Derrida Polutropos

There are two discussions of Aristotle that can be taken as bookends in the Derridean corpus: 'White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy' (1972) and Politics of Friendship (1994). This article argues that Derrida's departure from and return to Aristotle follows the narrative logic of an Odyssean nostos whose Indo-European, 'white mythological', provenance is precisely the solar myth of the dying and reborn sun and whose root nes- * ('return to light and life') also lies behind the noun nous. Derrida resists the safe nostos of a philosophical nous that seeks only an unerring return voyage to its point of origin. Derrida's nostos, although it is charted between Occident (Greek) and Orient (Jew), embraces the errancy of a voyage with neither a fixed origin nor a final destination.