Jacques Derrida

Do you no the jurisprude from Edin., err, Christianiddis or -iopolous or something? He's good friends with out tutor, we're getting him next term I think.

I only revived this because we had our Derrida tute today and I don't think he is a good writer but am unsure with him as a thinker. Not too interesting. Foucault was much more exciting and a better writer (scaffold puns ridin all over the place).

Where is Frank?

"Le 11 Septembre, as you say, or, since we have agreed to speak two languages, 'September 11'. We will have to return later to this question of language. As well as to this act of naming: a date and nothing more. When you say 'September 11' you are already citing, are you not? Something fait date, I would say in French idiom, something marks a date, a date in history. “To mark a date in history” presupposes, in any case, an ineffaceable event in the shared archive of a universal calendar, that is, a supposedly universal calendar, for these are – and I want to insist on this at the outset – only suppositions and presuppositions. For the index pointing toward this date, the bare act, the minimal deictic, the minimalist aim of this dating, also marks something else. The telegram of this metonymy – a name, a number – points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize that we do not yet know how to qualify, that we do not know what we are talking about."

Anyone care to paraphrase?

"September 11 [le 11 septembre] gave us the impression of being a major event, one of the most important historical events we will witness in our lifetime, especially for those of us who never lived through a world war. Do you agree?"

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/066649.html

jd can generally take an awful long time to say stuff - but there's more to what he's saying as a whole (on that link) than my redux: he's saying it that way to get you in a mood to be attentive to what's not being said

(ie like elmer fudd: "be vewwy vewy quiet, i'm hunting wabbits)

jonathan z. i take yr point, i'm just not sure if the best way to get ppl to think for themselves abt the shadow side of eloquence and rhetorical power is by being ALWAYS snappy and zippy and grabby

(on the other hand JD is *never* any of those things, though in some ways his problem is that he is too compressed haha)

this phrase is one of both Derrida and DeMan's favorite red herrings

What he says about philosophy has not always been banal, or has not always been obvious.

(haha "like nations on a map with no names" -- WHERE the fuck did i just read that!?)

im not sure what that means but it seemed very funny.

they're like monads except they throb

is this like saying that naming something necessarily means "we do not know what we are talking about"? (and therefore means that we never know what we are talking about - we just talk about words) or does this only apply to metonyms?

crown -- > king
shake your ass -- > shake your entire body
9/11 -- > ?

then once he's actually GOT himself started, where he gets to (which comes after this little section), is the important bit

it isn't arbitrary (the name of the event is the DATE the event happened on); it *is* unusual (holidays often get metonymised this specific way - 4th of july - but what else does? off the top of my head can't think of any other political-military events)

(black friday? bloody sunday? that's the best i can do...)

it could almost suggest that 9/11 was instantly commemorated, which is kind of creepy.

is there a difference between "1066" and "the Norman Conquest"?

Didn't people immediately start using 9/11 because of those numbers specifically? People would not use 9/10 or 9/12, would they, if it happened on these dates instead?

it's still a fairly minor throat-clearing of an idea in itself: just the route JD comes at stuff

x-post re battle of boyne

oh right: but even so, it's the holiday celebration that's created the metonymy, surely?

'In this regard, when compared to the possibilities for destruction and chaotic disorder that are in reserve, for the future, in the computerized networks of the world, "September 11" is still part of the archaic theater of violence aimed at striking the imagination. One will be able to do even worse tomorrow, invisibly, in silence, more quickly and without any bloodshed, by attacking the computer and informational networks on which the entire life (social, economic, military, and so on) of a "great nation," of the greatest power on earth, depends. One day it might be said: "September 11"—those were the ("good") old days of the last war. Things were still of the order of the gigantic: visible and enormous! What size, what height! There has been worse since. Nanotechnologies of all sorts are so much more powerful and invisible, uncontrollable, capable of creeping in everywhere. They are the micrological rivals of microbes and bacteria. Yet our unconscious is already aware of this; it already knows it, and that's what's scary.'

Possible argument: the problem lies with the people who keep asking people like JD about things like 9/11, when there is no very good reason to think that he will have anything more brilliant to say about it than the rest of us.

Perhaps his banal replies signify commendable politeness, in their refusal to say 'Why are you asking me?'.

I can understand him: he is banal!

i don't know what menswear is, is it like the men's wearhouse?

Johnny Dean (born John Hutchinson Dean; 12 December 1971) is a British musician, frontman and figure of the 1990s Britpop era. He was the frontman of Menswear (stylized Menswe@r) and is currently working on a solo, synthpop project called Fxxk Explosion.

lots of british people on this board who persist in having the most arcane discussions imaginable about disputes between obscure media figures. but i'm pretty sure this is a thread about jacques derrida

i don't know what jd is about really but reading him sure is a pleasure

i think it's more helpful to think of derrida and other continental philosophy "rock star" types as idea artists more than anything

différ@nce

JD's unknown pleasures

Happy to have infested the Jacques Derrida thread with discussion of Menswe@r, let's tie this all together.

I have a philosophy degree because the lead singer in Menswear said that mods were existentialists in an article in Melody Maker. Looked up Existentialism after reading that and went to a bookshop and got some Sartre. https://t.co/xDmR1AEdUy

— Marcas Ó hUiscín (@MarkHoskins) June 4, 2019

pdf of the interview/conversation w Ornette:
https://www.ubu.com/papers/Derrida-Interviews-Coleman_1997.pdf">chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.ubu.com/papers/Derrida-Interviews-Coleman_1997.pdf
You can read it w/o dl, though it's a little blurry around the edges, maybe appropriately--although I like Open Culture's take & quotes:

The interview took place in 1997, “before and during Coleman’s three concerts at La Villette, a museum and performing arts complex north of Paris that houses, among other things, the world-renowned Paris Conservatory.” As I mentioned, the two spoke in English but, as translator Timothy S. Murphy—who worked with a version published in the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles—notes, “original transcripts could not be located.” Curiously, at the heart of the conversation is a discussion about language, particularly “languages of origin.” In answer to Derrida’s first question about a program Coleman would present later that year in New York called Civilization, the saxophonist replies, “I’m trying to express a concept according to which you can translate one thing into another. I think that sound has a much more democratic relationship to information, because you don’t need the alphabet to understand music.”
As one example of this “democratic relationship,” Coleman cites the relationship between the jazz musician and the composer—or his text: “the jazz musician is probably the only person for whom the composer is not a very interesting individual, in the sense that he prefers to destroy what the composer writes or says.” Coleman goes on later in the interview to clarify his ideas about improvisation as democratic communication:

[T]he idea is that two or three people can have a conversation with sounds, without trying to dominate or lead it. What I mean is that you have to be… intelligent, I suppose that’s the word. In improvised music I think the musicians are trying to reassemble an emotional or intellectual puzzle in which the instruments give the tone. It’s primarily the piano that has served at all times as the framework in music, but it’s no longer indispensable and, in fact, the commercial aspect of music is very uncertain. Commercial music is not necessarily more accessible, but it is limited.

Translating Coleman’s technique into “a domain that I know better, that of written language,” Derrida ventures to compare improvisation to reading, since it “doesn’t exclude the pre-written framework that makes it possible.” For him, the existence of a framework—a written composition—even if only loosely referenced in a jazz performance, “compromises or complicates the concept of improvisation.” As Derrida and Coleman try to work through the possibility of true improvisation, the exchange becomes a fascinating deconstructive take on the relationships between jazz and writing. (For more on this aspect of their discussion, see “Deconstructin(g) Jazz Improvisation,” an article in the open access journal Critical Studies in Improvisation.)

The interview isn’t all philosophy. It ranges all over the place, from Coleman’s early days in Texas, then New York, to the impact of technology on music, to Coleman’s completely original theory of music, which he calls “harmolodics.” They also discuss globalization and the experience of growing up as a racial minority—an experience Derrida relates to very much. At one point, Coleman observes, “being black and a descendent of slaves, I have no idea what my language of origin was.” Derrida responds in kind, referencing one of his seminal texts, Monolingualism of the Other:

JD: If we were here to talk about me, which is not the case, I would tell you that, in a different but analogous manner, it’s the same thing for me. I was born into a family of Algerian Jews who spoke French, but that was not really their language of origin [… ] I have no contact of any sort with my language of origin, or rather that of my supposed ancestors.

OC: Do you ever ask yourself if the language that you speak now interferes with your actual thoughts? Can a language of origin influence your thoughts?

JD: It is an enigma for me.

Indeed. Derrida then recalls his first visit to the United States, in 1956, where there were “‘Reserved for Whites’ signs everywhere.” “You experienced all that?” he asks Coleman, who replies:

Yes. In any case, what I like about Paris is the fact that you can’t be a snob and a racist at the same time here, because that won’t do. Paris is the only city I know where racism never exists in your presence, it’s something you hear spoken of.

“That doesn’t mean there is no racism,” says Derrida, “but one is obliged to conceal it to the extent possible.”

You really should read the whole interview. The English translation was published in the journal Genre and comes to us via Ubuweb, who host a pdf. For more excerpts, see posts at The New Yorker and The Liberator Magazine. As interesting a read as this doubly-translated interview is, the live experience itself was a painful one for Derrida. Though he had been invited by the saxophonist, Coleman’s impatient Parisian fans booed him, eventually forcing him off the stage. In a Time magazine interview, the self-conscious philosopher recalled it as “a very unhappy event.” But, he says, “it was in the paper the next day, so it was a happy ending.”

I did part of my MA with a Derrida specialist, who led six of us through some of the thornier parts of his oeuvre. It was a trip tbh and I think about it often. I think of Derrida a bit like I do Lacan: it's like a high-wire act and I experience something approaching jouissance when I'm reading it, then I look away and it's not gone as such but something like gone.

A mate, who now works at Leeds via Goldsmiths, wrote a long piece about that very Ornette interview.

God, that sounds so pompous. Anyway, I don't think I could be arsed to read Derrida today but glad I went there.

what, sound pompous on a derrida thread? impossible.

Haha. Fair point.

He taught at NYU at least one semester while I was there. I didn't try to get into his class. Probably should have.

i guess the good thread i'm suggesting would be a place to brainstorm ways *out* of the current impasse

― mark s, Wednesday, 24 May 2023 bookmarkflaglink

One day I will read something on TV from a left journal with absolutely no mention of politics.

https://jacobin.com/2023/05/succession-television-devestating-critique-ultrarich-review/

I'm a bit bemused at myself that I only posted twice on this thread over the years and in both cases tried to say something by implication rather than fully spelling it out, but honestly there's not much to tell. Anyway: so I was a grad student in English lit at UC Irvine in the early nineties, switched over to working in the library system there through 2015, and as such was in the mix of Derrida being here for his spring quarterly visits until his passing. I always heard his lectures were crowded/overbooked affairs and actually being in grad school made me realize how my eyes quickly glazed over on a lot of things in the general field, so I admit I never bothered with said appearances, but it was interesting/bemusing to sense him as presence in the air. I essentially saw him in person only a handful of times over the years, never spoke with him directly, but he seemed either affable in conversation with others or lost in thought on his own, which I chose not to disturb, tempted though I was to ask him about a certain Scritti Politti song. Ultimately my strongest memory of him was walking past him casually one morning on the footbridge connecting the campus to the mid-size open air mall across the street, and I like imagining he was going over for a burger or something. (Plus, to add another memory, per my earlier comments, TAs coming in to put lots of books for his course on reserve, and indeed a number of them were his.)

Are you able to confirm a bit of apocrypha about his time there - that over his office door was a "French Only" sign?