Someone Called Derrida – An Oxford Mystery

"What interests me today is not strictly called either 'literature' or 'philosophy'...'autobiography' is perhaps the least inadequate name." - Jacques Derrida *** 'Autobiography' may be the least inadequate name for deconstruction, but it is not the least complex since, for Jacques Derrida, all confession is what he calls 'circumfession' - a telling of one's life that works circuitously, via a detour around the life of another. This book seeks, therefore, to plot or narrate the life of Derrida through or around the lives of others. Some are likely, continental others, such as Paul de Man and Paul Celan; some, though, are wholly unlikely, English others whom Derrida never even knew, such as C. S. Lewis, Hugh Trevor Roper, and, above all, the author's deceased father Richard Schad, a man who was neither famous nor eminent, simply a kind of Everyman, or Everybody. To quote Robert Smith, "how much of [deconstruction] is...'everybody's autobiography.'" In tracing these comings and goings, author John Schad considers to what extent deconstruction may best be called 'the biography of the other,' or what Derrida himself playfully calls an 'autobiothanatoheterograpical opus,' a body of writing through which others somehow ghost-write their own lives and, indeed, deaths - this is not just autobiography but autothanatography. The book mixes literary criticism and archival scholarship with (auto)biography, investigative history, detective fiction, and, indeed, Oxford. Forming as it does one continuous narrative, Someone Called Derrida may be closer in style to a novel than a conventional academic study. The outcome is quite startling.