Geopoetics: The Politics of Mimesis in Poststructuralist French Poetry and Theory (review)

Brandt, Joan. Geopoetics: The Politics of Mimesis in Poststructuralist French Poetry and Theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Pp. 344.

In concluding Geopoetics: The Politics of Mimesis in Poststructuralist French Poetry and Theory, Joan Brandt speaks of the “spirit of hospitality” (251), conjured by Jacques Derrida and Edmond Jabès. Brandt is referring to Derrida’s quasi-concept of the “New International” explored in Specters of Marx and Jabès’s thinking on a “Jewish community of limits.” While Jabès has gone relatively unremarked, except among French scholars in the Anglo-American academy, Derrida’s suggestive figure can hardly be said to have met with anything resembling a “spirit of hospitality” on the part of the Left in the English-speaking world, since the publication of Specters of Marx in 1994. [End Page 136]