Someone Called Derrida

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.

"John Schad deftly splices stories inherited from his two fathers, the real one from Oxford, a minister of religion who may have witnessed Satanic rituals as a boy, and the symbolic father coming from across the Channel who invented deconstruction. All the secrets and traumas of recent history return in this non-linear chronicle that throws new light on the divide between analytic philosophy and continental philosophy. This generates endless narratives in which verve, erudition and suspense appear laced with wry Freudian Schadenfreude. Should we laugh when philosophy discloses old skeletons in its libraries, or just follow odd couples like Derrida and Gilbert Ryle, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Paul de Man, Elijah and Aleister Crowley since they seem to hold the key to the murder mystery? Or, should we attend to one single question: can I die of a death that is not mine?" -- Jean-Michel Rabate, Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania.

• 'Si puer vivet'; A Sleep of Prisoners; XX; Silences; Freiburg; Esther; "They Weren't Really You Know"; The House; Stolen Evening; High Places; Fast Cars; Secret Marriage; Hastings; Sacrifice; Elijah; Index.