by Laura Hughes
Northwestern University Press, 2024
Paper: 978-0-8101-4627-3 | Cloth: 978-0-8101-4628-0 | eISBN: 978-0-8101-4629-7
Library of Congress Classification PQ2663.I9Z745 2023
Dewey Decimal Classification 848.91409

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK

A capacious analysis of a legendary intellectual friendship and the material legacies it left behind

Over the course of their decades-long friendship, Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida assembled overlapping archives of written experiments and exchanges that document a shared interest in their literary afterlives. In this incisive account, Laura Hughes shows how pushing against the limits of writing and of life itself means not only imagining but manifesting a community of future readers.

Archival Afterlives: Cixous, Derrida, and the Matter of Friendship examines the embodied nature of literary creation, taking letters, fragments, notes, and other ephemera as objects of critical analysis and care. Combining close readings of key texts and previously unexamined archival materials, Hughes traces critical connections between Cixous and Derrida, between the theoretical and the autobiographical, and between life writing and its limits. In putting deconstruction into dialogue with new material analyses and archive studies, Archival Afterlives positions this historical and intellectual relationship as a lens through which to reexamine the legacy of critical theory itself.


See other books on: Critics | Derrida, Jacques | Friends and associates | Friendship | Matter
See other titles from Northwestern University Press