Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida's Ghost WritingIn the last thirty years the living-dead, the revenant, the phantom, and the crypt have appeared with increasing frequency in Jacques Derrida's writings and, for the most part, have gone unaddressed. In Cryptomimesis Jodey Castricano examines the intersection between Derrida's writing and the Gothic to theorize what she calls Derrida's "poetics of the crypt." She develops the theory of cryptomimesis, a term devised to accommodate the convergence of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and certain "Gothic" stylistic, formal, and thematic patterns and motifs in Derrida's work that give rise to questions regarding writing, reading, and interpretation. Using Edgar Allan Poe's Madeline and Roderick Usher, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Stephen King's Louis Creed, she illuminates Derrida's concerns with inheritance, revenance, and haunting and reflects on deconstruction as ghost writing. Castricano demonstrates that Derrida's Specters of Marx owes much to the Gothic insistence on the power of haunting and explores how deconstruction can be thought of as the ghost or deferred promise of Marxism. She traces the movement of the "phantom" throughout Derrida's other texts, arguing that such writing provides us with an uneasy model of subjectivity because it suggests that "to be" is to be haunted. Castricano claims that cryptomimesis is the model, method, and theory behind Derrida's insistence that to learn to live we must learn how to talk "with" ghosts. |
Contents
Cryptomimesis or the Return of the LivingDead | 31 |
The Question of the Tomb | 83 |
An Art of Chicanery | 109 |
No Fixed Address | 131 |
Bibliography | 153 |
Other editions - View all
Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida's Ghost Writing Carla Jodey Castricano Limited preview - 2001 |
Common terms and phrases
Abraham and Torok aesthetics Applied Grammatology assertion border context crypt cryptic cryptomimesis dead death deconstruction Derrida calls Derrida refers Derrida says Derrida's remarks Derrida's writing displacement door draws attention dream effect encrypted Envois evokes fantasy of incorporation fiction Freud function ghost Glas Gothic Gothic fiction Gothic novel Grammatology grave Gregory Ulmer haunting hauntology Heidegger House of Usher implies inheritance inside introjection Jacques Jacques Derrida Kamuf King's novel Kristeva language living living-dead Louis Creed Madeline Usher Maria Torok Mark Wigley Marxism meaning mourning Nicolas Abraham notion object Peggy Kamuf Pet Sematary phantom Poe's story poetic popular culture predicated proper name psychoanalysis question reader reading recall revenant Riddel Roderick Usher Roundtable on Autobiography says Derrida secret sense signifier Slavoj Žižek space speak Specters of Marx spectral spirit Stephen King's Stirner structure textual thing thinking thought tion tomb Translated uncanny unconscious unspeakable vampire writing practice Žižek