Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Dedication
- 1 What is Shakespeare's Genius?
- 2 Deconstructing (with) Shakespeare
- 3 Flèches and the Wounds of Reading
- 4 Porpentine
- 5 Giving the Greatest Chance to Chance
- 6 The Politics of Re-reading
- 7 Conclusion, or Génie qui es tu
- Works Cited
- Index
7 - Conclusion, or Génie qui es tu
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 September 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Dedication
- 1 What is Shakespeare's Genius?
- 2 Deconstructing (with) Shakespeare
- 3 Flèches and the Wounds of Reading
- 4 Porpentine
- 5 Giving the Greatest Chance to Chance
- 6 The Politics of Re-reading
- 7 Conclusion, or Génie qui es tu
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius opens with the question: ‘Un génie, qu’est-ce que c’est?’ What is a genius, and what does it do? To us? Derrida notes that the word ‘genius’ is uncomfortable, that it ‘makes us squirm’.
One is often right to view it as an obscurantist abdication to genes, as it turns out, a concession to the genetics of the ingenium or, worse, a creationist innatism, in a word, in the language of another age, the dubious collusion of some sort of biologising naturalism and a theology based on ecstatic inspiration. An irresponsible and docile inspiration, a drunken submission to automatic writing. The muses are never far off. In according the least legitimacy to the word ‘genius’ one is considered to sign one's resignation from all fields of knowledge, explications, interpretations, readings, decipherings – in particular in what one hastily calls the aesthetics of arts and letters, supposedly more propitious to creation. Such resigning is considered mystical, mysticoïd. One is said to be confessing to dumb adoration of the ineffability of that which, in the usual currency of the word ‘genius’, tends to link the gift to birth, the secret to the sacrifice.
Nevertheless, Derrida embraces this word, and importantly he does so not merely when thinking about Shakespeare. He acknowledges that genius is at work in the plays; his understanding of genius is, however, distinct from the idea of genius that we might find lurking behind much of philosophy’s bardolatry.
A little later on in the text, Derrida notes that Homer’s, Joyce's and Shakespeare's Ulysses together with ‘their brilliant [géniaux] inventors’ are ‘potentially incommensurable with any library supposed to house them, classify them, shelve them’. This is because ‘they derange all the archival and indexing spaces by the disproportion of the potentially infinite memory they condense according to the processes of undecidable writing for which as yet no complete formalisation exists’. It is in the idiom's process of undecidable writing, for which as yet no complete formalisation exists, that the genius of Shakespeare lies. Here, genius lies not in the man but in the work, and not in what it represents but in what it says, more precisely in the spectral, idiomatic, philosophonic bodies of the words themselves.
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- Information
- Derrida Reads Shakespeare , pp. 215 - 226Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020