Chronicle of Separation ─ On Deconstruction's Disillusioned Love

"The book Chronicle of Separation is an attempt to write on Derrida, to Derrida and from Derrida on the basis of a pathetic experience, which, in various ways, describes and enacts the pathetic experience of deconstruction itself. The book tackles the weight of emotions that is at the heart of deconstructive reading, treating deconstruction's weak, fragile and parasitic mode of thinking as a deconstruction of emotion, on emotion and as emotion. Chronicle of Separation examines these themes beginning with a descriptive and an analytic reading of Derrida's Memoirs: For Paul de Man and The Post Card, as embodiments of deconstruction's melancholic friendship which inscribes its disillusioned love in what it calls the 'postal condition'. The book then moves on to a feminization of Derrida, experimenting in different modes of writing. It firstly discusses Fred Zinneman's film Julia about a mournful friendship between women. Then it performs a deconstructive meditation on the anorexic person suggesting that anorexia constitutes a paradoxical embodiment of deconstruction. The concluding chapter presents a complete incorporation of Derrida into a fictional text that re-writes the biblical Book of Ruth"--

MICHAL BEN-NAFTALI is a writer and a translator who lectures at Tel Aviv University. Her other books includeThe Visitation of Hannah Arendt, Childhood, a Book-a Novella, On Retreat: Four Essays, and Spirit. Her translations into Hebrew include works by Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Andre Breton, and Maurice Blanchot.

MIRJAM HADAR is an editor and translator who lives in Tel Aviv.

AVITAL RONELL is University Professor of the Humanities and a professor of German, English, and Comparative Literature at New York University. Her most recent book isLoser Sons: Politics and Authority.