The War on Mourning

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Jacques Derrida, ‘The University without Condition’ in Without Alibi [2001], ed. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2002), pp. 204. 2 Jacques Derrida, Rogues. Two Essays on Reason [2003], trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2005). 3 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, pp.xiii-xiv 4 See Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.4: ‘The oath would go like this: oui il ya de l'amitié à penser; yes there is friendship to (be) thought.’ 5 See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning and the New International [1993], trans. Peggy Kamuf (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p.29: ‘Hamlet declares “The time is out of joint” precisely at the moment of the oath, of the injunction to swear, to swear together [conjurer], at the moment in which the specter, who is always a sworn conspirator [conjuré], one more time, from beneath, from beneath the earth or beneath the stage, has just ordered: “Swear.” And the sworn conspirators swear together (“They swear”).’ 6 See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, p.185: ‘The oaths, the calls to swear, the injuctions and the conjurations that then proliferate – as in all of the plays of Shakespeare, who was a great thinker and great poet of the oath… ’. 7 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.xiv. 8 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.xi. 9 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, pp.10-11. 10 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.xiv. 11 On the ‘carelessness’ of the event see Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’ in Without Alibi, pp.146: ‘But one should also know that wherever there is some performative, that is, in the strict Austinian sense of the term, the mastery in the first person present of an “I can”, “I may” guaranteed and legitimated by conventions, well, then all pure eventness is neutralized, muffled, suspended. What happens, by definition, what comes about in an unforeseeable and singular manner, couldn't care less about the performative.’ 12 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.13. 13 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.12: ‘Before any sovereignty of the state, of the nation-state, of the monarch, or, in democracy, of the people, ipseity names a principle of legitimate sovereignty, the accredited or recognized supremacy of a power or a force, a kratos or a cracy.’ 14 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.14. 15 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, pp.83-84. 16 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.84. 17 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.84. 18 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.86. 19 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.87. 20 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.87. 21 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.87. 22 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.88. 23 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.135. 24 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.135. 25 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.135. 26 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.135. 27 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, pp.141-142. 28 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, pp.141-142. 29 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.142. 30 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.142. 31 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.143. 32 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.143. 33 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.144. 34 See Jacques Derrida, Rogues, pp.149-150. 35 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.148. 36 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, pp.148-149. 37 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.148. 38 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.150. 39 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.151. 40 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.151. 41 See Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.151: ‘Although I cannot demonstrate this here, I believe – and the stakes are becoming more and more urgent – that none of the conventionally accepted limits between the so-called human living being and the so-called animal one, none of the oppositions, none of the supposedly linear and indivisible boundaries, resist a rational deconstruction’. 42 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.158. 43 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.158. 44 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.159.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 2. Aristotle, Ethics, rev. edn, trans. J.A.K. Thomson (London, Penguin: 1976), VI.iv.1140a19‐20. 3. David Wills, ‘Thinking Back: Towards Technology, via Dorsality’, parallax, 10:3 (2004), pp. 36‐52 (p. 38). 4. David Wills, ‘Thinking Back’, p. 51, fn.1. 5. Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming spring 2008). 6. ‘There are individuals walking along. Somewhere (usually behind them) the hail rings out’, or ‘The hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one‐hundred‐and‐eighty‐degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject.’ [my emphasis] ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 170–86 (p. 174). 7. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), pp. 65–66. 8. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 262. 9. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 85. 10. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 86. 11. Jacques Derrida, L'animal que donc je suis (Paris: Galilée, 2006). 12. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 132. 13. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 152. 14. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York, London: Routledge, 1994), p. 53. 15. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 213. 16. See ‘Techneology or the Discourse of Speed’, in The Prosthetic Impulse, ed. Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 237–63. 17. Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction Engaged: The Sydney Seminars, ed. Paul Patton and Terry Smith (Sydney: Power, 2001). 18. Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity, 2002). 19. Jacques Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone’, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (London, New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 40–101. 20. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 169. 21. Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction Engaged, p. 76. 22. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 3–35; 36–49. 23. Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l'amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994); Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London, New York: Verso, 1997). 24. David Wills, ‘Full Dorsal: Derrida's Politics of Friendship’, Postmodern Culture, 15:3 (2005). 25. An avenue developed by Derrida in ‘“Perhaps or Maybe”, Jacques Derrida in conversation with Alexander Garcia Düttmann, ICA, 8 March 1996’, PLI Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 6 (Summer 1997), pp. 1–18. 26. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, pp. 30; 29. 27. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in The Anti‐Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 69–152 (p. 131). 28. ‘Every art [tekhnē] is concerned with bringing something into being, and the practice of an art is the study of how to bring into being something that is capable either of being or not being, and the cause of which is in the producer and not in the product. For it is not with things that are or come to be of necessity that art is concerned, nor with natural objects (because they have their own origin in themselves). And since production is not the same as action, art must be concerned with production, not with action. There is a sense in which art and chance operate in the same sphere, as Agathon says: Art has a love for chance, and chance for art.’ [our emphasis] Aristotle, Ethics, VI.iv.1140a.6–20. 29. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, p. 197. 30. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, p. 105. 31. Jean‐Luc Nancy, Corpus (Paris: Métailié, 1992); L'Intrus (Paris: Galilée, 2000). 32. Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978). 33. David Wills, ‘Jasz Annotations: Negotiating a Discursive Limit’, paragraph, 21 (1998), pp. 131–49. 34. See David Wills, ‘Notes Towards a Requiem or the Music of Memory’, Mosaic, 39:3 (2006), pp. 27–46. 35. David Wills, Prosthesis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 11. 36. See Wills, Prosthesis, p. 88ff.

The spectre is also […] what one imagines, what one thinks one sees and which one projects – on an imaginary screen where there is nothing to see. Not even the screen sometimes, and a screen always...

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning and the New International [1993], trans. Peggy Kamuf (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p.165. 2 See ‘The Deconstruction of Actuality: an Interview with Jacques Derrida’ in McQuillan, M. (ed.), Deconstruction: a Reader, (London and New York: Routledge 2001). 3 ‘The Deconstruction of Actuality: an Interview with Jacques Derrida’, pp.543–544. 4 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, p.50. 5 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, pp.47–48. 6 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, p.162. 7 ‘Oh, may the Morning Star, that has no rival in the fields of night, spur on his steed and bring with speed that happy day.’ Ovid, Amores, II.11, pp.55–56. I dare refer you back to Ovid, The Love Books of Ovid Being the Amores, Ars Amatoria, Remedia Amoris and Medicamina Faciei Femineae of Publius Ovidius, trans. Julian L. May (Whitefish, Montana: Kessinger Publishing 2005) pp.50–1: ‘Pray thou thyself the Zephyrs to breathe full upon thy sails, and with thine own hand shake the canvas out. I, gazing seawards from the shore, shall be the first to see thy vessel dear, and I shall cry, “That barque brings home my heaven.” I'll fold thee in my arms, and with a riot of wild kisses smother thee; the victim, consecrate to thy return, shall slaughtered be; the sands of the shore I'll fashion like a couch, and any mound will serve us for a table. There, with the wine beside us, thou shalt all thy tale narrate; thou shalt tell me how thy vessel almost foundered mid the waves; thou shalt tell how, in hastening home to me, thou didst not fear the cold, dark nights, no, nor the stormy southern gales. They may be travellers’ tales, yet I'll believe them, every one. Wherefore should I not smile on what I long for most? Oh, may the Morning Star, that has no rival in the fields of night, spur on his steed and bring with speed that happy day'.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994). See p. 31. 2. Jacques Derrida, ‘Countersignature’, Paragraph 27.2 (2004), pp. 7–42. See pp. 17–19. 3. Jacques Derrida, ‘I Have a Taste for the Secret’, in Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret (London: Polity Press, 2001). See pp. 50–1. 4. In his interview with Bernard Stiegler, ‘Echographies of Television’, Derrida says ‘Testimony, as witness borne, as attestation, always consists in discourse. To be a witness consists in seeing, in hearing, etc., but to bear witness is always to speak, to engage in and uphold, to sign a discourse. It is not possible to bear witness without a discourse. Well, this discourse itself already harbors technics, even if only in the form of this iterability implied by the oath, to say nothing of this technics already constituted by the minimal grammaticality or rhetoricality which an attestation requires. Hence the apparent contradiction: technics will never make a testimony, testimony is pure of any technics, and yet it is impure, and yet it already implies the appeal to technics’. See Derrida and Stiegler, ‘Echographies of Television’, in Echographies of Television, by Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), pp. 93–5. 5. Jacques Derrida, ‘Globalization, Peace, and Cosmopolitanism’, in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971–2001 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 371–86. See p. 376.

Mourning: not a crushing oppression, a jamming (which would suppose a ‘refill’), but a painful availability: I am vigilant , expectant, awaiting the onset of a ‘sense of life’. The deaths of Roland Barthes: his deaths, that is, those of his relatives, those deaths that must have inhabited him, situating places and solemn moments, orienting tombs in his inner space (ending – and probably even beginning – with his mother's death). His deaths, those he lived in the plural, those he must have linked together, trying in vain to ‘dialectize’ them before the ‘total’ and ‘undialectical’ death; those deaths that always form in our lives a terrifying and endless series. Diogenes Laertius’ Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers shares something vital with both Roland Barthes’ mourning diary and Jacques Derrida's work of mourning. These texts all dwell on how the singular reaction to and narrative account of a singular death (of mother, friend or philosopher) is inevitably part of a series of deaths (of relatives, friends or philosophers). Furthermore, the challenge for Diogenes, Barthes and Derrida is to explain how death in its singular and plural forms is an intrinsic part of a life and living. Yet what separates Diogenes’ work of mourning from that of Barthes and Derrida is his uncannily deadpan humour when facing the dying philosophers he writes about, specifically employed through the medium of the poetic form of the epigram as epitaph . It is precisely this conception of the work of mourning that I want to explore in my reading of the ill-fated poetic output of Diogenes Laertius, which consists in the selections from his collection (or collections) called Epigrammata or Pammetros (‘Epigrams or In Various Metres’), interspersed throughout his monumental Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers . It has been well-documented that Diogenes’ work emphasizes the deaths, as much as the lives, of Greek philosophers. Central to any discussion of Diogenes and death is the role played by his poetic works scattered throughout his biographical narratives, works which I will dub his biographical death-poems. Since the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, these poems have been generally criticized, either as bad poetry or tasteless or, perhaps worst of all, as a flimsy rationale for the composition of the work as a whole. Nietzsche also called them ‘burial inscriptions’ ( Sepucralinschriften ) and dubbed Diogenes the clumsy night watchman of philosophy.

This paper is part of a larger project exploring Australian literary responses to the Great War of 1914-1918. It draws on theories of embodiment, mourning, ritual and the recuperative potential of writing, together with a brief discussion of selected exemplars, to suggest that literary works of the period contain and lay bare a suite of creative, corporeal and social impulses, including resurrection, placation or stilling of ghosts, and formation of an empathic and duty-bound community.

Following Jacques Derrida's first sustained critique of Marx and Marxism in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (1994), an expanded version of his lectures delivered at the University of California, Riverside, in May 1993, numerous "Marxist" theorists have responded to his provocative (and, for some, "untimely") intervention. Several of these critical responses have been gathered in Michael Sprinker's volume Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's "Specters of Marx" (1999), which includes contributions from such diverse theorists as Pierre Macherey, Antonio Negri, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Aijaz Ahmad, and many others. Important omissions from Sprinker's book include Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "Ghostwriting" (1995), an essay that Derrida nonetheless comments upon in his response "Marx & Sons," or any other feminist analysis of Specters of Marx, a curious absence in a text so riveted by questions of patriarchal affiliation. An even more startling omission from Sprinker's book is any analysis of Derrida's discussion of the Middle East, especially his remarks on the State of Israel and "a certain Jewish [i.e. Zionist] discourse on the Promised Land" [Specters of Marx 60] ("un certain discours juif de la Terre" [Spectres de Marx 104]). The myopic range of Marxist critiques of Specters of Marx is regrettable insofar as both Derrida and his Marxist critics ostensibly offer "radical" or "oppositional" perspectives on George H. W. Bush's New World Order while ignoring imperialist practices in places like Jerusalem, Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. In The End of the Peace Process (2001), Edward W. Said observes, "[w]hen one considers the broad lines of Jewish philosophy from [Martin] Buber to [Emmanuel] Levinas and perceives in it an almost total absence of reflection on the ethical dimensions of the Palestinian issue, one realizes how far one has to go" [208]. Said does not include Derrida in this trajectory of Jewish philosophers, possibly because Derrida has repeatedly disavowed any explicit affiliation with Judaism as religion, but I will argue here that Derrida's disavowal is implausible if not altogether disingenuous. In Ghostly Demarcations, Marxist responses to Derrida reveal how little real progress has been made in Western literary theory since the early 1980s, when now-tired debates about the Yale School echoed in nearly every humanities' corridor in the [End Page 56] United States. There are surely more compelling reasons to read Derrida today than to settle old scores with Ithaca-Irvine varieties of deconstruction. A key goal of this article is to enunciate Derrida's elision of the Palestinian question, not so much to undermine Specters of Marx, but to extend its power by venturing into domains that Derrida himself refuses to explore, a factor that weakens without totally disabling his deconstruction of Marxist theory. 1

This article represents an effort to outline the existence of a fundamental and unremarked-upon relationship between Jacques Derrida’s reconfiguration of the Freudian work of mourning and theorizations of haptic visuality. While Derrida is under-represented in film-theoretical discussions generally, and in discussions of haptic visuality specifically, the author argues that the ethical goal of his work aligns with that of the film-makers in question, and that it should be of key importance for the discourse. Oliver Stone’s JFK, Chris Marker’s La Jetee and Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema are examined through these twin prisms in order to illustrate how the engagement with this work of mourning and the employment haptic techniques are used in conjunction in order to hasten a new relationship to alterity.

Whatever approach I take, when I attend to the question of the margin, it resolutely returns to the red line drawn down the left-hand-side of a lined page. It is the red, ruled margin I was trained...

Reviewed by: Judith Butler: Philosophie für Einsteiger by René Lépine Tiarra Cooper René Lépine. Judith Butler: Philosophie für Einsteiger. Illustrated by Ansgar Lorenz, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2018. 120 pp. Paper, €19.90. Judith Butler: Philosophie für Einsteiger (Judith Butler: Philosophy for beginners) is a graphic voyage through the key tenets, foundational antecedents, and contemporary debates of Judith Butler’s scholarship. Written in German by René Lépine and illustrated by Ansgar Lorenz, this work renders Butlerian philosophy—traditionally viewed as esoteric and elitist—accessible to dilettantes. Interspersed with engaging graphics and forays into principal philosophies, this captivating book prepares the reader to adequately comprehend, contextualize, and engage with Butler’s claims. Following an abbreviated version of Butler’s initial encounters with philosophy, Lépine facilitates an understanding of Butler’s complex thought by outlining the fundamentals of structuralism and its successor, poststructuralism. Essentially, Lépine highlights the power of language to shape our world perception, norms, and differentiations—the productive power of that which, generated interactively through language, would be termed discourse by Michel Foucault. Butler, Lépine demonstrates, innovatively connects this discursive [End Page 121] analysis to pragmalinguistics in her explosive work Gender Trouble (1989). Combining the theory of speech acts (in which performative utterances may describe or change a social reality) with Jacques Derrida’s notion of iterability (whereby a performative act must be repeated in order to evoke its signification), Butler locates a subversive opening in performativity. Deconstructing the superficially seamless relationship between sex and gender, Butler postulates the ability to uncouple the two through the re-signification of gender via iterated performativity. The conventional alignment of (discursively produced) sex and gender, Butler further claims, forms a compulsory heterosexual matrix; to be gendered and heterosexual translates to intelligibility, whereas to be dislocated from this matrix equates to social death. Consequently, Gender Trouble not only redefined feminist frameworks but forged the basis for queer theory. Butler continues to theorize performativity, Lépine highlights, in her 1995 work Bodies That Matter. Performativity cannot be perceived as a single, conscious act that summons a subject into existence, Butler clarifies; rather, performativity is the continually repeated power of discourse to produce phenomena that it then regulates and restricts. Bodies was critiqued as ignoring the body as a material reality, though Butler claims that what constitutes legitimate bodies is inextricably situated in the matrix of intelligibility. Furthermore, Butler advocates here for a redefinition of the material, as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time. In The Psychic Life of Power (1997), Butler expounds that the situation of material bodies into the matrix of intelligibility provides a necessary orientation; though body and identity cannot be conceptualized together, they cannot be constituted separately. Furthermore, the psyche represents the authority of power that (invisibly) regulates the self—the resistance of which appears only when protecting the self against power’s demands. As the last of Butler’s works to be featured, Excitable Speech (1997) is recapitulated by Lépine as a revisiting of discursive power and performance, and a collapse of the conceptual distance between physical integrity and speech; verbal violence targeted at one’s identity, Butler claims, can also be experienced corporeally. Moreover, those who are not recognized fully as subjects can face both social and political violence. Following an extensive overview of her philosophies, Lépine situates Butler’s activism socially, as witnessed in public controversies. This contextualization includes her rejection of the Civil Courage Award at Christopher Street Day in Berlin in 2010 and the protests against [End Page 122] her receipt of the Theodor W. Adorno Prize in 2012. Although debate stemmed from Butler’s stances against racism, Zionism, and imperialism, Lépine situates these advocacies among many: Butler railed against Islamophobia following 9/11 and drew attention to cases of indefinite imprisonment without trial at Guantánamo Bay. Lépine and Lorenz culminate their work with ample resources, replete with appendices (on movements such as feminism, sexology, gay rights, and lesbian feminism), a bibliography of referenced works, and a glossary of relevant terms. Given that Judith Butler’s philosophies are known to resist understanding, I applaud the authors for simplifying their multiplex nature. The...

This thesis aims to explore the ethical implications and aspiration in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005). Inspired by Jacques Derrida's discussions on the subject of reckoning with the dead other, the research project comprises three correlated thematic investigations into the novel: death, remembrance and the work of mourning. The first-person narration of the novel is treated as a literary work of mourning, manifesting ethical concerns about the relationships between the living and the dead, between the present and the past, as well as between self and other. The first thematic analysis on loss in the novel concludes with the philosophical connotation that the force of death is a ubiquitous gaze cast upon the living. The second part of this research project suggests that the novel treats the narrator's remembrance of past lives as an art of living in the present. The theme of the third part focuses on the manners of reckoning with constituent traces of otherness. With her autobiographical reckoning with the dead others, the clone narrator of Ishiguro's novel is going through a process of self-reckoning vis-a-vis an egoistic society's rejection of its clone members. In sum, all of the thematic investigations reveal otherness as constituent and productive in the formation of individual or collective subjectivity. Both a tale of alternative history and a literary work of mourning, Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go reckons with modern memories in an imaginary way, refracting ethical concerns about the social situation in the contemporary world as well as an ethical aspiration for a more tolerant future.

Whatever happened to cybernetics in architecture? Cybernetics was swaggering from day one. Its original mission, to predict the evasive manoeuvres of bomber pilots, soon evolved into making predictions in social systems and game theory. In the early 1960s, cybernetics began to make inroads into architecture, famously so in the never-realised Fun Palace, designed by architect Cedric Price, theatre director Joan Littlewood and cyberneticist Gordon Pask. Pask continued developed his thoughts on the uses for cybernetics in the field of architecture, and in 1969 published “The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics” (Gordon Pask, Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics, Architectural Design , no. September, 1969). By then however, cybernetics’ moment had all but passed, and cybernetics faded into obscurity. Or, so the story goes. What if , on the contrary, cybernetics disappeared in name only , and its principles thrive architectural practices? Tiqqun’s ‘The Cybernetic Hypothesis’ argues that the cybernetic hypothesis replaces the liberal hypothesis of sovereignty with one of control (Tiqqun, L'hypothese Cybernetique, Tiqqun 2, 2001). What we then have is architecture haunted by cybernetics – simultaneously be not-present and not-absent, following Jacques Derrida (Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, New York: Routledge, 2006). The article retraces cybernetics in architecture, discusses Pask’s take on architecture and cybernetics, and aims to articulate how cybernetics remains not-present and not-absent to the architectural discipline in the “post-critical” architecture that currently dominates (or suffocates) the architectural theory discourse since the turn of the millennium.

Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International (1994) was published not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the so-called demise of Marxism, and President George H.W. Bush’s proclamation of a New World Order. His book on Marx deservedly received a great deal of attention and was followed by the publication of a volume entitled Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1999), edited by Michael Sprinker. However, it would be erroneous to describe Derrida’s book in strictly literary terms, or as a masterpiece of print media, rather than an unusual transcription of an important historical event. What must be emphasized is that Specters of Marx functioned in the first instance as a voiced performance at a specific place and time. Not unlike the Platonic dialogues Derrida has famously subverted, Specters of Marx must be construed as a book that seeks to subvert its own status as a merely reified and spatial artifact. Although surprisingly few commentators have remarked upon this book’s deconstruction of the book form,1 it is finally impossible to divorce Specters of Marx from its historical and performative context, or, as Derrida would have it, from its “perverformative”2 and stubbornly anti-logocentric basis in temporality.KeywordsMiddle EastPrint MediumJewish PeopleMarxist TheoristAfrican IdentityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Filmmaker’s Journal:resonanz.01 (2008−2013) notes / fragments on a case of sonic hauntology Tony Cokes (bio) Mourning always follows a trauma. I have tried to show elsewhere that the work of mourning is not one kind of work among others. It is work itself, work in general, the trait by means of which one ought perhaps to reconsider the very concept of production.… A question of repetition: a specter is always a revenant. One cannot control its comings and goings because it begins by coming back.… There has never been a scholar who really, and as scholar, deals with ghosts. A traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts—nor in all that could be called the virtual space of spectrality. —Jacques Derrida, “Specters of Marx” Note One: Early Thoughts (2008−2010) I am developing resonanz.01, a video essay that ghosts, or thinks through and rearticulates Derrida’s concept of hauntology, as referenced in the above epigraphs, into relation to my reading of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, in which he maps blackness as a transnational diasporic form whereby musical, cultural, and political tropes, themes, and genres circulate via technologies, particularly sound recordings. Given that sound recordings (like the texts that I often deform in my practice) are objects of commodity circulation and consumption for multiple publics in disparate contexts, they inhabit a kind of virtual space and time of future deployment, consumer desires, and potential abuse. By that I mean that these familiar forms are constantly being shifed, re-encoded, and re-circulated among nodes: their origins [End Page 220] are played, replayed, and displaced. My adaptation of Gilroy’s concept involves unsettling any notion of fixed historical origin, or essentialist notion of blackness, and thinking instead about how black cultural practices inhabit, shadow, and shif modern cultural forms in unexpected ways and contexts. This video case study will consider ways in which non-blacks participate in, retrofit, and complicate black cultures, not through appropriation, thef, or misappropriation (as these exchanges may have been traditionally enacted and described) but through reworking the logics, technologies, abuses, and improvisations that blacks themselves deployed to invent, reproduce, and circulate their historical and sonic interventions. It’s not about simply copying or imi tating a given image or static idea, as if there were an authentic mode. It’s about taking up a technology or structure (usually at some cultural or geographic distance from its normative use or tradition) and trying to produce differential originary meaning with it. I’m arguing that blackness is not an essence, but a hack (or series thereof), a method, a technological intervention under construction (and also under often dire social pressures) being coded, or played into existence daily. My work is an attempt to think blackness as an uncanny, ghostly methodology, that is, blackness as a critical, technical hauntology in relation to whiteness. My video resonanz.01 explores the sound of Manchester post-punk band Joy Division and its linkages to dub reggae and subsequent forms like minimal techno and dubstep. Additionally, the video will consider Joy Division’s habit of producing darkness and the uncanny in visible form, particularly the way that English art director Peter Saville’s design vocabulary appropriates certain generic modernist or minimal forms to question the normative conditions and tropes of display for popular music in late 1970s capitalism. I will take up some of these same visual and cultural codes in the aesthetic of my project. Note Two: (2011−2012) The product did not have to appear as if it was for sale, only that it now existed and was itself. It did not have to draw attention to itself in the old fashioned way, with photographs and large blatant type and a general attitude of commercial neediness. —Paul Morley, “Joy Division: Piece By Piece” What does it mean to construct a visual form that functions as a conceptual or imaginative symbol, not an illustration or caption for sonic (or other) content? What would a critique of neoliberalism or late capitalism look like, or sound like? I read Saville’s decision to use a series of layered radio waves from the first observed pulsar1 for the cover...