An unfinished review

Here are the beginnings of a review I'm working on, concerning Psyche and The Animal That Therefore I Am in their recent English translation. I include it as it is because what is said here might be a little helpful to someone--who knows?

With the English publication of the entirety of Derrida’s Psyche: Inventions of the Other in August of last year and March of this one, along with The Animal That Therefore I Am in June, we confronted on the one hand with two works that are assembled out of material that has been translated and published in parts before, but which has not appeared in full; while, on the other, we are confronted with two ways this assemblage goes about. Psyche is made up of essays and so seems more amenable to being published in parts and then appearing in full, though it raises questions when this publication occurs about the coherence of any such volume of essays. The Animal That Therefore I Am was published in part in English (in 2002, in Critical Inquiry), but was an excerpt, not an essay: the book has the function of restoring the whole of what was missing to English readers. In short, we are confronted with a question: is Derrida a writer of books or essays? Of long addresses, lectures and seminars (such as the nine-hour one at the Cerisy conference on “The Autobiographical Animal” which makes up The Animal That Therefore I Am—or of long tomes that meditate along silent paths of thought?
This either/or is troubled by no one more than Derrida, of course, who—as Marie-Louise Mallet, coordinator of the 1997 Cerisy conference, emphasizes in her forward to The Animal That Therefore I Am—most always wrote out what he said “perfectly and in toto.” And of course there is what he wrote or said about regarding writing and speech, so long ago and consistently throughout this life. But what is so interesting about these three major books hitting our bookstores within such a short span of time—and which I would like to stay with here—is this more surface-level phenomenon: that we are still having trouble finding a way to regard the immensity of what Derrida did as a book, as a work, whether as a labor (something closer to speech) or as a series of texts, an oeuvre (something closer to writing). And the timing of the English appearance of these texts could not make this more palpably felt: Peggy Kamuf’s photo of Derrida meandering along the Brooklyn Promenade on both volumes of Psyche reminds us that with his death, we have now more responsibility than ever to engage with Derrida’s impact on the English speaking world—and particularly on America, where he taught and thought so often—which still wanders about and still leaves its tracks all over the place.
Psyche brings this to the fore in the thought that all these texts are pursuing their respective objects roughly as a whole—and brings it to the fore precisely as a problem for the student or professor of literature, who had so much to do with this American impact of Derrida: the concerns of the essays in these volumes run from politics to music to architecture to philosophy—and literature itself is not touched on very much. In short, Psyche as a book poses an immense challenge to us involved with literature, one that is not as able to be taken up by lumping it together with the “ethical” thought of the “late” Derrida, as we have been doing for the past decade or so and following his death...