|
|
 |
| |
Someone Called Derrida
An Oxford
Mystery
In the series:
Critical Inventions
| John Schad |
|
|
|
John Schad is
Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Lancaster.
He is the author of The Reader
in the Dickensian Mirrors, Victorians in Theory,
and Queer
Fish: Christian Unreason from Darwin to Derrida (Sussex),
the editor of Dickens Refigured, Thomas Hardy’s
A Laodicean, and Writing the Bodies of Christ;
and co-editor of life.after.theory. |
|
| |
“John Schad deftly splices stories inherited from his
two fathers, the real one from Oxford, a minister of religion who
may have witnessed Satanic rituals as a boy, and the symbolic father
coming from across the Channel who invented deconstruction. All the
secrets and traumas of recent history return in this non-linear chronicle
that throws new light on the divide between analytic philosophy and
continental philosophy. This generates endless narratives in which
verve, erudition and suspense appear laced with wry Freudian Schadenfreude.
Should we laugh when philosophy discloses old skeletons in its libraries,
or just follow odd couples like Derrida and Gilbert Ryle, Hugh Trevor-Roper
and Paul de Man, Elijah and Aleister Crowley since they seem to hold
the key to the murder mystery? Or, should we attend to one single
question: can I die of a death that is not mine?” Jean-Michel
Rabaté, Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities
at the University of Pennsylvania
“One of the many unique features of this intriguing, emotionally powerful,
and disturbingly entertaining book is that it brings together three real people
in what turns out to be (at least) a triple mystery involving Jacques Derrida,
John Richard Schad, and John Schad, the author himself. The title refers to an
uncanny event in which someone called Derrida on the phone on August 22, 1979,
and identified himself as Martin Heidegger, who had died in 1976. Derrida was
a Jew; and while Heidegger had been the Rektor of Freiburg University in 1933,
he dismissed Jews from the faculty of the University, including philosophers
with whom he had been professionally and personally associated. Derrida’s
philosophical writing, nonetheless, was pervasively influenced by Heidegger.
John Richard Schad, the father of the author, who suffered from dementia during
the last five or six years of his life, was a minister of religion in Oxford;
he and Derrida were both born in 1930.
The book opens in the author’s own voice: ‘It is late, later than
I think, and I am reading; but even while reading I keep drowsing and dreaming,
and often I am dreaming that I am still reading.’ This is an ordinary enough
situation, but it is also mysteriously uncanny in that it is reminiscent of similar
situations in Poe, as in his poem ‘The Raven.’ The book Schad is
reading is Derrida’s ‘The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond,’ in
which there are several references to Poe’s story ‘The Purloined
Letter.’ Throughout his book, Schad quotes freely from the Derrida text
that he is reading (these quotations appear in italics), but he also weaves into
these italicized passages and his own prose quotations from his father as he
was wasting away from Alzheimer’s during the years 1992-96. Those utterances
were recorded by John Schad's mother, and they are included as an appendix to
the book. Essentially, then, what is happening is that the author (John Schad)
is mediating between the text he is reading (Derrida's) and the final words of
his father (John Richard.) The mystery begins, however, not just when Shad begins
to discover striking connections between Derrida's and his father's texts but
especially when he realizes that there are certain passages that seem to be directed
specifically to him.
An important part of what he begins to discover is that both Derrida and his
father keep coming back, however obliquely, to the scene of a murder, or perhaps
more than one. Schad never lets us forget how often Oxford has been a place of
mystery and intrigue. Not only were there the fictional detectives - Lord Peter
Wimsey, Prof. Gervase Fen, and Inspector Morse - but there were also many non-fictional
ones as well: Gilbert Ryle, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and A.L. Rowse. Here the history
of Oxford's complicity in appeasement efforts with the Nazis during the 1930s
becomes an important part of the mystery.
Schad also narrates very well several events from Derrida's life, including his
visits to Oxford, his arrest in Prague, his obsession with a dog called Fido,
his reaction to the Paul de Man affair, his encounter with Schad in a hotel near
Loughborough, and his terminal illness.
An excellent intellectual thriller, this book is an important contribution to
the ‘Critical Inventions’ series that Schad edits. In his preface
Schad explains that this series features books that ‘push the generic conventions
of literary criticism to breaking point’ by allowing the critic to appear
as autobiographer, novelist, mourner, poet, parodist, detective, dreamer, diarist,
etc. In this book Schad has provided his future contributors with a brilliant
example of such a hybrid genre.” Michael Payne, The Star (Lewisburg
USA)
Someone called Jacques Derrida, someone called
him on the phone, someone who was dead – this was August 22nd 1979. A mystery,
he thought; but it is a mystery that began more than ten years
earlier, in 1968, when Derrida, a philosopher, visits Oxford
and there, before the very eyes of the Philosophy Sub-Faculty,
he dies, several times. Murder, he thought. And so I shall investigate,
and begin with a sign that the philosopher says he left within
a book from the thirteenth century, a strange fortune-telling
book that he had found in the oldest part of Oxford’s Bodleian
Library. In the book are a host of cryptic questions, but the
philosopher directs us to one in particular, a peculiar question
about a boy, and the question is this: Does the boy live? The
philosopher will not, though, give the answer; he requires, instead,
that we go to Oxford to open the book for ourselves. So, I shall
go. And, as I do, there is a phone call from a boy who had struggled
to live. This boy was once my father, a man who, for the last
five or six years of his life, suffered from some kind of terrible
dementia. It was as if he had lost his memory and found someone
else’s; for he spoke of appalling things, unspeakable things.
Above all, he said, ‘I must telephone. He is murdering
me.’ We have, it seems, another call from the dead and,
perhaps, another murder on our hands. So, let us be going – and
not just to Oxford in the late 1960s but also to an English public
school in the middle of the Second World War. And much else may
yet demand our attention, may yet act as clues – a forested
silence near Freiburg, a stolen evening in America, an abandoned
car in Paris. And all the while, all the while, the radio transmits,
the TV is on, and, back in Oxford, analysts decrypt intercepted
messages, a Jew investigates, the Great Dictator counts to six
million, and Esther prepares to take the minutes.
 |
| |
List of Contents to follow |
Publication Details
| |
ISBN: |
|
978-1-84519-030-9 h/b |
| |
|
|
978-1-84519-031-6 p/b |
| |
Page Extent / Format: |
|
224 pp. / 229 x 152 mm |
| |
Release Date: |
|
October 2007 |
| |
Illustrated: |
|
Yes |
| |
Hardback Price: |
|
£47.50 / $65.00 |
| |
Paperback Price: |
|
£16.95 / $35 |
|
|

|
| |
© 2007 Sussex Academic Press | Disclaimer |
|