‘Today This Title Seems Strange’: The Ideality of the Literary Object in Contemporary Writing

This article argues that reflection on the title of Jacques Derrida's unfinished PhD thesis, ‘The Ideality of the Literary Object’, can help re-prime, for current critique, the resonances of Derrida's reflections on literature and writing. It identifies seven planes for that undertaking, re-collecting salient texts on literature within the corpus/archive of texts by and about Derrida and reconsidering the philosophical, theoretical and literary (con)texts that would have made, and could again make, discussion of the ideality of the literary object punctually viable – were such discussion deliverable. ‘Disposition’ (individual, ideational, institutional), it emerges, is a factor in the receptivity to such discussion. The article also identifies counterpointing and revelatory writing by Maurice Blanchot, Rodolphe Gasché and Julian Barnes on the ‘strange’ issues at hand.