Deconstructionist philosopher on the European modernist master
Excerpted from Jacques Derrida, 'Two Words for Joyce' in
Post-Structuralist Joyce (ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer):
'Here the event is of such plot and scope that henceforth you have only one way out: being in memory of him. You're not only overcome by him, whether you know it or not, but obliged by him, and constrained to measure yourself against this overcoming. Being in memory of him: not necessarily to remember him, no, but to be in his memory, to inhabit his memory, which is henceforth greater than all your finite memory can, in a single instant or in a single vocable, gather up of cultures, languages, mythologies, religions, philosophies, sciences, history of mind and of literatures.'
