ContamiNation: Patrick McCabe and Colm Tóibín’s Pathographies of the Republic

Abstract

At the close of his celebrated essay, ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, Jacques Derrida imagines, in all its monstrosity, a ‘birth […] in the offing’¹. Derrida has in mind a coming episteme in which the structurality of structure comes to be most fully thought, a period in which the reassuring structures of belief and of thought are placed under laborious interrogation. Derrida’s metaphor can be borrowed and adapted for other anticipated births, such as the renaissance of new nationhood, or of imagined post-nationhood. Derrida leaves us on the threshold of change, with existing structures prone to excavation or deconstruction in much the same way as the texts that I consider in this essay leave off at a moment of traumatic cultural change, and at a point where any certainties held out by the past are rapidly dissolving.