An Interview with Jacques Derrida on the Limits of Digestion
Daniel Birnbaum and Anders Olsson
Working in the early 1990s on the book As a Weasel Sucks Eggs: An Essay on Melancholy and Cannibalism (published in English in 2008 by Sternberg Press), we exchanged a few letters with the late Jacques Derrida, who was then working on what he referred to as the “cannibalistic tropes” in hermeneutics and German Idealism. He was grateful for a little fragment by Novalis that we had sent him:
All enjoyment, all taking in and assimilation, is eating, or rather: eating is nothing…
