Passion of the Proper Name

In a collection of papers that are gathered under the name ‘Derrida’ we may take it as given that we know what is at stake, that from text to text one is engaged across the deployment of certain Derridean philosophemes, concepts, archives, positions, that would return us to a signature and the contexts of the events of its signing. And this would be, perhaps, more so in a commemorative volume or memoralising volume that is to mark a certain finality to the signature. Yet this very question of the ‘living on’ of the name, of a work or task of gathering and of a disseminating force of erasure has itself been a stuttering or haunting of the texts we name Derridean. This article approaches in a partial way a complex engagement by Derrida on that movement of a name from its ‘nature’ as familial bond to its becoming concept. Glas (1990) is a text, arranged in two (at least) parallel columns, one engaging GWF Hegel and the other Jean Genet. This article aims to ask, particularly in the contexts of Derrida’s reading of Hegel, what is filiation such that we might have even commenced with writing on or with or for Derrida, such that this name becomes an horizonal disclosure for …, such that we might say we have learnt something here, or even that we might have begun to call ourselves, perhaps, Derridean.