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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida's Ghost Writing

Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida's Ghost Writing

Castricano, Jodey

Paperback

PhilosophyLiterary CriticismGeneral Sociology

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ISBN10: 0773522794
ISBN13: 9780773522794
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: Feb 25 2003
Pages: 176
Weight: 0.60
Height: 0.49 Width: 6.12 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

In 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.

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