Jacques Derrida once defined his intellectual project with the aid of an image from the Biblical story of Jonah and the Whale. It was a question, he suggested, of 'vomiting up' philosophy and restoring her to the 'sea of texts' from which she had proudly withdrawn. Those who would like to take the allegory further might reflect that Jonah was not in fact precipitated into the sea but onto dry land, and lost no time in prophesying doom to the great city of Nineveh. Derrida's message has indeed caused increasing disarray in the citadels of Academe over the past decade, and particularly in those of America. If American philosophers, such as John Searle, have reacted dismissively, the same has not been true of those restless denizens of the sea of texts, the literary critics. Geoffrey Hartman's Saving the Text, whose subtitle hopefully sandwiches Derrida between the two bastions of 'Literature' and 'Philosophy', is a recent and highly impressive example of the recuperative effort which has been expended in responding to the challenge.

LRB 4 March 1982 | PDF Download