You know better than I the disquiet regarding familial legitimation; it is this which makes Ulysses, as well as Finnegans Wake, vibrate.

The edition I enjoyed only contained the first essay and not the Two Words in Joyce. That said, it was sustained delight. The essay is based on a lecture that Derrida delivered to a Joyce Symposium in Frankfort in 1984. Almost immediately Derrida notes his trepidation at being involved, in addressing, a group of Joyce scholars.

When you call on incompetents, like me, or on allegedly external competences, knowing full well that these do not exist, is it not both to humiliate them, and because you expect from these guests not only news, good news come at last to deliver you from the hypermnesic interiority n which you go round in circles like hallucinations in a nightmare, but also paradoxically, a legitimacy?

What follows is a series of anecdotes and subsequent explorations of the word Yes in Ulysses. I have had my own affirmations while reading such. I successfully maintained a month long boycott of pizza in June. As it was now July I went yesterday afternoon to purchase a carry-out monster from a local artisan shop. I went up to the counter and placed my order and turned to sit and read ata windowside table. I was started with a greeting from the darkened corner of the restaurant. It is in a strip mall, so how could there be this Dickensian shadow? I saw a man, slightly younger than myself wearing sunglasses seated with a bucket of empty beer bottles in front of him. The man was obviously eager to talk. He noted that the Fourth was likely ruined by the rain. I thought, well, I didn't have to work today and I'm reading, well - was reading Derrida at a time when I would be heading home, no doubt knackered. So, NO, it wasn't ruined, not for me. I spent my evening in a beery haze, viewing a few films with my wife and tumbling into oblivion. I awoke and immediately steeled myself to finishing this masterful aside on the laughter which permeates Ulysses. I am often a lucky man
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