William Blake, Jacques Derrida and the Secret Heart of Deconstruction

This book reads Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction through the lens of William Blake’s aphorism, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time”. Blake’s sentence finds a modern echo in Leonard Cohen’s most famous line, “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”. That light is Blake’s eternity. This book takes deconstruction out of the seminar room and into the wider world, demonstrating its vital role in everyday life, and showing also that it has existed for as long as language itself, and that it forms the invisible heart of both art and religion.
The book will be of interest to all Blake and Derrida scholars, and to all literature lovers who harbour a spiritual hunger. It will also interest students of religion and theology, and indeed anyone who wonders, with Charles Bukowski, about the nature of that “place in the heart that will never be filled”.