Someone Called Derrida
An Oxford Mystery
Published on 1. December 2007
Book
Paperback/Softback
211 pages
978-1-84519-031-6 (ISBN)
Description
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.
Reviews / Votes
"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 Rabate, Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania.More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Liverpool
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 152 mm
Width: 229 mm
Weight
332 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-84519-031-6 (9781845190316)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
John Schad is Professor of Modern Literature at Loughborough University. He is author of Queer Fish: Christian Unreason from Darwin to Derrida, Victorians In Theory and The Reader in the Dickensian Mirrors; editor of Writing the Bodies of Christ, Thomas Hardy's A Laodicean and Dickens Refigured; and co-editor of life.after.theory. Professor Schad is currently writing an experimental book called Derrida via Oxford: Barely a Life.
Content
'Si puer vivet'; A Sleep of Prisoners; XX; Silences; Freiburg; Esther; "They Weren't Really You Know"; The House; Stolen Evening; High Places; Fast Cars; Secret Marriage; Hastings; Sacrifice; Elijah; Index.