Of “Spirit”

Abstract

Outlining Jacques Derrida’s discussion in Of Spirit of Martin Heidegger’s Geist, Coughlan comments on the ways in which Derrida’s understanding of spirit does and does not relate to the novelist Marilynne Robinson’s. Coughlan suggests that Derrida’s opening line, “I shall speak of ghost, of flame, and of ashes,” is a line that applies also to Robinson’s first novel Housekeeping, but he argues that Derrida’s spirit is always spectral whereas Robinson’s spirit survives the ghost. Robinson, therefore, would write of the spirit where Derrida believes we are always writing “spirit.”