A Cross in the Margin]: Inscription and Erasure in Jacques Derrida and Ezra Pound (original) (raw)

Understanding Derrida, Understanding Modernism, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 157-177

Given Ezra Pound’s sustained interest in languages, translation, and systems of inscription, as well as his formidable literary archive, it seems odd at first glance that Derrida should show relatively little direct interest in a poet whose shadow still looms over modern and contemporary poetry in English––not to mention poetry in Italian, French, Chinese and Japanese. Pound’s lifelong fascination with Neoplatonism exposed him to negative theology, and his experiments with the Chinese language and systems of inscription in his epic poem, The Cantos, marks out his poetics as one of sustained meditation on the nature of the sign and the latencies of signification. One might consider Pound’s aesthetics, his philosophical outlook, and even his politics, and think of a number of Derrida’s more well-known works as candidates for direct dialogue: Of Grammatology for “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium of Poetry”; Archive Fever for Pound’s own immense, porous archive; Acts of Literature for The Cantos; and so on. Derrida famously professed an aversion to writing on Samuel Beckett by virtue of what he saw as an inhibiting intellectual proximity. Derrida and Pound seem to be in little danger of any similar problem, and the paucity of direct engagement might be seen to confirm a sense of indifference. The following discussion will argue that Pound and Derrida share important intellectual terrain despite the divergences in their attitudes, aesthetics, and modes of thought. By necessity it will be selective rather than exhaustive, taking the themes of signification, archives, and negative theology as points of orientation.