Death and Fairy Tale

differences ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 30-57
Author(s):  
Andrew Kingston
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Early Essay

The music of the spectralist composer Claude Vivier is often considered through the lens of autobiography. However, from his abandonment as an infant to the circumstances of his murder at the age of thirty-four, certain aspects of Vivier’s life also seem to resist any straightforwardly autobiographical account. Borrowing the concept of “autothanatography” from Jacques Derrida and others, this essay explores how Vivier’s works inscribe a relationship to death, to the end and impossibility of autobiography, into its very origin. I argue that such an inscription occurs prominently in Vivier’s musical and dramatic portrayals of childhood, particularly those in Kopernikus: Opéra—Rituel de mort and Lonely Child. Drawing on Kathryn Bond Stockton’s writing on queer childhood and Lee Edelman’s early essay on homographesis, I further argue that this displacement of the autobiographical in Vivier’s works is also marked by his sexuality, or, more precisely, by its spectral repercussions.

Jacques Derrida

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Virgil W. Brower
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Metaphysical Tradition ◽  
Early Essay ◽  
Almost All

There’s kinship, no doubt. Traces of Derrida ever haunt Agamben, brilliantly, even in the dark. He is expressly ingratiated by ‘Derrida’s critique of the metaphysical tradition‘ (LD 39, original italics). Amid the myriad of his coeval influences, it is certainly worth considering that Derrida is Agamben’s ‘primary contemporary interlocutor’. His ‘critical engagement with deconstruction can indeed be identified as the context out of which emerge almost all of his key concepts’.2 Attell offers compelling discussions of this polemical relationship with regard to voicing language, sovereignty and animality. The former accounts for Agamben’s direct textual engagements with Derrida which, for the most part, address his earlier works, specifically Of Grammatology, Voice and Phenomena and Margins of Philosophy. To address his contemporary intellectual situation, Agamben roots himself in that one he finds most rooted, dedicating an early essay, ‘Pardes‘, to Derrida, which hails him as ‘the philosopher who has perhaps most radically taken account’ of the ‘crisis […] of terminology [that] is the proper situation of thought today …’ (PO 208). Here, Agamben mounts a deferential defence against caricaturisations of deconstruction (oft heard to this day) as a hermeneutical relativism of infinite deferral: ‘[I]t would be the worst misunderstanding of Derrida’s gesture to think that it could be exhausted in a deconstructive use of philosophical terms that would simply consign them to an infinite wandering or interpretation’ (PO 209).

The Red Shoes: A fairy tale within a ballet within a film.

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (Suppl 1) ◽  
pp. S104-S119
Author(s):  
Diana Diamond
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tale

Literature in Our Time, or, Loving Literature to Bits

CounterText ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Callus
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Anthony Trollope ◽  
Don Quixote ◽  
Time Machine ◽  
Paul Auster ◽  
Anne Michaels

In this essay Ivan Callus provides some reflections on literature in the present. He considers the tenability of the post-literary label and looks at works that might be posited as having some degree of countertextual affinity. The essay, while not setting itself up as a creative piece, deliberately structures itself unconventionally. It frames its argument within twenty-one sections that are self-contained but that also echo each other in their attempt to develop an overarching argument which draws out some of the challenges that lie before the countertextual and the post-literary. Punctuating the essay and contributing to its unconventional take on the practice of literary criticism is a series of exercises for the reader to complete, if so wished; the essay makes no attempt, however, to suggest that a countertextual criticism ought to make a routine of such devices. The separate sections contain reflections on a number of texts and writers, among them, and in order of appearance, Hamlet, Anthony Trollope, Jacques Derrida, The Time Machine, Don Quixote, Mark Z. Danielewski, Mark B. N. Hansen, Gunter Kress, Scott's Reliquiae Trotcosienses, W. B. Yeats, Kate Tempest, David Jones, Anne Michaels, Bernice Eisenstein, Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee, Billy Collins, Deidre Shauna Lynch, Tim Parks, Tom McCarthy – and Hamlet again. The essay's length fulfils a performative function but also facilitates as extensive a catalogue of aspects of the countertextual in literature and elsewhere as is feasible or as might be dared at this stage.

Provocations and Improvisations Concerning Reality: The Encounters of Jacques Derrida and Jean Luc-Nancy

Derrida Today ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-101
Author(s):  
Joanna Hodge
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
The Real ◽  
Michel Henry

This essay responds to the Nancean account of presentation, evoked in the opening citation, in order to trace out in Nancy's enquiries a disruption of Husserlian presentation, and a re-thinking of materiality on the edge of classical phenomenology. It stages a non-encounter between the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy and of Jacques Derrida in relation to a third term, the Lacanian conception of the ‘real’. Thereby it can be shown how these writings touch on each other, in response to phenomenology and to psychoanalytical theory, but do not engage. All the same, the claim to be made is that the writings of Nancy and Derrida converge in forming a third option, alongside the secularised phenomenologies of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty and the Christian phenomenologies of Jean-Luc Marion and Michel Henry, by marking up the event of Lacan's reformulation of Freud's psychoanalytical theorising.

Il la faut (la logique), Yes, yes: Deconstruction's Critical Force

Derrida Today ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 196-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stella Gaon
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Critical Force ◽  
Ethical Imperative ◽  
Political Critique

Jacques Derrida regularly appeals to an affirmative gesture that is ‘prior’ to or more ‘originary’ than the form of the question, and this suggests one way to understand deconstruction's critical force. The ‘Yes, yes’, he says, situates a ‘vigil or beyond of the question’ with respect to an ‘irreducible responsibility’. Some Derrida scholars therefore construe the double affirmation as a source or ground of critique. In this paper, I refute this suggestion. While an originary ‘Yes, yes’ or ‘come’ (viens) does open the fields of (for example) ‘inheritance’, language, or ‘holistic webs’, I argue, it only marks (will have marked) the processes of différance or of trace that make signification possible in general. No thing, as such, is thereby affirmed. This is why the originary affirmation cannot be said to constitute, in itself, the imperative (il la faut) of the logic (la logique) of ethical-political critique. To explain why a certain ethical imperative can be associated with deconstruction, one must determine why one is always already subject to a vigil that opens critique to its own possibility. One must also determine how the affirmative gesture relates to deconstruction's critical force.

The Final ‘Thank You’

Derrida Today ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-36
Author(s):  
Grant Farred
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Political Transition ◽  
The Other ◽  
World Cup ◽  
The Core ◽  
Nelson Mandela ◽  
Black President ◽  
The Moment

‘The Final “Thank You”’ uses the work of Jacques Derrida and Friedrich Nietzsche to think the occasion of the 1995 rugby World Cup, hosted by the newly democratic South Africa. This paper deploys Nietzsche's Zarathustra to critique how a figure such as Nelson Mandela is understood as a ‘Superman’ or an ‘Overhuman’ in the moment of political transition. The philosophical focus of the paper, however, turns on the ‘thank yous’ exchanged by the white South African rugby captain, François Pienaar, and the black president at the event of the Springbok victory. It is the value, and the proximity and negation, of the ‘thank yous’ – the relation of one to the other – that constitutes the core of the article. 1

Joshua Kates, Essential History: Jacques Derrida and the Development of Deconstruction (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 352pp, $29.95 (USD), ISBN 10: 0810123274, ISBN-13: 978-0810123274

Derrida Today ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-133
Author(s):  
Gary Banham
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
The Real ◽  
Northwestern University ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This book promises a ‘radical reappraisal’ (Kates 2005, xv) of Derrida, concentrating particularly on the relationship of Derrida to philosophy, one of the most vexed questions in the reception of his work. The aim of the book is to provide the grounds for this reappraisal through a reinterpretation in particular of two of the major works Derrida published in 1967: Speech and Phenomena and Of Grammatology. However the study of the development of Derrida's work is the real achievement of the book as Kates discusses major works dating from the 1954 study of genesis in Husserl's phenomenology through to the essays on Levinas and Foucault in the early 1960's as part of his story of how Derrida arrived at the writing of the two major works from 1967.

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