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

As of 2007 he is Distinguished Research Professor in Philosophy at Cardiff University. He completed his PhD in English at University College London in 1975, while Sir Frank Kermode served as the Lord Northcliffe Professor of modern English literature there.

Until 1991 Norris taught in the Cardiff English Department. He has also held fellowships and visiting appointments at a number of institutions, including the University of California, Berkeley, the City University of New York and Dartmouth College.

He is one of the world's leading scholars on deconstruction, particularly in the work of Jacques Derrida. He has written numerous books and papers on literary theory and continental philosophy. Norris is now considered a philosopher in his own right: 2003's Life After Theory reference required featured an interview with Norris, placing him alongside Derrida as a significant contemporary.