Abstract

This tribute to Jacques Derrida takes in the sweep of his orchestration of literature with philosophy, as two “counterposed moments” of his interrogation of the working of language and thought. Focusing especially on his reading of Mallarmé, which distills the philosophical resonance of discourse that identifies itself as literary, and on Specters of Marx, which displays the political resonance of deconstruction, Sussman also turns to Derrida's reading of Blanchot as a figure who resumes the tension between the literary and the philosophical but who “inscribes life, in all its impossible conditions.”