Reading Derrida’s ‘I’ requires tracking empirical effects rather than biography.

Evidence

To express wariness over the forgetting of the “I” in the reading of the Derridean text by Smith and others is not to criticize them as if from the opposed vantage point, however. It does not warrant the restitution of a naively empirical “I” in the so-called “autobiographical” text. In Smith’s wording, “appeals to biological knowledge” should not be “reduced immediately to empirical data concerning the biological” (91). Not “immediately,” but then what is still required is to address what could be called, after Derrida, “empirical effects.” — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 961

Categorization

• DEFINE: The term ‘empirical effects’ names a middle path between naive biographical reading of the Derridean text and pure theory that forgets the ‘I’ entirely.