Book of Addresses M E R I D I A N Crossing Aesthetics Werner Hamacher Editor Stanford University Press Stanford, California  BOOK OF ADDRESSES Peggy Kamuf Stanford University Press Stanford, California © by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data [CIP to come] Original Printing  Last figure below indicates year of this printing:           Contents Acknowledgments iii Introduction: Disavowals (A Foreword)     ( , ,  ) §  Deconstruction and Love  §  Deconstruction and Feminism: A Repetition  §  Jealousy Wants Proof  §  The Other Sexual Difference  §  The Sacrifice of Sarah  §  To Give Place: Semi-Approaches to Hélène Cixous     §  “Fiction” and the Experience of the Other  §  The Experience of Deconstruction  §  Deconstruction Reading Politics: Democracy’s Fiction (Everything, Anything, and Nothing at All)  § The Other Fiction  §  Syringe (at the point)  viii Contents    § The Ghosts of Critique and Deconstruction  § The Haunts of Scholarship  § Derrida on Television, or “Applied Derrida”  § Singular Sense, Second Hand  Afterword: On Leaving No Address, by Branka Arsi´c  Notes  Index  Acknowledgments All of the chapters in this book were originally written in response to invitations: to participate in a conference or contribute to a publication. I am grateful to the many friends and colleagues who worked to provide these occasions: Geoff Bennington, Jean Bessière, Elizabeth Beaumont Bissell, John Brannigan, Monique Chefdor, Tom Cohen, Hafid Gafaiti, Nancy Holland, Lynne Huffer, Michel Lisse, Ian Maclachlan, Martin Mc- Quillan, Richard Rand, Alison Rice, Ruth Robbins, Nicholas Royle, Michael Syrotinski, Christine Thuau, and Julian Wolfreys. Several chap- ters benefited greatly from responses by Derek Attridge, Michel Lisse, Nick Royle, and Sam Weber, all incomparable readers. My thanks to David Agruss for his careful help checking the final manuscript and to Christopher Peterson for his splendid assistance preparing the index. Having had the good fortune to spend fall semester  at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, I want to thank all my col- leagues there for their hospitality and fellowship. For their generous sup- port, I thank the deans of the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences at the University of Southern California, as well as my department chairs and friends, Karen Pinkus and Peter Starr. I’m especially indebted to Branka Arsic´, who from the beginning helped me to see the shape of this book and who bestowed on it the gift of her Afterword. And we are both very grateful to Kristina Pribic´evic´ Zoric´ for her remarkable translation of this text. To acknowledge debts is also to practice ingratitude. For awareness of that paradox, along with so many other things, I have two great writers to thank (or not), Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida. I acknowledge and thank all the publishers that granted permission to reprint material that appeared in earlier versions in the following publica- x Acknowledgments tions: chapter , in Nicholas Royle, ed., Deconstructions: A User’s Guide, , Palgrave, reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan; chap- ter , in Nancy Holland, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Jacques Derrida, University Park, The Pennsylvania State University Press, , pp. - , © The Pennsylvania State University, reproduced by permission of the publisher; chapter , in Tom Cohen, ed., Jacques Derrida and the Hu- manities: A Critical Reader, Cambridge University Press, , © Cam- bridge University Press, reprinted with permission; chapter , in Yale French Studies, ed. Lynne Huffer; chapter , in The Question of Litera- ture and the Place of the Literary in Contemporary Theory, ed. Elizabeth Beaumont Bissell, Manchester University Press, ; chapter , in Ange- laki: A Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, (December ), http:// www.tandf.co.uk; chapter , in Tympanum ,  (); chapter , in Paroles Gelées, ,  (), © Regents of the University of California; chapter , in John Branigan, et al., eds., Applying to Derrida, , Macmillan, reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan; chapter , in Michael Syrotinski and Ian Maclachlan, eds., Sensual Reading: New Approaches to Reading in Its Relation to the Senses, , Bucknell Univer- sity Press. Los Angeles August 