Restarting The Prelude

In his 1979 essay ‘Living On’, amidst a reading of Blanchot’s ‘The Madness of the Day’, Jacques Derrida proposes that one replaces ‘the question of narrative’ – ‘What is a narrative [r ecit]?’ – with what he calls ‘the demand of narrative’. At stake in such a gesture is the nature of the narrative object itself. Before one could ask after the being of narrative, Derrida here implies, one would have to approach the force, or insistence, of narrative. In other words, before there could be any engagement with the narrative thing, as a form of presence, one would have to consider the exigence of narrative (r ecit), which conditions, but also exceeds, the given surface of the woven text. Narrative – or r ecit – in short, pre-empts every merely frontal interrogation of it. And it is for this reason that it demands that one address first of all its demand: