Content area
Full text
Jodey Castricano. Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida's Ghost Writing. Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 2001. x + 165 pp.
Castricano's study seeks to cast Derrida's work in a Gothic light and to elaborate a new kind of discourse to which she gives the name "cryptomimesis." She formulates her starting point as follows: "It is curious that in the last thirty years the living-dead, the revenant, the phantom, and the crypt-along with their effects of haunting and mourning-have been appearing with increasing frequency in the writings of Jacques Derrida; it is even more curious that this inclination has, for the most part, gone unaddressed." In a footnote she specifies: "It is important to mention that Derrida's Gothic inclinations have not been totally ignored although where the Gothic is mentioned, its name is used in the pejorative." She then refers to a single example, Geoffrey Hartman's 1981 book, Saving the Text, which proposes that Derrida turns psychoanalysis into "a modern Gothic affair." Hartman, we are told, "draws back from further development of this thought" since he wishes, as he himself puts it, "to avoid the charge...