Derrida (Almost) Reads King Lear

Derrida's ‘My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies’ is in many ways a companion piece to ‘Aphorism Countertime’. Here, we re-encounter themes of translation, of those strange movements in ‘tr’, intertextual travel, and lost or erring letters, as well as the uncanny thinking processes of lettres, which, as I have shown in the preceding chapter, are intrinsic to Derrida's understanding of ‘Shakespeare's genius’. If I turn to ‘My Chances’ now, however, it is mainly because this text deals with the thorny but central issue of chance in Derrida's approach to reading, writing and thinking.

The ways Derrida reads Shakespeare may not leave everyone with the aftertaste of the inevitable. Chance, indeed, orchestrates them, whether this be the unprogrammatic character of his engagement with the plays, the seemingly fortuitous routes he takes from one decontextualised passage to the next, the often surprising appearance of Shakespeare at the most unexpected argumentative junctions, and, perhaps most importantly, his dedication to tracing the seemingly aleatory but argumentatively absolutely pivotal lexical and phonetic movements of the Shakespearean porpentine.

The chances a reading takes, as well as the chances it does not take, and the routes of reading that it therefore skirts, are my subjects here, just as they are Derrida’s. What chances, then, does Derrida take with Shakespeare in this text on chance and on reading? Given that ‘My Chances’ is in silent conversation with his engagement with Romeo and Juliet and with Shakespeare more in general, it is perhaps not surprising that, nestled towards its very end, we find a direct reference to Shakespeare, but this time to King Lear. As we shall see later in more detail, Derrida is here talking about his decision to cite Freud citing Leonardo da Vinci citing Hamlet as a way of thinking about the role the chances of literature and reading play for psychoanalysis, but also for Derrida himself: