Shakespeare and Theory: Special Issue II

The latest issue of English Studies

Jobsite Theater’s production of Macbeth, starring Giles Davies (Macbeth) and Dahlia Legault (Lady Macbeth). Photo: Crawford Long

Shakespeare and Theory: Special Issue II
Guest Editors: François-Xavier Gleyzon and Johann Gregory

The latest issue of English Studies (94.7, 2013) is a special issue on Shakespeare and Theory.

Contents

(Vol. 94.7)

Listening to the Body …: Transitioning to Shakespeare and Theory (Special Issue II)
François-Xavier Gleyzon (University of Central Florida) and Johann Gregory (Cardiff University)

Performing Disability and Theorizing Deformity
Katherine Schaap Williams (Rutgers University)

Ship of Fools: Foucault and the Shakespeareans
Richard Wilson (Kingston University)

“Untimely Ripp’d”: On Natality, Sovereignty and Unbearable Life
Arthur Bradley (Lancaster University)

Syllogisms and Tears in Timon of Athens
Drew Daniel (Johns Hopkins University)

Opening the Sacred Body or the Profaned Host in The Merchant of Venice
François-Xavier Gleyzon (University of Central Florida)

For more information, visit Cardiff Shakespeare [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Shakespeare and Theory: Special Issue II
• Girls and Girlhood in Adaptations of Shakespeare
• Toni Morrison on Joyce and Shakespeare
• Shakespeare, Justice and Modern Law
• Shakespeare's Hamlet: Polonious on Conduct

Shakespeare and Theory: Special Issue I

The latest issue of English Studies

Pete Postlethwaite plays the lead in a production of Shakespeare's King Lear

Shakespeare and Theory: Special Issue I
Guest Editors: François-Xavier Gleyzon and Johann Gregory

The latest issue of English Studies (a Taylor and Francis journal) is a special issue on Shakespeare and Theory.

Contents

(Vol. 94.3)

Thinking through Shakespeare: An Introduction to Shakespeare and Theory
Johann Gregory and François-Xavier Gleyzon

Shakespeare by Design: A Flight of Concepts
Julia Reinhard Lupton and C.J. Gordon (University of California)

Of Cause
Madhavi Menon (American University)

“After the Takeover”: Shakespeare, Lacan, Žižek and the Interpassive Subject
Étienne Poulard (Cardiff University)

Wordplay in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Accusation of Derrida’s “Logical Phallusies”
Johann Gregory (Cardiff University)

Storm at Sea: The Tempest, Cultural Materialism and the Early Modern Political Aesthetic
Christopher Pye (Williams College)

A second issue on Shakespeare and Theory, also guest edited by François-Xavier Gleyzon and Johann Gregory, will be published in the November issue of the same journal volume. This issue will include contributions from Arthur Bradley (Lancaster University), Drew Daniel (Johns Hopkins University), François-Xavier Gleyzon (University of Central Florida), Katherine Schaap Williams (Rutgers University) and Richard Wilson (Kingston University) [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Girls and Girlhood in Adaptations of Shakespeare
• Toni Morrison on Joyce and Shakespeare
• Shakespeare, Justice and Modern Law
• Shakespeare's Hamlet: Polonious on Conduct

Kas Saghafi on Derrida: A Biography

The LARB weighs in on the English translation of Peeters' biography

Jacques Derrida at the Sorbonne, June, 1979. Photograph: Martine Franck/Magnum Photos.

From Kas Saghafi (Los Angeles Review of Books) (link via 3:AM Magazine): ‘Jacques Derrida will have been the greatest thinker of the 20th century. This might sound like the opinion of a misinformed, biased, sycophantic fan willfully ignorant of intellectual history. To nominate one person as meriting such an accolade would be to ignore and trivialize the achievements of all the other great thinkers of the past century, to treat what deserves utmost seriousness as a game or a horse race. Yet the great impact and wide-ranging influence of Derrida’s writings on the study and practice of a broad range of disciplines such as philosophy, art and aesthetics, political theory, literature and literary studies, psychoanalysis, religious studies, law, architecture and urban planning, linguistics, post-colonialism, and even science, which will take years to be measured and assessed, will bear out what at first appears to be a wildly exaggerated remark. No other 20th-century thinker will have had such a profound effect on so many domains of knowledge as Derrida.’ [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Jacques Derrida
• Derrida: The Excluded Favorite
• Life after Derrida
• Deconstructing Derrida: Mikics' Intellectual Biography
• Josh Cohen on Derrida, reading and différance
• Why read Derrida?

Derrida: The Excluded Favorite

NYR Blog reviews Benoît Peeters' Derrida: A Biography

Jacques Derrida

From Emily Eakin NYR Blog (link via 3:AM Magazine): ‘In May of 1951, at the age of twenty, Jacques Derrida took the entrance exams for the prestigious École Normale Supérieure a second time, having failed, as many students do, in his first attempt the previous year. Fueled by amphetamines after a sleepless week, he choked on the written portion and turned in a blank sheet of paper. The same month, he was awarded a dismal 5 out of 20 on his qualifying exam for a license in philosophy. “The answers are brilliant in the very same way that they are obscure,” the examiner wrote, encapsulating a sentiment about Derrida’s work that has since become a commonplace [...]’ [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Jacques Derrida
• Life after Derrida
• Deconstructing Derrida: Mikics' Intellectual Biography
• Josh Cohen on Derrida, reading and différance
• Why read Derrida?

Christopher Fynsk on Academia and Critical Theory

An interview with Figure/Ground Communication

Christopher Fynsk

Figure/Ground Communication talks to Professor Christopher Fynsk:

How did you decide to become a university professor? Was it a conscious choice?

This occurred in the last year of my undergraduate training at Cornell University (which would have been in 1974). I link the decision to my nascent political thinking: I could not think of a more worthy field (you will see that this thinking was also a bit naïve, but there it is).

Two of your mentors were Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy. How was your experience working with them and what were some of the most important lessons you learned from them?

I hope it will not be disrespectful to say that I did not really take Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy as mentors. I looked upon them rather almost as “older brothers.” At that time, my mentors were Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard. But I chose to work with the two of them in Strasbourg for my PhD (rather than return to Paris, where I had studied in 1976), because I felt that it was perhaps a more propitious site for my work on Heidegger. This was an obscure decision, but it seems to have been a good one, even though neither Lacoue-Labarthe nor Nancy had progressed as far in their respective readings of Being and Time as I had at that time (the text had not been fully translated in French). I don’t believe that Lacoue-Labarthe (attached at that time to Johns Hopkins and serving as my titular advisor) read even a page of my actual thesis, which was exactly what I had anticipated.

The seminar in ‘79-‘80 and ’80-’81 was a thrilling context. There was also an excellent seminar that was undertaken jointly, I believe, with Bernard Bass. When I returned to Strasbourg to take Jean-Luc Nancy’s place at the faculté (during his visit to San Diego), the seminar had declined in importance. But I was so nervous in conducting it (Lacoue-Labarthe was also absent that term) that it took me almost 6 weeks to realize that the institutional conditions had changed at the University and in Strasbourg.

Lunches and dinners at 6 rue Charles Grad were memorable events. For the first time I witnessed literary history debated at the table as something with real political and social importance. But here, I should refer to my experience in France in general during this period—I discovered there an entirely new set of possibilities for living as an intellectual. The university receded as my primary point of reference. This was where I would locate the substance of my real learning in Strasbourg.

In terms of their influence upon me, I would note that Lacoue-Labarthe was a great stylist, a “syntaxier,” as I described him in Typography. There was a care in thinking and reading that I responded to very strongly. I was also very attentive to his relation to the theatre. I was certainly fond of Nancy and very happy to present his work to a North American audience, but we were not as close. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Christopher Fynsk on Maurice Blanchot
• Why read Derrida?
• A Tour of Slavoj Žižek's Apartment
• Documentary: Examined Life (2008)
• Theodor W. Adorno, Dream Notes

Style in Theory: Between Literature and Philosophy

A new title from Bloomsbury

Style in Theory: Between Literature and Philosophy, ed. Ivan Callus, James Corby, Gloria Lauri-Lucente

From Bloomsbury Publishing:

'What, in theory, is style? How has style been rethought in literary theory?'

Drawing together leading academics working within and across the disciplines of English, philosophy, literary theory, and comparative literature, Style in Theory: Between Philosophy and Literature sets out to rethink the important but all-too-often-overlooked issue of style, exploring in particular how the theoretical humanities open conceptual spaces that afford and encourage reflection on the nature of style, the ways in which style is experienced and how style allows disciplinary boundaries to be both drawn and transgressed.

Offering incisive reflections on style from a diverse and contemporary range of theoretical and methodological perspectives, the essays contained in this volume critically revisit and challenge accepted accounts of style, and provide fresh and compelling readings of the relevance in any rethinking of style of specific works by the likes of Shakespeare, Petrarch, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze, Blanchot, Derrida, Nancy, Cixous and Meillassoux. [Read More]

Contributors: Jean-Michel Rabaté (University of Pennsylvania), Laurent Milesi (Cardiff University), Saul Anton (The New School & Pratt), Gloria Lauri-Lucente (University of Malta), Stuart Sillars (University of Bergen), Stefan Herbrechter (Coventry University), James Corby (University of Malta), Chris Muller (Cardiff University), Douglas Burnham (Staffordshire University), Fiona Hughes (University of Essex), Janice Sant (Cardiff University), Marie-Dominique Garnier (Université de Paris-8 Vincennes-à-St-Denis), Mario Aquilina (Durham University), Ivan Callus (University of Malta), Giuseppe Mazzotta (Yale).

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Why read Derrida?
• A Tour of Slavoj Žižek's Apartment
• Documentary: Examined Life (2008)
• Theodor W. Adorno, Dream Notes

10 Years Since Blanchot

French critic, writer and philosopher passed away on 20 February 2003

Maurice Blanchot, the French writer, critic and philosopher, passed away exactly ten years ago today. From a 2003 obituary published in The Guardian:

The French writer Maurice Blanchot, who has died aged 95, was not so much a private person, it was almost as if he was perpetually absent. He lived in isolated places, such as the village of Eze-Village, in the south, or Mesnil Saint Denis, in the Yvelines, where he died. He never appeared on radio or television, never spoke in public and did not allow himself to be photographed. One biographer, Christophe Bident, entitled his book Maurice Blanchot: Invisible Partner.

Yet Blanchot was considered one of the outstanding intellectuals of postwar France. He wrote 11 novels and a series of essays, many of which also appeared in book form. None were bestsellers, but what counted was their quality. People were not always converted to his ideas, but they were invariably fascinated by him. [Read More]

A Selection of Articles from A Piece of Monologue:

• Maurice Blanchot: Corrected Proofs
• Michel Foucault on Maurice Blanchot
• Maurice Blanchot and Romanticism
• Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster
• Lars Iyer on Blanchot's Vigilance
• Blanchot and Beckett's Letters
• Blanchot on Karl Marx and Communism
• Maurice Blanchot and Romanticism
• Heiner Goebbels: I Went To The House But Did Not Enter
• Maurice Blanchot and the Limit of Disaster
• Maurice Blanchot on Kafka
• Maurice Blanchot at Station Hill
• Blanchot at 100

Ludwig Wittgenstein's Photography

Unseen photographs by the Austrian philosopher

Ludwig Wittgenstein with his three sisters

From Open Culture: 'For the unsentimentally cerebral Wittgenstein, a photograph is not a memorial, but a “probability.” The philosopher’s archive at the University of Cambridge includes the photograph above, a true “probability” in that it does not represent any one person but is a composite image of his face and the faces of his three sisters, made in collaboration with the “founding father of eugenics,” Francis Galton.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Ludwig Wittgenstein on Writing
• Ludwig Wittgenstein: Looking not Thinking
• Ludwig Wittgenstein and Architecture
• Ludwig Wittgenstein's Lifestyle

Laura Salisbury, Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing

Beckett's comic timing as part of a post-war ethics of representation

About the book

Samuel Beckett is a funny writer. He is also an author whose work is taken to respond ethically to the unspeakable seriousness of the post-Holocaust situation. How can these two statements sit together? Ranging widely over Beckett's fiction, drama, and critical writings, and including readings of Murphy, the Trilogy, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, the late prose, and the late plays, the book demonstrates that it is through Beckett's comic timing that we can understand the double gesture of his art: the ethical obligation to represent the world how it is while, at the same time, opening up a space for how it ought to be.

Key Features

• Presents innovative readings of the comedy found in Beckett's fiction, drama and critical writings
• Spans Beckett's entire oeuvre, using published and unpublished sources
• Engages with recent and contemporary philosophical approaches to literature, including work by Derrida, Badiou, Levinas, and Adorno
• Makes a unique contribution to theoretical work on comedy and laughter
• Provides a rigorous introduction to the theoretical debates surrounding the relationship between modernist literature and a post-war ethics of representation

Publication details

Publication date: April 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7486-4748-4
Format: Hardback
Price: £70
Edinburgh University Press website

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett

Judith Butler: How to Read Kafka

The European Graduate School broadcasts online seminars with Judith Butler

Description from The European Graduate School: 'Judith Butler, philosopher and author, talking about how to read Kafka. In this lecture, Judith Butler discusses the relationship between philosophy and literature, how to read parables, the limits of knowledge, theology and the adequacy of the propositional form in relationship to Franz Kafka, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Michel Foucault focusing on reason in history, the messiah, time, space, argumentative structure, playfulness, mediation and the figure of Christ.' [Source]

Description from The European Graduate School: 'Judith Butler, philosopher and author, talking about Kafka's parables and paradoxes. In this lecture, Judith Butler discusses the didactic function of the parable, the structure of command and the communicability and legitimacy of laws in relationship to Franz Kafka, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Immanuel Kant, Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Michel Foucault focusing on das Ziel, progressive history, teleology, the messianic, indeterminacy, the politics of arrival and departure, temporal progressions and spatial relations.' [Source]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Judith Butler on Franz Kafka
• How to Read Kafka
• Introducing... Franz Kafka
• 'At last I understand Kafka'

Douglas Glover on Thomas Bernhard's The Loser

An analysis of Bernhard's novel

Thomas Bernhard

A big thank you to Ready Steady Book for drawing my attention to Douglas Glover's recent piece on Thomas Bernhard's The Loser: 'Thomas Bernhard is dead. He had a terrible life, at least the early part. He was born in Holland where his Austrian mother had fled to escape the shame of her unwanted pregnancy. He never knew his father who died far away and in obscurity (and obscure circumstances). His mother mistreated him because of the shame he represented. Back in Austria he wanted to be an opera singer and studied music but caught a cold working at a menial job to make ends meet; the cold turned into tuberculosis. He was hospitalized repeatedly, his treatment was bungled, he was given up for dead, and survived just to prove how stupid his doctors were. Since opera-singing was out, he became a writer. He became a famous writer of deadpan, mordant, hilarious, difficult (modernist) novels and plays that often portray depressed characters with lung diseases.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Thomas Bernhard
• Thomas Bernhard on self-discipline
• Thomas Bernhard on Perfection and Failure
• Glenn Gould and Beethoven's Tempest Sonata

Simon Glendinning, Derrida: A Very Short Introduction

A new guide to one of the most difficult contemporary philosophers

Jacques Derrida

In this week's Times Literary Supplement (6 January 2012), Neil Badmington reviews Derrida: A very short introduction by Simon Glendinning:

Glendinning's overview is accurate and informed, and the book covers many of the key terms: logocentrism, aporia, and grammatology, for example. I have a reservation, however, about the level at which the volume is pitched. Oxford Universty Press's "Very Short Introductions" are, the publisher explains, "for anyone wanting a stimulating and accessible way in to a new subject", and many of the titles in the series live up to this claim. (Catherine Belsey's Postructuralism and Peter Singer's Marx come to mind.) But Glendinning is often too immersed in the material to meet the needs of a newcomer. A discussion of the preface to Of Grammatology, for example, is interrupted by a reference to "Derrida's 'messianic' hope, a messianism without a determinate messianism'. Glendinning is not wrong to make the link, but the absence here of an explanation of Derrida's work on the messianic renders the allusion an obstacle. Meanwhile, a later chapter claims that "Derrida's conception of the 'text'... is not simply Heidegger's 'world'", but reveals nothing about the meaning of "world" in Heideggerean philosophy.

Glendinning's book might satisfy readers already familiar with Derrida's writings, but those seeking an accessible guide will need to turn elsewhere, perhaps to John D. Caputo's Deconstruction in a Nutshell (1997) or Nicholas Royle's Jacques Derrida (2003). Between here and there is a world of difference.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Jacques Derrida
• Roland Barthes, Travels in China
• Roland Barthes translated into Txt-spk
• Roland Barthes and The Preparation of the Novel
• Alain Robbe-Grillet, Why I Love Barthes
• Badmington on Roland Barthes and Mythologies

Christopher King on Book Cover Design

Melville House art director on designing the Last Interview series

Christopher King, art director at Melville House, discusses the process of designing book covers for their Last Interview series (link via Millions Millions): 'Starting a new series design is always a fun challenge—each book in the series needs to stand on its own, but the set should add up to more than the sum of its parts. An engaging design can help a series get displays in bookstores, and hopefully even inspire readers to collect them all. For our Last Interview series, I decided to illustrate the authors (Roberto Bolaño, Jacques Derrida, and Kurt Vonnegut) in a clean style that fits in with the modern look of our other series. In this slideshow, I’ll take you through the process of designing and illustrating the covers, from the first rough sketches to the final printed book.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Jacques Derrida
• The Book Cover Club
• 20 Most Iconic Book Cover Designs?
• Book Cover Archive
• Judging a book...
• The Great Gatsby: Re-Covered
• Peter Mendelsund in Design Bureau

Jacques Derrida on Humans and Animals

French philosopher reflects on what makes us human

Source: National Geographic

In a brief excerpt, Jacques Derrida reflects on what constitutes human identity, and challenges our assumptions of sovereignty in the animal kingdom (link via Brain Pickings):

None of the traits by which the most authorized philosophy or culture has thought it possible to recognize this ‘proper of man’ — none of them is, in all rigor, the exclusive reserve of what we humans call human. Either because some animals also possess such traits, or because man does not possess it as surely as is claimed.

Jacques Derrida, For What Tomorrow… A Dialogue 

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Jacques Derrida on the word 'Auschwitz'
• Why read Derrida?
• Philosophers: Jacques Derrida
• What is Hauntology?

Rachel Bowlby, A Child of One's Own: Parental Stories

Assuming Gender Annual Lecture · Cardiff University, 14 December 2011

Design: Rhys Tranter. Click to download poster (PDF)

Some readers of A Piece of Monologue may be aware that I am on the editorial committee of Assuming Gender, an academic project founded and organized by postgraduates. The project is structured around three research-led pursuits: a freely-accessible academic journal, an ongoing seminar series, and an annual lecture presented by a respected scholar.

This year's Assuming Gender annual lecture is just around the corner, and you may be interested to know that attendance is absolutely free. And no prior booking is necessary. I've designed a poster for the event (above) which is downloadable in a PDF format, should you wish to share news of the talk with friends and colleagues. The following text is taken from a press release on the Assuming Gender website:

'A Child of One's Own: Parental Stories'
An Assuming Gender Guest lecture by Professor Rachel Bowlby (University College London)
Wednesday 14 December 2011, 5.15pm
Lecture Theatre 2.01, Humanities Building, Cardiff University, Colum Drive
All welcome
Funded by the University Graduate College and ENCAP

We are delighted to announce that the 2011 Assuming Gender Annual lecture will be given by Professor Rachel Bowlby (University College London), and is entitled 'A Child of One's Own: Parental Stories'.

About the speaker:
Rachel Bowlby is Northcliffe Professor of English at UCL. Her books include Just Looking (1985), Still Crazy After All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis (1992), Shopping with Freud (1993), Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping (2000), and, most recently, Freudian Mythologies: Greek Tragedy and Modern Identities (2007). She has edited Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and two volumes of Woolf’s critical writings, and is also the author of Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf (1997). She has translated a number of books by contemporary French philosophers, including Derrida’s Of Hospitality (2000) and Paper Machine (2005). She currently holds a two-year Leverhulme Major Research Award.

About the lecture:
Parenthood is a neglected topic in comparison with other elemental attachments (the passions of childhood or erotic love). But recent radical changes in typical family forms and in procreative possibilities (new reproductive technologies) expose the mutability and multiplicity of ‘parentalities’, creating new kinds of parental story and new questions about parenthood. Why do people want (or not want) to be parents? How has the ‘choice’ enabled by contraception changed the meaning of parenthood? Today, the positive choice to seek and have a child as a matter of personal fulfillment is accepted as valid for men as well as women, individuals as well as couples. But there are also antecedents to the contemporary orientation, sometimes in classical texts where the parental story has up till now been sidelined. This lecture will look at one example of this phenomenon, Dickens’s Great Expectations.

Event Website:
assuminggender.com

If you have any questions about attendance, please feel free to add a comment below.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Assuming Gender Special Issue: Bodies
• Assuming Gender: Issue 2

Tom McCarthy on Friedrich Kittler

The aura that surrounds the ‘Derrida of the digital age’

Friedrich Kittler

Tom McCarthy writes on the aura of Friedrich Kittler in the London Review of Books blog: 'In 2004, after I gave an artist’s talk in a gallery in Berlin, a group of people strode up to speak to me. They were, they told me, followers of the media theorist Friedrich Kittler, members of his entourage – or, to give it its semi-official name, the Kittlerjugend. They used this last term not without irony; but it was the type of irony that masks seriousness, in the way that Hamlet’s pretending to be mad acts as a cover for him actually being mad. The shoulders of the lead delegate, a charismatic Russian émigrée named Joulia Strauss, were wrapped in a hand-woven silk shawl bearing a large reproduction of al-Jazeera’s test pattern. My art project, they informed me (it involved a narrative of radio transmission and network infiltration), met with their approval – that is, with the approval of the man himself, or at least (and perhaps equally importantly) of his aura.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Friedrich Kittler 1943-2011

Assuming Gender Special Issue: Bodies

New issue of free online academic journal now available

Assuming Gender is a Cardiff University project, comprising a journal, seminar, and lecture series. This interdisciplinary project is dedicated to the timely analysis of constructions of gendered texts, practices, and subjectivities and seeks to engage with contemporary conceptions of gender, while participating in the dialogues and tensions that maintain the urgency of such conversations. The new issue consists of the following articles and reviews, all free to download online as PDF files:

Articles

• Susanne Wegener, 'Forget Modesty – Here Comes the Tail: Abject Bodies, Post-Humanistic Philosophy and Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl'
• David Andrew Griffiths, 'Evolution, Bodies and Pleasures, and a Monstrous Queer Future'
• Virgil W. Brower, 'Ethics is a Gustics: Phenomenology, Gender, and Oral Sexuality (from ‘Entre Nous’ to ‘Lèvres Nous’)'
• Anindya Raychaudhuri, 'The Tragic Woman: Female Victimhood in the Cinema of the Spanish Civil War'

Reviews

• Bodies of Knowledge: Sexuality, Reproduction and Women’s Health in the Second Wave (Review: Angie Dell)
• Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America (Review: Kat Deerfield

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Assuming Gender: Issue 2

Jacques Derrida on the word 'Auschwitz'

French philosopher on the problems of using 'proper names'

Photograph: Wiener library

Excerpt from an interview with Jacques Derrida, conducted by Dr. Michal Ben-Naftali on 8 January 1998 (translated from the French by Dr. Moshe Ron):

Interviewer: Until now I have been asking questions as if Deconstruction, your philosophy of history and historicity, is indeed a response to Auschwitz. Is that so? Is it only Auschwitz? Is it a philosophy of a survivor? In what sense (“I could have been there” – the dream you recall in your autobiography)? Why have you avoided from using this proper name (you did use others, such as “shibboleth” and “circumcision”?)

Jacques Derrida: First of all, deconstruction is not a philosophy of history. I don't know if you're taking this expression literally, but it is not a philosophy, and then the concept of history is too problematic for me to say that deconstruction is a philosophy of history. It is not a philosophy of history. Your question was why I do not use the name Auschwitz? Were there other questions before? I could try to demonstrate, but once more I can't do it here, not under these conditions, that the concept of survival occupies an altogether particular place in my work. There is a text entitled Survivre, and in it I try to note that surviving is neither life nor death, and I demonstrate how a certain concept of survival resists, does not allow itself to be reduced to the opposition of life and death. And that the trace is always a survival, everything begins with survival, and thus, by the situation of inheritance and the relation to spectrality, the logic of the spectral which runs through all my work for at least twenty five years (in La Carte postale, Spectres de Marx (11) ), the logic of the spectral implies another relation to the spirit of which we spoke little earlier, in the sense of the specter as Geist and ghost. It is the question of a logic of the phantom, of inheritance and thus of survival - we are in the domain of survival. The element in which all this discourse is inscribed is the element of survival.

Obviously, one needn't necessarily have in mind the survivors of Auschwitz in order to think of survival. In principle, logically, this discourse I hold about survival does not require a reference to the Shoah. But one would have to be blind and deaf not to see and hear, that each time survivors are mentioned today, this is what one thinks of. And naturally, I don't think of it any less than anyone else. But at the same time I insist on referring by this word or by this logic of survival to Auschwitz, but not only to Auscwitz, that is true. I want to note that this discourse could have been held in the 19th century, or even if Auschwitz never happened.

This, then, leads me to your question, why I did not name Auscwitz in this text (but I did name it elsewhere). It is because, as I've said in the beginning, I wouldn't like and I don't feel I have the right to give a single proper name to all genocide, to all possible extermination, even to the extermination of Jews under Nazism. Auschwitz, where I went a few weeks ago, Auschwitz is a place, it is terrible, Auschwitz, it is something monstrous, of course. But it was only, even during the experience of the extermination, a place among others. But why this metonymy? It is well known that when one says Auschwitz today, one doesn't think only of the town which still exists: there are still restaurants in Auschwitz, it is a very particular place.

I don't feel I have the right, both for reasons of rhetorical rigor and by respect for the victims, to use the name Auschwitz to designate any place where similar things have happened. It is a word often abused. People often use this word as a banner, a label: "At least I uttered the word Auschwitz, I've done my duty, my conscience is clear." I resist this easiness. For me, it is both too difficult and too easy. I don't use this word except in a serious manner, when I think it is necessary.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Why read Derrida?
• Philosophers: Jacques Derrida
• What is Hauntology?

Simon Critchley: Style in Theory

Malta, November 2009

James Corby (University of Malta) interviews Simon Critchley (New School) by video link during the Style in Theory / Styling Theory conference in Malta in November 2009 (link via Continental Philosophy). Topics under discussion included the writing of Samuel Beckett, Maurice Blanchot, Wallace Stevens, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Tom McCarthy, Michel de Montaigne, and American president Barack Obama. Attendees included Jean-Michel Rabaté, Laurent Milesi and Catherine Belsey. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley
• How to Stop Living and Start Worrying

Friedrich Kittler 1943-2011

Contemporary media theorist and literary critic passes away, aged 68

Friedrich Kittler

Report from media blog, Machinology (thanks to Volker Frick for the link): 'Writing anything after hearing about the death of Friedrich Kittler (1943-2011) is not really easy, even if it surely will boost the academic publishing industry into a range of publications. Somewhere I read him characterized as the “Derrida of media theory” and where the writer (probablyWinthrop-Young or Peters) added that of course, Kittler would like to be called “Foucault of media theory”.' [Read More]