Book-Love and the Remaking of Literary Culture in the Romantic Periodical

Abstract

Musing on ‘The Book to Come’ in a 1997 lecture at the Bibliothèque nationale, Jacques Derrida declared, ‘I’m in love with the book, in my own way and forever’. But what is it one loves when in love with ‘the book’? Derrida himself (deconstructively enough) does not quite know: ‘The word book is as difficult to define as the question of the book, at least if the wish is to grant it a sharp specificity, and to cut it out in its irreducibility, at the point where it resists so many neighboring, connected, and even inseparable questions’¹ Such a pure cutting out of the book is of course impossible — Derrida’s own subsequent definition of book’s essence as ‘the idea of gathering together’ overlays book and archive — but the point is to foreground the displacement whereby ‘book’ characteristically functions in critical discourse as a sign pointing to contiguous, more conceptual signs such as ‘writing’, ‘print’ or ‘the work’, which then absorb the book. Literary history has long enacted such a conflation, even literary history of a more bookish cast, typically dissolving books into ‘literature’ on the one hand and into ‘reading’ on the other (reading itself being understood primarily in terms of imaginative genres). To love books, however, is not necessarily to love either literature or reading, as witness those book-collectors who notoriously never open the books to which they are devoted.²