The Law of Genre*

Abstract

As a focal point of structuralist endeavours to create a ‘science of literature’, the concept of genre was an obvious target for decon-struction. In this intricately argued essay, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida duly performs such an analysis, dramatising - in order to subvert - the authoritarian undertones that attach to traditional critical discourse about genre, whilst simultaneously parodying modern structuralism’s quest for the ‘laws’ of literature. Originally delivered as a lecture at an international symposium on genre at the University of Strasbourg in 1979 (contributions to which were published, together with translations, in a special issue of the journal Glyph), the discussion falls into two parts. The first examines the logical status of genre classifications, and the nature of ‘genericity’: that is, the means by which texts belong to, and inscribe themselves within, a genre or genres. Genre logic, Derrida argues, is contradictory, and the ‘law of genre’ self-defeating, not only because individual texts frequently elude classification, but also because the textual signals which indicate membership of a genre cannot themselves be part of that genre. To illustrate these claims, the second part of the essay (not included here) offers a detailed reading of Maurice Blanchot’s La Folie du jour (The Madness of the Day), a text which selfconsciously enacts the problematic which Derrida’s essay addresses, and in so doing invalidates, according to Derrida, the assumptions on which even the most advanced genre theory rests.