In Occasional Deconstructions, Julian Wolfreys challenges the notion that deconstruction is a critical methodology, offering instead a number of reintroductions or reorientations to the texts of Jacques Derrida and the idea or possibility of deconstructions. Proceeding from specific readings of various texts (both film and literary), as well as mobilizing a number of issues from Derrida’s recent work surrounding questions of ethics, politics, and identity, Wolfreys considers the role of deconstruction in broader academic and institutional contexts, and questions whether, in fact, deconstruction can be called upon to function as theory at all.
In this book, Wolfreys suggests that the patient, necessary work of reading, in which response and responsibility to the other has a chance to manifest itself, is necessary to the always political and ethical tracing of the material and the historical. He also contends that reading should be an encounter that gives place to an acknowledgment of the other, and that this singular act by which one is introduced to the other can never be programmed.
Table of Content
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART ONE: FALSE STARTS
1. Reflecting on the Occasions of Introduction: Justifying the Unjustifiable or, Beginning Again
PART TWO: IDENTITIES IN RUINS
2. Uncanny Temporalities, Haunting Occasions: Sunset Boulevard
3. Biography’s Ruins: The Afterlife of Mary Shelley
4. Between: Speculations
PART THREE: APPARITIONING
5. Eternity and a Day or, an ‘Endless Foreword’: Tout dire
6. Citation’s Haunt: Spectres of Derrida
7. Occasions of Trauma and Testimony: Witnessing, Memory, and Responsibility
PART FOUR: AFFIRMATIVE RESISTANCES
8. Origins of Deconstruction? Deconstruction, that which arrives (if it arrives at all)
9. Hauntology or the Political? (or, No Politics, Not Now): Always Already Deceived
10. Letter to Martin Mc Quillan, Concerning ‘the New International’: The Indelible Marx of Haunting
PART FIVE: READING TO COME
11. Guilty Reading
Notes
Works Cited
Index of Proper Names
About the author
Julian Wolfreys is Professor of Victorian Studies at the University of Florida. He is the author of many books, including
Being English: Narratives, Idioms, and Performances of National Identity from Coleridge to Trollope, and is the coeditor (with John Brannigan and Ruth Robbins) of
The French Connections of Jacques Derrida, both also published by SUNY Press.
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