ABSTRACT
Freud calls it cryptonesia, an aberration of memory in writing.4 My own case fi rst manifested itself in a review of the English translation of Politiques de l’amitié in the journal Textual Practice.5 Despite clearly stating on the front cover, back cover, inside leafs (twice) and in the header at the top of every left-hand page (one hundred and fi fty-four times in fact) that George Collins’s translation of Derrida’s book had the published title Politics of Friendship, I repeatedly referred to the text in my review as The
Politics of Friendship. I was even bold enough to suggest that ‘the politics of friendship’ could be read as a synonym for ‘the politics of deconstruction’. This is at once a spectacular case of misreading and, as a symptom of cryptonesia, an expression of a desire. This desire-that deconstruction should in some way inform ‘practical’ politics-is not unique to my review6 nor is it necessarily an example of youthful naivety, even if it will now require some qualifi cation. Given the due distinction between something like politiques de l’amitié and ‘the politics of friendship’ (a syntactical shift which places the emphasis on the grammatical possibilities of the relation rather than on the logocentrism of the foregrounded noun ‘politics’), I still hold by the majority of that review and the proposition that the book might be read as exemplary of ‘politics of deconstruction’.
