Chronicle of Separation On Deconstruction's Disillusioned Love

A unique feminist approach to the legacy of Jacques Derrida, Chronicle of Separation is a disparate yet beautifully interwoven series of distinct readings, genres, and themes, offering a powerful reflection of love in-and as-deconstruction. Looking especially at relationships between women, Ben-Naftali provides a wide-ranging investigation of interpersonal relationships: the love of a teacher, the anxiety-ridden bond between a mother and daughter as manifested in anorexia, passion between two women, love after separation and in mourning, the tension between one's self and the internalized other. Traversing each of these investigations, Chronicle of Separation takes up Derrida's Memoires for Paul de Man and The Post Card, Lillian Hellman's famed friendship with a woman named Julia, and adaptations of the biblical Book of Ruth. Above all, it is a treatise on the love of theory in the name of poetry, a passionate book on love and friendship.

Michal Ben-Naftali is a writer, a translator, and an editor of the series The French for the publishing house Hakibbutz Hameuchad. She lectures at Tel Aviv University, at the Bezalel and the Hamidrasha Schools for the Arts. Her books include Chronicle of Separation (2000), The Visitation of Hannah Arendt (2006), Childhood, a Book-- A Novella (2007), On Retreat: Four Essays (2009), and Spirit (2012). Among her translations into Hebrew are Derrida Reads Shakespeare (2007); The Gift of Death by Jacques Derrida (2008); Love Stories by Julia Kristeva (2006); Nadja by Andre Breton (2007); Blanchot Anthology--The Book to Come, The Literary Space (2011). She received the Prime Minister's Prize for Israeli Authors in 2007 and the Haaretz Prize for the best essay in 2008.