After struggling with this book for a month or two, I think it's a pretty solid work of exegesis. The main problem is that the writing is no more clear than the very difficult sources it writes about -- in some cases it is even less clear. It is obvious that the author has a deep and impressive familiarity with Derrida's work, but it is equally obvious that the author is not a philosopher: the book does not argue for any of the interpretations it proposes but simply asserts them. (That is especially frustrating when one finds oneself disagreeing with the interpretation being asserted.) Before you buy this, I strongly recommend that you use the 'READ INSIDE THIS BOOK" feature to read the first page -- that way you can see if you'll have the patience required to untangle 200 pages of such convoluted prose. Until SUP gets that feature up-and-running for this book, here's a taste, from the first paragraph of the introduction:

"If, as Derrida likes to put it, the sense [sens] of a text is never unveiled by a hermeneutic that takes the infinite as the temporal horizon of its task, for the simple reason that there is no such thing as the sense -- in the singular -- of a text, then this is something that his own texts can be said to share; which does not, of course, exempt us from attempting the most faithful interpretation possible."

I don't know what exactly it means to "take the infinite as the temporal horizon" for an interpretation, and so why we should not do so. Does it mean that (1) we should not assume that it will take forever to interpret the text, i.e., that we can never finally interpret it? That's what it sounds like, but then the claim would be false, because Derrida DOES think all great texts are hermeneutically inexhaustible. (Which, moreover, does not follow from their not having one sense; it only follows from their having infinite sense.) Does it mean, then, that (2) the text can never be interpreted once and for all? (Probably, but then shouldn't the argument be directed against the "eternal" temporal horizon rather than an "infinite" one?) Finally, doesn't the idea that there is no one right interpretation problematize the very idea of providing a "faithful" interpretation? I'm not saying that objection can't be answered, but it isn't even formulated here; the opposite is just asserted. (The problem is denied and that denial is marked by the "of course," a denegation Derrida would not likely use so naively.) The real issue here, I think, is: What does it mean to interpret "faithfulfully" after the death of God, of the author, of the idea that there is one single right meaning? Is the author seeking in this book to get the true meaning of Derrida's texts right (unlikely), or to show that there is no single true meaning (the interpretations ARE usually asserted as if they were simply true throughout the book), or to recognize that the meaning of Derrida's work is also inexhaustible and yet strive to do the impossible by doing justice to it anyway? I hope the last, but none of that comes through very clearly, leading one to suspect that it hasn't been thought through very clearly. In short, the prose may sound nice, but its imprecision raises numerous problems.

Marrati is a close reader, patient and probing, and her analysis of these difficult works is enormously worthwhile. She is clearly one of the brightest minds working in continental philosophy today.