Difference

Reading letters of Iris Murdoch. “The structuralist scene is such a mess- clever old Derrida, stupid messy critics, each man for himself. Motives, motives.” (5 May 1985) My experience too, and note the date, her awareness of Theory’s onset, her perception of the [difference] between Derrida and the Derrideans. Contrast this with her frustrations about left-wing novelists of the thirties, caught between “an indeterminate cloudy notion of Something or Other” and “political Apocalypse stuff”: “James Joyce used always to ask of some new writer ‘Is he trying to express something he has understood?’” (16 August 1942) Clever old James Joyce.