Derrida, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2008.
ISBN 978 0 7486 3296 1
RÉSUMÉ
In Memory of Jacques Derridais a remarkable account of one of the greatest thinkers of our time. Weare still coming to terms with the astonishing richness of Derrida'swritings, as well as with the impact of his untimely death in 2004. Ina 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 lucidand incisive readings of Derrida's work, as well as an elegiac tributein more personal terms. In the midst of his many extraordinary works,Derrida is constantly engaged with a series of topics that form thebasis of this book: the strange place of ‘death' in thinking, writingand perception; a new kind of attentiveness to the importance andparadoxes 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, orend?), Derrida makes frequent reference to arguably the most powerfulexploration of the topic in the western literary tradition:Shakespeare's Hamlet.Mourning, Derrida argues, is ‘the true subject' of this play. Royle'scommemorative volume in turn makes Shakespeare a central focus forthinking about Derrida's work. Nicholas Royle writes in anautobiographical as well as critical vein: In Memory of Jacques Derridais a poignant testament to the enigma of Derrida as writer, teacher andfriend, and a provoking and fascinating elaboration of why his workremains crucial to an understanding of the contemporary world.