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’.

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.