Hedgehogs

Hedgehogs is an extended sequence of poems and verse-essays about Jacques Derrida by a well-known philosopher, literary theorist, and commentator on his writings. Their topics range widely across the full span of Derrida’s work, treated here in formal (rhyming and metrical) verse of a variously witty, ironic, reflective, discursive, and narrative character. Norris’s aim is partly to provide a way into that work for readers with a chief interest in poetry and partly to offer fresh points of engagement for philosophers and literary critics, including those who have so far been resistant to it. Beyond that, his object is also to explore the possibility of playing off formal verse structures against Derrida’s very different, broadly symbolist-modernist idea of what poetry can and should be in the wake of practitioners like Mallarmé and Paul Celan.