New Literary History

Derrida was very attentive to the fictions that arise from claiming to open or to close a world, most notably in his readings of Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and Nancy. At the same time, he retained a concept—or a difference­­—of world. From his earliest work on Husserl, Derrida relies on a framework that takes its vantage point from what is not only in the world but also of the world, or as Fink puts, at the origin of the world. Derrida uses the difference of world—its origin and end—to register the other as other. In his later work, on an individual death as the end of the world, the difference of world delineates death as other. Like Husserl and Heidegger before him, Derrida needs a concept of world. Do we still need a concept of world?