Unheard of

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. All further references to this edition of The Oxford Literary Review will be given in the main body of the text. 2. See my ‘Auditing Derrida’, Parallax (2004) 10, pp. 3–18, with which the present essay might be paired. In the first section of ‘Auditing Derrida’, I explore in greater detail various connections in the etymological and lexical chains which include ‘audit’, ‘auditory’, and ‘auditorium’, all of which suggests the auratic, theatrical, and juridical aspects of a hearing, those that remain or return in order to establish parergonal conditions which threaten to destabilize the very discourse and practice of today's audit culture. 3. I use the term ‘medium’ here in the sense developed by Samuel Weber, notably in his essay ‘The future of the university: the cutting edge’, in Institution and Interpretation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 220–35. See pp. 230–1. It is interesting, here, that Weber sees traditional academic scholarship as advancing in pursuit of the not-yet-known, as if the unknown could be construed as just the negative other of knowledge, which then becomes an instrument in overcoming or mastering the unknown as not-yet-known. But with widespread effects of virtualization in the contemporary period, notably those which begin to unsecure the institutional site of the university as a definite place – a campus – ‘the unknown becomes, as it were, the element or medium of knowledge, not merely its negative other’. This is because ‘virtuality emerges not as a possibility to be realized or actualized’ in a ‘present’ or a ‘known’, but becomes instead the very condition of knowledge. Yet, albeit in different language, a similar thing might be said of judgement in the arts and humanities, going back at least as far as Kant. 4. The ‘event’ or ‘experience’ of teaching as deconstructible is something I attend to in my essay, ‘Teaching deconstruction: giving, taking, leaving, belonging, and the remains of the university’, Diacritics, 31 (2001), pp. 89–107. Here, the aleatory and unforeseeable aspects of teaching imply new or unrecognized kinds of responsibility and negotiation not simply bound to notions of the autonomy or (academic) freedom of the classical subject, whether master or pupil. The argument here draws in large part on a reading of Derrida's ‘Otobiographies: the teaching of Nietzsche and the politics of the proper name’, in The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), pp.1–38. 5. As the present essay unfolds, I relate this videotaping of the proceedings at Cork to Derrida's analysis, in a 1993 interview with Bernard Stiegler, of the complex interplay of evidence and testimony, illustrated notably in terms of the videotape shown during the Rodney King trial. 6. The allusion here is to Derrida's ‘Otobiographies’, which I discuss more fully in my essay ‘Teaching deconstruction’. 7. For a further treatment of the terms and ideas found here, see once again the opening stages of my essay ‘Auditing Derrida’. 8. Jacques Derrida, ‘Demeure: fiction and testimony’, published together with ‘The Instant of My Death’ by Maurice Blanchot (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). See pp. 27–8. Further references are given in the main body of the text. 9. Jacques Derrida, ‘The university without condition’, in Without Alibi (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 202–37. See pp. 214–5. 10. Jacques Derrida, ‘“Le Parjure,” perhaps: storytelling and lying’, in Without Alibi, pp. 161–201. See p. 196. Further references are given in the main body of the text. 11. Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), pp. 93–4. Further references are given in the main body of the text. 12. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 211, p. 216. Further references are given in the main body of the text.