Minding the gap: Mourning in the work of murdoch and derrida

Abstract

There is much common ground between Jacques Derrida’s late work, specifically his ‘mourning texts’ as collected in The Work of Mourning (2001) and Iris Murdoch’s late novels (of the 1970s onwards), particularly The Philosopher’s Pupil and Jackson’s Dilemma. Murdoch does not recognize this connection in her treatise Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992), despite having read Derrida’s Glas (1974) and Psyche (1987), both of which begin to discuss mourning.4 In this volume Tony Milligan suggests that Murdoch’s criticism of Derrida ‘directs our attention away from the possibility of using Derrida to win new insights into Murdoch’s novels’ and she would certainly have rejected any attempt to read her novels in the light of Derrida and deconstruction. However, making mourning the focus of critical inquiry reveals that Murdoch’s portrayal of loss in her novels relies upon the gaps, absences and iteration which are central to deconstruction and to Derrida’s engagement with mourning in his late work. If, as seems likely, Murdoch uses these deconstructionist techniques unknowingly to represent the truth of the experience of mourning, her demonization of Derrida in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals is also brought into question.