Someone Called Derrida

Someone called Jacques Derrida, someone called him on the phone, someone who was dead — this was August 22nd 1979. A mystery, he thought; but it is a mystery that began more than ten years earlier, in 1968, when Derrida, a philosopher, visits Oxford and there, before the very eyes of the Philosophy Sub-Faculty, he dies, several times. Murder, he thought. And so I shall investigate, and begin with a sign that the philosopher says he left within a book from the thirteenth century, a strange fortune-telling book that he had found in the oldest part of Oxford’s Bodleian Library. In the book are a host of cryptic questions, but the philosopher directs us to one in particular, a peculiar question about a boy, and the question is this: Does the boy live? The philosopher will not, though, give the answer; he requires, instead, that we go to Oxford to open the book for ourselves.

Author Biography

John Schad is Professor of Modern Literature at Loughborough University. He is author of Queer Fish: Christian Unreason from Darwin to Derrida, Victorians In Theory and The Reader in the Dickensian Mirrors; editor of Writing the Bodies of Christ, Thomas Hardy’s A Laodicean and Dickens Refigured; and co-editor of life.after.theory. Professor Schad is currently writing an experimental book called Derrida via Oxford: Barely a Life.