The Law of Genre by Jacques Derrida Translated by Avital Ronell

ON NARRATIVE

Excerpt from "The Law of Genre" by Jacques Derrida*
Translated by Avital Ronell

The law is mad. The law is mad, is madness; but madness is not the predicate of law. There is no madness without the law; madness cannot be conceived before its relation to law. Madness is law, the law is madness. There is a general trait here: the madness of law mad for me, the silhouette of my daughter mad about me, her mother, etc. But La Folie du jour, An (accountless) Account?, carrying and miscarrying its titles, is not at all exemplary of this general trait. Not at all, not wholly. This is not an example of a general or generic whole. The whole, which begins by finishing and never finishes beginning apart from itself, the whole that stays at the edgeless boundary of itself, the whole greater and less than a whole and nothing, An Account? will not have been exemplary. Rather, with regard to the whole, it will have been wholly counter-exemplary.

The genre has always in all genres been able to play the role of order's principle: resemblance, analogy, identity and difference, taxonomic classification, organization and genealogical tree, order of reason, order of reasons, sense of sense, truth of truth, natural light and sense of history. Now, the test of An Account? brought to light the madness of genre. Madness has given birth to and thrown light on the genre in the most dazzling, most blinding sense of the word. And in the writing of An Account?, in literature, satrically practicing all genres, imbiding them but never allowing herself to be saturated with a catalog of genres, she, madness, has started spinning Peterson's genre-disc like a demented sun. And she does not only do so in literature, for in concealing the boundaries that sunder mode and genre, she has also inundated and divided the borders between literature and its others.

Jacques Derrida is professor of history of philosophy at L'Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. His greatly influential works include Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology, Spurs: Of Nietzsche's Styles, Positions, and Dissemination. Avital Ronell teaches German at the University of Virginia and is the author of Poetics of Desire and Principles of Textuality in Kafka's "Das Schloss."