Hedgehogs: Verse-reflections after Derrida

by Christopher Norris

Hedgehogs is an extended sequence of poems and verse-essays about Jacques Derrida by a well-known philosopher, literary theorist, and commentator on his writings. Their topics range widely across the full span of Derrida's work, treated here in formal (rhyming and metrical) verse of a variously witty, ironic, reflective, discursive, and narrative character. Norris's aim is partly to provide a way into that work for readers with a chief interest in poetry and partly to offer fresh points of engagement for philosophers and literary critics, including those who have so far been resistant to it. But his object is also to explore the possibility of playing off formal verse structures against Derrida's very different, broadly symbolist-modernist idea of what poetry can and should be in the wake of practitioners like Mallarmé and Paul Celan. By so doing Norris makes a case - contra the advocates of free verse - for the exploratory-creative rather than restrictive or expression-cramping role of rhyme and meter. These serve at best as formal constraints that liberate thought into semantic, conceptual and imaginative regions beyond anything that might be envisaged by writers of straightforward expository prose, or indeed free verse. Thus they are highly suited to philosophical poetry, especially where it intersects with a mode of thought - like Derrida's - that lives very much in and through its singular resources of linguistic inventiveness. Altogether these poems make a notable contribution to the currently fast-growing field of creative criticism.

170 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2020

About the author

Christopher Norris is a British philosopher, literary critic, and scholar of deconstruction known for work on Jacques Derrida, continental philosophy, literary theory, and philosophy of science. After completing a doctorate in English at University College London, he pursued criticism and academic teaching before joining Cardiff University in 1991. He later became Distinguished Research Professor in the Cardiff School of English, Communication and Philosophy. Norris has also held visiting appointments at Berkeley, Dartmouth College, Aarhus University, and the City University of New York.