Eftichis Pirovolakis - Reading Derrida and Ricoeur: Improbable Encounters Between Deconstruction and Hermeneutics

In the course of writing this book, I have been indebted to the support and friendship of many people. I would like to thank Laura Marcus and Vicky Margree for their help and vital advice; Sean Gaston for his friendship and numerous thought-provoking conversations on Derrida and Ricoeur; the anonymous readers for State University of New York Press for their encouraging and constructive comments; and the series editor Charles Shepherdson and James Peltz for helping the finished manuscript through its last stages.

I would also like to express my gratitude to Joanna Hodge and Nick Royle for examining my Sussex doctoral thesis on which this book is based, for kindly making available to me some of their unpublished papers and for their very positive contributions towards the completion of this project. I am especially grateful to Cline Surprenant for her vital supervisory role during the later stages of the research, and for her generosity in reading very closely and offering incisive criticism and invaluable advice on the original manuscript. I am also greatly indebted to Geoff Bennington for the range of knowledge he has brought to my work, for helping me clarify my arguments at certain important points during the early stages of this project and, most of all, for continuous inspiration and encouragement since 1993. Very special and singular thanks are due to Vassiliki Dimitropoulou for her patience, understanding, and overall support.

Finally, I would like to record my gratitude to the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation for its financial assistance between 2001 and 2004, and to Marguerite Derrida and ditions de L'Herne for kindly authorizing the translation into English of Jacques Derrida's La parole: Donner, nommer, apeller, which appears here as an appendix. Some of the arguments on Ricoeur's narrative theory in the second section of have been anticipated in my Donner Lire: Unreadable Narratives, Literature Interpretation Theory 19, no. 2 (2008): 100122.