Critical Inquiry (the Late Derrida, 33:2)

Dead Again W. J. T. Mitchell In the United States, deconstruction still seems to be dying quite a bit. —Jacques Derrida Shortly after Jacques Derrida’s death in October 2004, the editors of Critical Inquiry began discussing the possibility of a special issue in his honor. The question was, of course, not whether to do this, given CI’s long relationship with Derrida, but what form it should take. How could we hope to do justice to Derrida’s body of work, his contributions to philosophy and the entire range of the human sciences? The task seemed impossible in both its quantitative and qualitative requirements. Thousands of intellectuals across the world have been, in Gayatri Spivak’s words, “touched by deconstruction,” and that word has now become part of everyday vernacular across many languages. And the range and variety of Derrida’s work seems to make any thematic emphasis immediately collapse in the face of the almost infinite topicality of Derrida’s own capacious intellect from A to Z, from the Animal to Zoographia. We did, however, form a consensus on two principles. The first was our sense of appropriate topic, and this seemed to come to all of us simultaThis special issue would have been impossible without the devotion and hard work of the entire editorial group and staff of Critical Inquiry. Lauren Berlant, Bill Brown, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Arnold Davidson, Beth Helsinger, Franc¸oise Meltzer, Richard Neer, and Joel Snyder provided key moments of editorial judgment and guidance throughout. Bill and Franc¸oise worked aggressively to secure several of the contributions, and Arnold spent so many hours working with the contributors to improve their essays that it seems only proper to share with him the credit for editing the entire project. Jay Williams negotiated the labyrinth of copyright and permission issues that surrounds Derrida’s writing as well as guided the editing of the manuscripts, which he and Jeff Rufo—with assistance from Anat Benzvi, Burke Butler, Kate Gaudet, Robert Huddleston, Elizabeth Hutcheon, and Abigail Zitin—completed with their usual expeditious mastery. J. Hillis Miller provided crucial inspiration and practical help at all stages of the project. For all Derrida’s skepticism about Mitsein, this project was all about being with others, and my hope is that this will be evident in the pages that follow. Critical Inquiry 33 (Winter 2007) 䉷 2007 by The University of Chicago. 0093–1896/07/3302–0009$10.00. All rights reserved. 219 220 W. J. T. Mitchell / Dead Again neously in a phrase that was inevitably and spontaneously uttered in the immediate aftermath of his death: “The Late Derrida.” Here is an extract from the letter that went out to potential contributors: We propose an issue entitled “The Late Derrida” with all puns and ambiguities cheerfully intended. Under this rubric we mean, of course, the late work of Derrida, the vast outpouring of new writing by and about him in the period roughly from 1994 to 2004. In this period Derrida published more new books, essays, and interviews than he had produced during his entire career up to that point, and many of them on important new concepts in ethics, politics, and religion. At a minimum, the shape of Derrida’s career, and the evolution of his ideas, are still only imperfectly comprehended. We do not yet know (and may never know in some basic sense) what it all amounted to, and there will be a period of continued reading as his last works are translated, disseminated, and critiqued. But it