Taking a Risk: Wound-Readers: Derrida and Frankenstein’s Monster

Abstract

I would like to discuss a late essay by Jacques Derrida, in which Derrida ventures into the hermeneutic tradition...to read a poem by Paul Celan. In this essay ["Rams"], published in 2003, it is interesting to see how perhaps the greatest philosophical enemy of the hermeneutic tradition and interpretation textually invites Hans-Georg Gadamer...to form part of his “reading expedition.” Derrida simultaneously invites and rejects the hermeneutic tradition into his work, in the configuration of what remains a very rare text in his corpus of work... As the bad, or counter, example of reading against interpretation I take the Monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The monster reads various texts in his hovel (Goethe, Milton, Plutarch) and he is incapable of distancing himself from the characters in the books he reads. I argue that it is this lack of interpretation that enacts the violence of the text. The monster is also the metaphor of a big wound patched together.