'Review Essay Between Deleuze and Derrida PAUL PATION and JOHN PROTEVI, Editors New York: Continuum, 2003; 207 pages CONSTANTIN V. BOUNDAS, Trent University In one handsome volume, Paul Patton and John Protevi have compiled eleven exceptionally strong (although not "unproblematic'') essays in an attempt to establish a "transverse communication" between the works of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida-two of the most radical thinkers of difference since Plato's audacious formulation of the seventh hypothesis of his Parmenides (164b-165e). Despite Patton's and Protevi's mistaken claim to being the first to explore relations between these two members of the French "strong generation"-that honor belongs to Laruelle's impressive body of work of the 1970s Laruelle, 1976; 1977a; 1977b; 1978), which to this day remains unknown to English- speaking readers-the value of their collection is not diminished. It may be hoped that their collection will provide others in our Anglophone con- text with the inspiration and the lines of research necessary to pursue the side-by-side reading of Derrida and Deleuze. Paul Patton's opening essay, "Future Politics," finds Deleuze and Der- rida converging on what Foucault once called the "undefined work of free- dom." The essay attributes to both thinkers a similar passion for philoso- phy, understood in its ethico-political orientation and openness to the possibility of change. This orientation and openness is sustained by the invention of concepts which, rather than describe or represent actual states of affairs, call forth (in Deleuze's expression) "a new earth and people that do not yet exist." Patton argues, in the sequence, that such concepts are put to work by Deleuze and Derrida only after the distinc- tion is made between a conditioned (contingent) and an unconditioned (absolute) form for each of them; and only after the demonstration that, existing necessarily in an irreconcilable and indissociable proximity to one another, the unconditioned "guarantees" the conditioned, and renders possible the "madness" of the decision that we necessarily bring to the space shared by the absolute and the contingent. One readily recognizes in all of this the structure of the Derridean aporia. As Patton puts it: "[I]n all cases, [the aporia] provides the ... assurance for an open future" (21). Without the impossibility of pure forgiveness, of a gift remaining forever outside the circuit of exchange, of a democracy that will always be "to come"-without the experience of the chiastic contamination 0 the conditioned by the unconditioned and vice versa-the decision to forgive, to give and to receive gifts, to think melioristically about our ac-