The strange embrace of dominance and opposition, of denial and return is what we witness in contemporary criticism; but Kamuf’s demanding and rewarding book teaches that that ‘scene’ is part of what has been a longer playing drama.
The strength of Signature Pieces does not lie in its illumination of any particular corpus of texts, historical period, author, or genre, but in its rigorous use of deconstructive logic to walk the tightrope between the opposed reductions of historicism and formalism.
Peggy Kamuf is Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and Professor of French and Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. She is the author of The Division of Literature, or the University in Deconstruction and To Follow: The Wake of Jacques Derrida.