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eBook details
- Title: Reading Justice: From Derrida to Shelley and Back (Jacques Derrida and Percy Shelley) (Critical Essay)
- Author : Studies in Romanticism
- Release Date : January 01, 2007
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 231 KB
Description
THIS ESSAY SHUTTLES BETWEEN JACQUES DERRIDA'S WRITING ON JUSTICE and Percy Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. In "Force of Law: The Mystical Foundations of Authority" and essays in Spectres of Marx and Without Alibi, (1) Derrida presents deconstructive reading as a vehicle for critiquing authority; he does so by referring to the historical moment that Shelley's play dramatizes: the revolutionary moment, with its swing between inaugural law and terror. My argument concerns Prometheus and Asia, whose questions to Demogorgon in Act 2 work against the Shelleyan grain of the drama and its preface by implicating Prometheus in the evil done to the world. (2) I argue that Prometheus, whose moral authority Shelley's drama and preface proclaim, stands, as it were, in the headlights of Derrida's analysis of what goes unsaid in the name of justice. Demogorgon's famous (non) reply to Asia's questions about the origin of evil ("the deep truth is imageless" or, don't ask, don't tell) might be said to constitute an alibi or deflection that makes the dramatic narrative safe for Prometheus' triumphant return. My interest in Shelley's Asia turns on the responsibility to the world that her questions register. In "Force of Law" Derrida forecasts the deconstructive protocols that the essay will enjoin on its readers. Responding to the charge (familiar in the annals of critical salvos against deconstruction) that deconstructionists have nothing to say about justice, he argues that in asking himself by what authority he writes he does what deconstructionist readers must do: in the present case they must think about what can be said and argued about justice, with a sharp eye for the singular demands of each such occasion. I understand Shelley's drama and Asia's questions as such an occasion. The itineraries of Shelley's play and Derrida's argument converge when the play puts these issues into play: the status of mystical (and mythic) authority; the role of undecidability; and the apparently incidental, apparently historical revolutionary moment that Shelley's mythopoetic drama dramatizes and Derrida marks as one (there have been many) ruined occasion for asking what justice might be and how it is implicated in or distinct from law and force.