Secomb, Linnell. Review of Joanna Hodge's DERRIDA ON TIME. NDPR (January 2009).

Hodge, Joanna. Derrida on Time. London: Routledge, 2007. Delving into the nuances and gradations of conceptual constructions while also recalling the far horizons of philosophical reflections -- from Aristotle to Derrida and friends -- Derrida and Time moves between intricate detailed readings and expansive historical overview. The text invokes the mutual readings that Hodge also identifies as the friendship of 'Blanchot, Levinas, [and] Derrida and their continuing points of reference: Aristotle, Augustine, Nietzsche; Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger' (92) not to mention Kant, Freud, Nancy, Marion, among many others. While explicating the transformations articulated across and between these various textual engagements, Hodge traces these theorists' reflections on temporality and time. This book demands an oscillating reading that returns back and forth between chapters, paragraphs, concepts, and phrases creating a disrupted and repeated engagement. There is a clearly discernable trajectory but there is also a looping return such that later insights recall, re-signify and rearticulate earlier observations. This returning is not a restating but a retrospective materializing of that which had already emerged: what the reader might have overlooked earlier attains a new significance in the context of later explications. This encourages or demands a non-linear reading so that later sections invite, even require, a revisiting of the earlier. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14985.