Writing ‘Time’:The (Late) Oeuvres of Jacques Derrida and William Kentridge

Abstract

In order to respond to the provocative interrogation of time in contemporary thought, this article investigates the ways in which the late oeuvres of Jacques Derrida and William Kentridge engage with the question of ‘time’: by way of deconstruction in Derrida's The Beast and the Sovereign (2011. Chicago: Chicago University Press), and through ‘imperfect erasure’ in the case of Kentridge's installation-performance The Refusal of Time / Refuse the Hour (2012). Derrida, the Algerian-French thinker, and Kentridge, the South-African artist-performer – two pre-eminent intellectuals of our time – coincidentally come to question time, to interrogate specific notions of time. They share a critical focus on the ‘instruments’ that ‘make’ time in the Western world: the ‘page’ of the text; the ‘stage’ of the performance; and the ‘wheel’, upon which the movements of time are deconstructed and imperfectly erased. In The Beast and the Sovereign, Derrida's reading of the adventures of Robinson Crusoe on the deserted island, interweaved with an analysis of a Martin Heidegger seminar on ‘solitude, finitude and the world’, deals with time in relation to the ‘retreating’ mechanism of the wheel. Kentridge, meanwhile, organizes the installation The Refusal of Time and the chamber-opera Refuse the Hour around the ‘returns’ of wheel of Fortuna. For both the thinker and the artist, the movements of the wheel set the rhythm of the encounter with the Other: in Derrida, it is the absolute other of death, in its relation to what is to come, l’à-venir; in Kentridge, it is the splitting of the ‘I’ into a series of others who act out the propelling force of their future(s). This article maps the re-treats and the re-turns of the wheel of time along the paths that Derrida and Kentridge follow on the page of the book and on the threshold between the studio and the world; it provides a reading of the singularity and the universality of their approaches to the (im)possible end of the journey in / through / of time.