...sure, instability of "romanticism"--as a fickle catachresis for something that cannot quite be named and so is interminably involved in the process of being named--did not originate with Derrida's unique intervention in the humanities, but its active afterlife in the academic postmodern was ensured and made more productively convoluted because of it. In ways small and large Derrida demonstrated an uncommon generosity towards colleagues in the field, and this would include the unasked for gift of his thought, yet he happened not to make romanticism a thematic focus of his work, at least not one that he described as such. Several contributors to this volume make this point, but each exemplifies what it nevertheless means to write in the midst of a still unfolding inheritance while at the same time making the obscurities and challenges of that inheritance a part and indeed an important part of his or her work. As Derrida argued, the work on mourning and the work of mourning are always intertwined in consequential, troublesome, and responsibilizing ways that make being a legatee and a survivor both impossible and unavoidable. The futurity of the future of thinking and of making an intervention in a field of thought rests on our negotiations with the past (including a rigorous critique of the claims made in the name of the pastness of the past, and of the periodization that appears to ensure its difference from the present), whose already-thereness and thus eternal return makes it feel not like a distant memory, like "one of those speculative statements of a German Idealism that we would today study through the mists like some great philosophical archive," (1) as Derrida says ironically of Friedrich Schelling (in an essay to which we will have recourse in a moment), but something much more pressing and urgent, like what is coming or what is to come--yet another lesson that he taught romanticism and that romanticism in turn continues to teach us. The seemingly one-sided conversation that obtains between "Derrida" and "romanticism" thus stages and anticipates the opaque operation of the legacy it describes, for, to switch metaphors from a vocal to a visual register, in the wake of the philosopher's oeuvre, whose outer edges no longer seem discernible, romanticists seem almost to fall under the gaze of a gracious and beneficent master whose eyes they cannot meet, and whose mastery is anything but a sure thing. In Specters of Marx, his most sustained exploration of the vicissitudes of inheritance, Derrida called this enabling and imposing asymmetry "the visor effect"--a phenomenon that is vividly captured by Antony Gormley's steely and implacable sculpture, different images of which grace the front covers of this special double issue of Studies in Romanticism.

With the memorable exception of "Living On," an essay written not so much about but on the unending occasion of P. B. Shelley's Triumph of Life, Derrida had relatively little to say about romanticism as such. But thinkers working on the archives, histories, and conceptualities written in its name have had many different things and a great deal to say about Derrida: sometimes directly or discreetly or inadvertently, sometimes indirectly in the shape of negotiating with what is called "theory," sometimes in the form of a kind of commerce (without commerce) with troublesome ghosts ("de Man" and "history" are scholarly apparitions that come quickly to mind), sometimes with boundless curiosity or thoughtful hospitality, and sometimes inhospitably in the mode of repelling an unbidden specter. (On this latter point, it's worth recalling that it is Den-ida who argues towards the end of his life that hospitality and inhospitality share a relationship much finer than one of contrast.) As romanticists with an allergy to "theory" have by now discovered, the problem is not punctually having done with Derrida, as unlikely as the success of that disavowal might seem; it is rather with the more interminable difficulty of having done with having done with him, and with all that he represents or is imagined to personify about knowledge, reading, criticism, politics, history, ethics, and literature-among many other pertinent questions quickening humanities research and teaching broadly conceived--but vexing in especially productive ways for romanticism and romanticists alike. Whatever its particular motivations or valences, the ongoing and seemingly unavoidable work with and in the midst of the irrepressible otherness of Derrida's intellectual inheritance shows no signs of abating, even if its modalities continue to change and multiply. After Derrida, indeed, le deluge. The diverse critical rhetorics and thematic loci, the often very distinct ways in which the essays gathered here take up the question of Derrida's legacies for romanticism, the idiomatic and dissimilar signals with which the contributors identify themselves as fellow travelers, attest to this fact, and remind us that one of the reasons for the open-ended nature of the project at hand is that both Derrida and romanticism are peculiarly preoccupied with the problem of life, death, and living-on, as well as the work of mourning and the irreducible remainder, not to mention a host of other matters falling under the enigmatic aegis of "legacies." What remains constant is that Derrida's thought remains meaningful to these essayists, not only in spite but also because of the disappointing valedictions forbidding mourning that have haunted discussions of his presence in the university--and well beyond-since his untimely death in the autumn of 2004. (2)

I think that it would be fair to say that no disciplinary formation in the academy has responded more forcefully, complicatedly, or eventfully to Derrida's interventions than romantic studies. Starting more or less in the 1970's, romanticism became the hinterland where North American literary studies in particular demonstrated a prescient cordiality towards what would come to be called theory, welcoming--although not without some trepidation--its embodiment in the strange and changeful shapes of Derrida and Paul de Man. As the generational mix of the scholars collected here attests, it is welcoming it still, especially if we understand hospitality as Derrida came to characterize it--as a gesture that combines complex immunizing and indemnifying impulses with those of amity and receptivity. What makes the situation even more difficult to parse is the ways in which the relationship between Derrida and romanticism can be restaged as one between phantasms of "Derrida" and "de Man," a pairing that was at once activated and complicated by the colloquy that the two figures actually did conduct about, among many other things, the importance of Rousseau. That this conversation continued long after his friend's death and after the debacle of the "wartime writings" suggests the degree to which Derrida remained alive not only to de Man's unimpaired significance in the humanities but also, more generally, to the ongoing role that a theoretically inflected romanticism--here figured by "de Man"--might well continue to play in its future. Keeping faith with de Man (and here we might recall that for Derrida nothing is more imperilled, agonistic, or undetermined than faith), Derrida in effect models and calls for a hospitality to romanticism, or to a certain romanticism, an endeavor dedicated not to the certainty of cognition but to the risks of reading, and to the open-ended and improvisational labor of what Kant would call "reflective judgment."

Moreover, the very title of Derrida's last substantial essay on the subject--"Typewriter Ribbon"--reminds us that legacies are over-written by anonymous and indelible forces that are machine-like in their indifference to the pathos and drama of the realm of scholarly "personalities," the realm to which de Man's influence had often been safely if mistakenly consigned. (3) Yet why Derrida and de Man, much less the thought-formation which brought the two bodies of thought into a partly imaginary entente (ironically celebrated in a 1990 painting by Mark Tansey, Derrida Queries de Man), came to have the impact that they did on academic romanticism remains a question very much still to be asked, much less answered, although several essays collected in this forum offer up promising signs of what that time-to-come and that history could look like. Part of the difficulty of this future work stems from the fact that we have yet to take the measure of either Derrida's legacies or romanticism's (these efforts are of course interminable), making the prospect of thinking the two inheritances together, at once indissociable and heterogeneous, as daunting as it is necessary--like any inheritance worthy of the name. At the very least, we could claim that beginning with the English translation of the Grammatology in the mid 1970s, and probably for some time before, and then in the wake of the proliferating questions and problems that were subsequently signed by his name, romanticism was irrevocably changed by Derrida's presence. But he gave romanticists a new critical language with which to pose questions that they had in many respects already asked themselves, often in deconstructive registers predating the advent of what would come to be named, for better or for worse, "post-structuralism." Derrida's legacy for romanticism was thus in some sense felt in anticipation of itself, this, in a way that might...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



More articles from Studies in Romanticism
Derrida's ghosts: the state of our debt.(Jacques Derrida)(Essay), June 22, 2007
Aesthetics, theory, and the profession of literature: Derrida and Roma..., June 22, 2007
The rhetoric of survival and the possibility of romanticism.(Essay), June 22, 2007

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