Riding the hyphen: Derrida-Woolf

Riding the Hyphen forms a deconstructive conversation that features Derrida, Woolf, and a host of other modern and contemporary thinkers, including Martin Heidegger, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. In the first chapter, "The Religion Question: When Faith Encounters Critique," I examine the ways in which both Woolf and Derrida dissolve the dichotomy between faith and critical thought in order to arrive at a purer and more productive mode of critique. The second chapter, "Being and Sacrifice," in which I theorize and ontology of sacrifice, argues, with recourse to Heidegger, for a secularized understanding of "spirit" that maintains the play between the "spiritual" and "responsibility." This chapter ends with a discussion of Derrida's work on friendship as a prelude to my investigation of the philosophy of friendship that is at the center of Woolf's penultimate novel The Years. "Silent Guests: The Echo of the Other," my third chapter, extends the Derridian and Woolfian problematizations of friendship and introduces the concept of the "arranger," which embodies both the concept of a narrator and of a signature distinct from the author. The fourth chapter carries the arranger concept through to a discussion of Woolf and Derrida's respective philosophies of language, which is also to say their respective philosophies of being and politics. I conclude this work by arguing for the significance to our present moment of the mode of thinking these two writers enable when brought to encounter.