Viscounts Swapping Stories

Michael Wood

• The Work of Mourning by Jacques Derrida, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault
  Chicago, 272 pp, £16.00, July 2001, ISBN 0 226 14316 3
• A Taste for the Secret by Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, translated by Giacomo Donis
  Polity, 161 pp, £13.99, May 2001, ISBN 0 7456 2334 4

In 1995, Derrida wrote of Lyotard and himself as the last survivors of a generation, although he also worried about ‘that terrible and somewhat misleading word’. The word is terrible, presumably, because it conceals death in its very announcement of life: ‘those dying generations’, Yeats wrote, but then all generations die, that’s what they do. And it is misleading because it bundles together very different people at the behest of a clock or a calendar. But we do live in particular times and are formed by them, and times change. Derrida insists on the desirability of listening to ‘our time’, and adds: ‘for we had no other’. That, no doubt, is the reason he doesn’t refuse the notion of a generation, and The Work of Mourning, although the pieces in it arose according to the random rhythms of other people’s deaths, is the story of one of those changes of time, and also an epitaph for a generation of writers and thinkers in France. The group Derrida has in mind includes Barthes (born 1915), Althusser (born 1918), Deleuze (born 1925) and Foucault (born 1926). Three years later Lyotard (born 1924) is also dead, and Derrida (born 1930) identifies himself now as ‘the last born, and, no doubt, the most melancholic of the group’.