Peggy Kamuf Research Articles

After the Death Penalty

After the Death Penalty Mark Sanders (bio) LITERATURE AND THE REMAINS OF THE DEATH PENALTY BY PEGGY KAMUF New York: Fordham University Press, 2019 In 1995, the Constitutional Court of the Republic of South Africa declared the death penalty to be unconstitutional. The judgment and concurring opinions in State v. Makwanyane relied, along with other precedents, on Furman v. Georgia, the 1972 U.S. Supreme Court case that, following a moratorium, brought about an end to executions in the United States, until Gregg v. Georgia opened the way four years later for their resumption under more restricted conditions. The South African justices find noteworthy Justice William Brennan's affirmation, in Furman, of human dignity as a value guiding his concurring opinion. A right to dignity is enshrined in South Africa's constitution (State v. Makwanyane, ¶¶ 57–58). In the judgment in Makwanyane, as well as in several of its concurring opinions, human dignity is connected to ubuntu—the idea that a person is a person through other people—an African ethics of reciprocity invoked in the epilogue of the 1993 interim South African constitution (State v. Makwanyane, ¶¶ 130–31, 223–27, 237–63, 307–13). This reference to ubuntu leads to an appeal to recognize "African law and legal thinking as a source of legal ideas, values and practice." It is then noted that, prior to the imposition of colonial law, although people suspected of witchcraft were sometimes summarily killed, and killings took place in the context of military discipline, this is not how murderers were punished: meaning that the equivalent of judicial killing was not practiced in precolonial southern Africa (State v. Makwanyane, ¶¶ 365–83). [End Page 177] Peggy Kamuf's Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty comes out of the post-Gregg era, taking as its point of departure Jacques Derrida's 1999–2000 lectures on the death penalty, which it takes to be similarly situated (Kamuf, 1–2). As the translator of these lectures, the first of two series of lectures by Derrida on the subject, and as an editor of the English-language edition of Derrida's seminars (publication of which began in 2009), Kamuf brings a clear sense of the status of the text, which is based on Derrida's typescript but also incorporates his handwritten annotations and verbal additions preserved in recordings. Having translated this and many other works by Derrida, and having authored several studies on his thought, Kamuf is well placed to undertake the analysis proposed in her book. Although a special issue of the Southern Journal of Philosophy addressed Derrida's seminars on the death penalty in 2012, and a book on the seminars edited by Kelly Oliver and Stephanie Straub appeared in 2018 (both of which volumes Kamuf contributed to), Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty is the first book-length study of them. Concentrating on remarks made in the lectures by Derrida about literature, which she sets out with great clarity, Kamuf proceeds to an analysis of works by various authors, with George Orwell, Robert Coover, Norman Mailer, and Charles Baudelaire as her principal foci. Derrida furnishes Kamuf with three main ideas. First, as Derrida hypothesizes in his first lecture, the "history of the institution named literature in Europe over the last three or four centuries is contemporary with and indissociable from a contestation of the death penalty." This "abolitionist struggle … tend[s] toward the worldwide as conjoined history, once again, of literature and rights, and of the right to literature" (Derrida 2014, 30; quoted in Kamuf, 19). As Kamuf shows, elsewhere Derrida defines this right as "its right to say everything. Literature thus ties its destiny to a certain noncensure, to the space of democratic freedom (freedom of the press, freedom of speech, etc.)" (Derrida 1995, 28; quoted in Kamuf, 19–20). Second, as Kamuf explains, for Derrida, "this right to say everything … is also the right to say nothing, or rather the right and even the obligation not to respond to a demand to know, to divulge the hidden or unapparent, to make public what is secret…. Literary fictions … figure a space of nonresponse to the demand to know and therefore a reserve...

Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty by Peggy Kamuf

Reviewed by: Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty by Peggy Kamuf Jeremy Tambling Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty. By Peggy Kamuf. New York: Fordham University Press. 2018. 161 pp. $25. ISBN 978–0–8232–8229–6. Peggy Kamuf translated the first of two volumes of Jacques Derrida’s seminars, published posthumously, called The Death Penalty; these transcripts appeared in English from Chicago University Press in 2014 and 2015. She says nothing about her work of translation, but her book offers footnotes, as it were, to Derrida’s work, which itself gives a fascinating range of arguments against the death penalty, drawing many examples from French literature: thus Hugo and Camus appear in both Derrida and Kamuf, and Kamuf analyses Baudelaire through the récit given in Le Spleen de Paris, translated here as ‘A Heroic Death’. Kafka appears here; while there are chapters on Orwell’s ‘A Hanging’, an account of an execution he was responsible for in colonial Burma (Myanmar), and on two American texts: Robert Coover’s A Public Burning (1977), his treatment of the electrocution of the Rosenbergs in 1953, and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1979). The American emphasis reflects Kamuf’s desire to concentrate on America’s history: apparently ending capital punishment in the early 1970s, only to reintroduce it, Gary Gilmore being the first to die under the new permission to kill in 1977. Gilmore (Mailer’s subject), shot for a double murder, brings out an irony Kamuf explores: Gilmore wanted to be executed and refused to appeal against his sentence; lawyers tried to save him because of the precedent that would give for capital [End Page 108] punishment to resume in America. And where much of the rest of the world has abolished the death penalty, America, Kamuf says with further irony, ‘is struggling to survive in a largely hostile world’ given the protection of secrecy, everything to do with execution even being exempted by law from the Freedom of Information Act (pp. 65–66). The interest in discussing the death penalty through literature comes from Derrida claiming that literature, not philosophy, has advanced the cause of abolition, and that literature always speaks against it: ‘literature’, as Derrida considers it, is distinct from ‘belles-lettres and poetry’ (Kamuf’s quotation, p. 19); it is modern, post-French Revolution, metatextual, almost halfway towards theory; Kamuf quotes Derrida saying that it ‘has the right to say anything’ (p. 23)—that being almost a definition of modern literature, as with Blanchot, another writer discussed. (This modernism cannot really claim Orwell, but interestingly, Kamuf has good things to say about him.) Such a literature is essential for a democracy and can only live in one; its power is to question the death penalty, which is read as a particular aim to define the limits of life, terminating its openness to chance. Kamuf makes good points about literature as a witness to capital punishment—a witness being essential to say that an ‘execution’ (a word whose etymology she traces) has taken place. The chapter on Coover shows how modern executions demand secrecy, and how they relate to the obscene. The death penalty is ‘driven by the urge to indecent exposure, which has to call up the contrary drive to keep hidden what should not be exposed’ (p. 82): in this novel, the Rosenbergs are made to die publicly, as a way of bringing home what that shamefulness involves; Kamuf here invokes Freud’s idea of the passage à l’acte, an acting out of unconscious desires (p. 85)—disavowed desires projected in front of spectators who can see what they have repressed. The book is full of sharply suggestive points, mostly unusual in debates of this sort, affirming literature’s inherent value in contesting the absoluteness of the death penalty, cutting off life and language together. Jeremy Tambling SWPS Warsaw Copyright © 2022 Modern Humanities Research Association

Analiza fragmenta: književnost, histerija, biseksualnost

A b s t r a c t AN ANALYSIS OF FRAGMENT: LITERATURE, HYSTERIA, BISEXUALITY The essay starts with Freud’s Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, relating its discordant lines of argumentation with the psychoanalytic concept of (bi)sexuality, as it was developed from Studies on Hysteria to Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, the latter of which was published in same year as the “Dora case”. We consider the aspects in which Freud’s contradictory analysis of the case becomes central to the feminist debate on hysteria in Hélène Cixous’s and Catherine Clément’s classic The Newly Born Woman. The analysis points to the constitutive relation of the authors’ disagreement on hysteria and different conceptions of literature and politics presented in their study and the subsequent polemical discussions. We further approach the dissent about the political and methodological framework of feminist criticism in the Anglo-American reception of the French authors, wherein gynocritics Elaine Showalter and Sandra M. Gilbert renounce the question of hysteria. Alternatively, deconstructive critical reading by Peggy Kamuf is grounded in Derrida’s approach to literature. Kamuf traces the main misunderstandings in Cixous’s reception, by interpreting her oeuvre as emblematic of so-called semi-theory and semi-politics, trying to deconstruct oppositions between a theoretical, political, and poetical text. Through the lens of semi-theory, the relation between Cixous’s semi-concept of a woman, as a reference without a referent, and the psychoanalytic understanding of bisexuality and hysteria, has far-reaching consequences on the reading of psychoanalytic text as literary and hysterical, as it compulsively repeats the very fragmentary pattern it tries to interpret. Keywords: hysteria, literature, feminist criticism, bisexuality, politics

Death Sentences: Peggy Kamuf's Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty

Death Sentences: Peggy Kamuf's <i>Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty</i>

Scatter I: The Politics of Politics in Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida

Scatter I: The Politics of Politics in Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida

Cixous's Semi-Fictions: Thinking at the Borders of Fiction

In her detailed study of five texts by Hélène Cixous, Mairéad Hanrahan demonstrates the effectiveness of the expression ‘semi-fictions’ to describe the unique œuvre of this prolific writer. Her use of this hyphenated term takes its cue from an influential essay by Peggy Kamuf, ‘To Give Place: Semi-Approaches to Hélène Cixous’ (Yale French Studies, 87 (1994), 68–89). According to Hanrahan's well-formulated reading of Kamuf, ‘[t]he “semi-” is less a space than a spacing; it is as a space of encounter, of “giving place” to the other, that it “gives place” to writing’ (p. 3; emphasis original). This perspective is aware that Cixous's itinerary is made up of multiple locations and their intersections: ‘If she has a place, it is always more than one, a place of connection between different places’ (p. 1). This point of view also reveals that these texts elude categorization; indeed, a number of Cixous's publications bear subtitles that open up new possibilities when it comes to genre. Hanrahan's study is marked by a nuanced understanding of the relationship between fiction and theory, identifying ‘the narrative impulse’ as ‘an insistent motor of Cixous's writing’ (p. 9) all while elucidating the seemingly paradoxical affirmation that ‘Cixous's narratives are singularly lacking in “narrativity”’ (p. 11). This is part of what is meant by the term ‘semi-fictions’: in each case, ‘the text in question both is a fiction and is more than a fiction’ (p. 13; emphasis original). If Jacques Derrida is frequently mentioned in this book, it is often in order to differentiate his work from that of Cixous, whether in their approach to narrative or their recourse to theory. Such distinctions as ‘Derrida's practice is more theoretical than Cixous's’ (p. 59) lead up to the suggestion that Cixous's work ‘goes “beyond” Derrida's’ in its very ‘movement of “going beyond”, never arresting the emergence of truth’ (p. 65; emphasis original). Despite these differences, it is clear that Derrida has served as a source of inspiration for Cixous and his reflections are at once complimentary and complementary to her work. These relationships come through most saliently in the final chapter of this study when Derrida's thoughts on hospitality enrich an exploration of Cixous's ‘newfound hospitality towards her own country of origin’ (p. 179) in her more recent writings. This book contains literary analyses that are especially aware of time, not only in its role in narrative, but also in its importance to the process of writing itself. Certain texts necessitate the passage of years before they can be conceived, and, when Cixous revisits tragedy, the work of writing ultimately ‘affirms life in all its dimensions, including its darkest underside’ (p. 152) in semi-fictions that exceed the possibilities of theatrical writing. This is a beautifully written and subtle study that contains unprecedented insights into the workings of Cixous's texts, eloquently arguing that these semi-fictions make up the spaces of ‘ongoing thinking, a thinking in movement, rather than a place in which “thoughts” are fixed’ (p. 85).

A Few Words (and Four Notes) of Introduction

A Few Words (and Four Notes) of Introduction Elizabeth Rottenberg (bio) I would like to introduce this text, which appears here in English for the first time, just as Laura Odello did in her footnote to the published French text (Odello 2014), by briefly recalling its editorial history. “Beyond the Power Principle” was first delivered by Jacques Derrida at a conference organized at New York University (with the support of the Center for French Civilization and Culture and the New York Institute for the Humanities) by Thomas Bishop and Richard Sennett on March 27, 1985.1 The conference, titled “Homage to Michel Foucault,” took place less than a year after Foucault’s death on June 25, 1984, a death that itself occurred just days after the French publication of volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality (L’usage du plaisir and Le souci de soi). The 1985 conference was thus both homage and celebration—an homage to the man and a celebration of The History of Sexuality, as we see in the opening paragraphs of “Beyond the Power Principle.”2 Although Derrida’s 1985 lecture remained unpublished until 2014, the reader may well recognize some of its questions and themes from the 1991 text “‘To Do Justice to Freud’: The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis.”3 Like “Beyond the Power Principle,” its source and urtext, “To Do Justice to Freud” considers not only the place and role of psychoanalysis in the Foucauldian project of a history of sexuality but also the problematization of the concept of power and what Foucault calls the “spiral” in the duality power/pleasure in The History of Sexuality. [End Page 1] Indeed, much of the language of the last section of “To Do Justice to Freud” recalls that of “Beyond the Power Principle.” For this reason, in fact, we can now say that “Beyond the Power Principle,” even more than “To Do Justice to Freud,” signals a shift in Derrida’s relationship to Foucault. Not only does “Beyond the Power Principle” move the discussion from the figure of Descartes and the “exclusion” of madness to the figure of Freud and Beyond the Pleasure Principle, but it also dispels the “shadow” (1996, 70) that made Derrida and Foucault invisible to one another for close to ten years after Foucault’s caustic response to Derrida’s essay “Cogito and the History of Madness.”4 Although the two men had been on good terms following Derrida’s release from a Czech prison on January 1, 1982 (and Foucault’s intercessions on his behalf), “Beyond the Power Principle” is the first text to testify publicly to this reconciliation. Sadly, we can only speculate about what the future of such a reconciliation might have been. In this sense, “Beyond the Power Principle” is an elegiac text. It is a text that mourns the loss of a man greatly admired by Derrida. But it is also a text that mourns the missed encounter between the Foucauldian project and the Freudian project, between the “perpetual spirals of power and pleasure” and the enigma of Freud’s Bemächtigungstrieb. As we know from “To Do Justice to Freud,” it is to this missed encounter that Derrida will return at great length in 1991. Six years after “Beyond the Power Principle,” that is, Derrida is still trying (and still daring) to imagine Foucault’s response—as if this missed encounter were a loss to which Derrida could not reconcile himself. [End Page 2] Elizabeth Rottenberg Elizabeth Rottenberg teaches philosophy and comparative literature at DePaul University. She is one of six founding members of the Derrida Seminars Translation Project. Her published work includes translations of Lyotard’s Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (1993), Blanchot’s Friendship (1997), Blanchot and Derrida’s The Instant of my Death/Demeure (2000), and Derrida’s The Death Penalty, vol. 2 (2000–01) (2016). She is the editor and translator of Derrida’s Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews (1971–2001) (2001) and the coeditor and co-translator (with Peggy Kamuf) of the two-volume edition of Derrida’s Psyche: Inventions of the Other (2007/2008). She is the author of Inheriting the Future: Legacies...

Earthquake weather and other tentative correspondences

The term ‘earthquake weather’ has had a fluctuating history being understood as both an observable event and a recurring fiction. The starting point for the term is usually associated with Aristotle who is said to have promoted the idea that winds trapped in underground caves caused earthquakes. Nineteenth century reports on the occurrence of earthquakes in Aotearoa New Zealand frequently link seismic activity with carefully detailed weather conditions.&#x0D; The nature of earthquake weather is variable with claims of calm expectancy, hot sultry weather or storms. Earthquake clouds currently have had some technical backing even as scientific reports largely deny associations between weather and earthquakes. The desire for such an association between the two events is of interest to this paper.&#x0D; Elizabeth Diller writing about the Blur project pointed out that, “Contemporary culture is addicted to weather information. … Our cultural anxiety about the weather can be attributed to its unpredictability.”[1] While weather is easily imagined as affective atmosphere we seek to illuminate the obdurate material atmosphere associated with earthquakes in an attempt to navigate the indeterminate atmospheric divide between stability and movement.&#x0D; Peggy Kamuf, writing on approaches to the work of Hélène Cixous, models a potential attitude for such a material writing project which might be to acknowledge&#x0D; “A matter of some gravity: that which pulls towards the earth, the lowest level, below ground even, the weight and volume with which heavier substances displace air or water. We say a matter is grave to remind ourselves to ponder it, to weigh it carefully, to exercise acute ethical vigilance … If the matter is grave, then, by definition it should not be taken lightly.”[2]&#x0D; However, Kamuf suggests a further angle of approach, which holds as imperative that one’s subject not be crushed by the weight of approach but, rather, be permitted to “escape the force of our gravity.”[3] From such an angle, “The most responsible and serious approach advances carefully and slowly, but above all lightly - which may mean obliquely, or imperceptibly, or even not at all”.[4] Here, as Hiddleson argues, Cixous’ works, “participate in the genre of theory, but allow the object of their theorising to shift and mutate, in their enjoyment of poetic associations, parallels and allusions.”[5]&#x0D; Like Kamuf’s dilemma of the love note, in which one does not wish to crush one’s lover under the weight of one’s own desires, Victorian and Edwardian correspondents of earthquakes and usual weather offer, time and again, paths of escape. Unexpected weathers and seismic activities are delicately laid together, but with a marked silence about the nature of their relationship. In this paper we explore the relationship offered by the correspondants through a tentative poetics of atmosphere consisting of text and accompanying images.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; [1] Elizabeth Diller, “Blur/Babble”, Anything, 2001, 132-139.&#x0D; [2] Peggy Kamuf, “To give Place: Semi-approaches to Hélène Cixous”, Yale French Studies, no. 87, 1995, 68.&#x0D; [3] Peggy Kamuf, Book of Addresses. California: Stanford University Press. 2005, 114).&#x0D; [4] Peggy Kamuf, Book of Addresses. California: Stanford University Press. 2005, 114).&#x0D; [5] Hiddleston, Jane. 2010. “In or out? The Dislocations of Helene Cixous” pp. 47-76. Poststructuralism and Postcoloniality: The Anxiety of Theory. (2010:51)

“Admiration of Nelson Mandela, or The Laws of Reflection”: Translator's Introduction

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1. Jacques Derrida, “Ethics and Politics Today,” in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, trans. and ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 300.2. Mustapha Tlili, “The Meaning of an Act of Compassion and Rigor: Preface to the American Edition,” trans. Franklin Philip, in For Nelson Mandela, ed. Jacques Derrida and Mustapha Tlili (New York, NY: Seaver, 1987), x. An earlier translation of “Admiration of Nelson Mandela,” by Mary Ann Caws and Isabelle Lorenz, appeared in this volume under the title “The Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela, in Admiration,” and later in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. II, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). Likewise, the French text was also published in Psyché. Inventions de l’autre, vol. II (Paris: Galilée, 1987-2003). I will take this opportunity to note that my own effort has doubtless benefited from the consultation of Caws and Lorenz's translation, though many of my own decisions have, of course, for better or for worse, differed from theirs. I should also note, moreover, that behind the idea of retranslating this text there lay no polemical intention; in other words, this new translation is by no means intended to “replace” what is all in all, in my opinion, an excellent, a rigorous and an attentive, rendering.3. Jacques Derrida, “Racism's Last Word,” trans. Peggy Kamuf. Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 290–9. For the debate that followed, see Ann McClintock and Rob Nixon, “No Names Apart: The Separation of Word and History in Derrida's ‘Le Dernier Mot du Racisme,’” Critical Inquiry 13 (1986): 140–54; and Jacques Derrida, “But, Beyond… (Open Letter to Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon),” trans. Peggy Kamuf. Critical Inquiry 13 (1986): 155–70.4. Tlili, “The Meaning of an Act of Compassion and Rigor,” xi.5. I note in passing that this gesture already anticipates Derrida's 1999–2001 seminar on the death penalty, in which he will attempt to ally, in a philosophically rigorous fashion, “the reasons of the heart” – compassion, for example – with those of principle, in other words, with “reason itself”; Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, vol. I, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013). See also Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow … A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 89f.6. Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography, trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 375.7. Jacques Derrida, “Before the Law,” trans. Avital Ronell with Christine Roulston, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York, NY: Routledge, 1992), 210; my emphasis.8. Cf. Paul de Man, “The Concept of Irony,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 184. “Irony and history seem to be curiously linked to each other,” notes de Man, “but this can only be tackled when the complexities of what we could call performative rhetoric have been more thoroughly mastered.”9. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 84.

Orrin Wang Romantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, HistoryRomantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History. Orrin Wang. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Pp. ix+369.

<i>Orrin Wang</i> Romantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History<i>Romantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History</i>. Orrin Wang. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Pp. ix+369.

This Is Not a Plough:

This Is Not a Plough:

Response by J. Hillis Miller

Response by J. Hillis Miller

“With a View to Speech”

"With a View to Speech" Akira Mizuta Lippit (bio) The Beast & the Sovereign, by Jacques Derrida, 2 volumes, translated by Geoffrey Bennington, edited by Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf. The Seminars of Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009 and 2011. Volume 1, 349 pp. $22.50 paper, $38.00 cloth. Volume 2, 293 pp. $30.00 e-book, $35.00 cloth. The first two volumes of an ambitious project to publish Jacques Derrida's complete "teaching lectures" or seminars, delivered between 1968 and 2003 in French and in English, begin at the end with Derrida's last, unfinished seminar "The Beast & the Sovereign," which he presented during 2001-3 in France and the United States. Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf, who supervise the English edition of "The Seminars of Jacques Derrida," and are also involved in the French project published by Galilée, explain the process by which Derrida's lectures, which he called "seminars" and which were in most cases written out in their entirety beforehand, originally by hand, then by typewriter, and eventually electronically, were transcribed, and with minimal editing, published first in French and then in English translation. "In all cases," write Bennington and Kamuf, along with their cosignatories of the "General Introduction to the French Edition" (Marc Crépon, Marguerite Derrida, Thomas Dutoit, Michel Lise, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud), "our primary goal is to present the text of the seminar, as written by Jacques Derrida with a view to speech, to reading aloud, and thus with some marks of anticipated orality and some familiar turns of phrase" (2009, xi, original emphases). Already at work in this complex project is an irreducible ambiguity [End Page 345] regarding the phenomenality of the object, its objectivity (and objecthood) as such, but also its authority, specifically its authorship. These signatories, all of who worked closely with Derrida (including Marguerite), and whom Derrida trusted deeply, are also involved in an expanded economy of authorship that is not unrelated to Derrida's work. As they write in the general introduction, "It is not certain that Jacques Derrida would have published the seminars as they stand; probably he would have reorganized or rewritten them" (2009, xi). These supplementary texts, written and spoken by Derrida, bear the marks then of a quasi authorship, a virtual authorship he shares with his colleagues posthumously. This precarious authorship bears significantly upon the continued understanding of Derrida's oeuvre as a singularly important event in the history of twentieth-century thought since it is precisely one of the themes to which Derrida turns and returns consistently, here and elsewhere: Who or what writes? Is writing written or spoken by a subject or does it arrive, return, take place ipso facto with or without an author? In his or her absence? And what constitutes writing, what are its genres, its genders even? Who or what is sovereign in writing, an author, he or she? Among the notable phrases in the editors' introduction is the claim that these seminars, to be distinguished from Derrida's published work, which he authorized as their author, which he authored in a more conventional sense of the term, are texts written by Derrida but "with a view to speech." That is, their authorship is performed as it were live, in full view, perhaps, a spectacle of speech and thought. What might such a view be, and how to view or review the visuality implicit in speech, inherent in the two volumes that signal the arrival of a writing genre with a view to and perhaps of speech? What mode of speech is made visible in these publications? What does this thought look like? As the editors suggest, it is Derrida himself, the dynamic temporality of his thought, what Jean-Claude Lebensztejn once referred to as Derrida's "extravagant patience," and the rhythms with which his thought unfolds that become visible.1 Not simply the thought made text, made flesh, transposed from and to a body fixed in space, but a movement in time, changing in time, over time and through space from one session to the next. What is immediately but also slowly visible in these volumes is the remarkable...

"With a View to Speech"

"With a View to Speech" Akira Mizuta Lippit (bio) The Beast & the Sovereign, by Jacques Derrida, 2 volumes, translated by Geoffrey Bennington, edited by Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf. The Seminars of Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009 and 2011. Volume 1, 349 pp. $22.50 paper, $38.00 cloth. Volume 2, 293 pp. $30.00 e-book, $35.00 cloth. The first two volumes of an ambitious project to publish Jacques Derrida's complete "teaching lectures" or seminars, delivered between 1968 and 2003 in French and in English, begin at the end with Derrida's last, unfinished seminar "The Beast & the Sovereign," which he presented during 2001-3 in France and the United States. Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf, who supervise the English edition of "The Seminars of Jacques Derrida," and are also involved in the French project published by Galilée, explain the process by which Derrida's lectures, which he called "seminars" and which were in most cases written out in their entirety beforehand, originally by hand, then by typewriter, and eventually electronically, were transcribed, and with minimal editing, published first in French and then in English translation. "In all cases," write Bennington and Kamuf, along with their cosignatories of the "General Introduction to the French Edition" (Marc Crépon, Marguerite Derrida, Thomas Dutoit, Michel Lise, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud), "our primary goal is to present the text of the seminar, as written by Jacques Derrida with a view to speech, to reading aloud, and thus with some marks of anticipated orality and some familiar turns of phrase" (2009, xi, original emphases). Already at work in this complex project is an irreducible ambiguity [End Page 345] regarding the phenomenality of the object, its objectivity (and objecthood) as such, but also its authority, specifically its authorship. These signatories, all of who worked closely with Derrida (including Marguerite), and whom Derrida trusted deeply, are also involved in an expanded economy of authorship that is not unrelated to Derrida's work. As they write in the general introduction, "It is not certain that Jacques Derrida would have published the seminars as they stand; probably he would have reorganized or rewritten them" (2009, xi). These supplementary texts, written and spoken by Derrida, bear the marks then of a quasi authorship, a virtual authorship he shares with his colleagues posthumously. This precarious authorship bears significantly upon the continued understanding of Derrida's oeuvre as a singularly important event in the history of twentieth-century thought since it is precisely one of the themes to which Derrida turns and returns consistently, here and elsewhere: Who or what writes? Is writing written or spoken by a subject or does it arrive, return, take place ipso facto with or without an author? In his or her absence? And what constitutes writing, what are its genres, its genders even? Who or what is sovereign in writing, an author, he or she? Among the notable phrases in the editors' introduction is the claim that these seminars, to be distinguished from Derrida's published work, which he authorized as their author, which he authored in a more conventional sense of the term, are texts written by Derrida but "with a view to speech." That is, their authorship is performed as it were live, in full view, perhaps, a spectacle of speech and thought. What might such a view be, and how to view or review the visuality implicit in speech, inherent in the two volumes that signal the arrival of a writing genre with a view to and perhaps of speech? What mode of speech is made visible in these publications? What does this thought look like? As the editors suggest, it is Derrida himself, the dynamic temporality of his thought, what Jean-Claude Lebensztejn once referred to as Derrida's "extravagant patience," and the rhythms with which his thought unfolds that become visible.1 Not simply the thought made text, made flesh, transposed from and to a body fixed in space, but a movement in time, changing in time, over time and through space from one session to the next. What is immediately but also slowly visible in these volumes is the remarkable...

Rousseau's Knees

Rousseau's Knees Peggy Kamuf It may seem a little perverse to address the topic "Rousseau and emotion" through what seems, at least on its most evident surface, such an unemotional text as Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire. In its 100 Pléiade pages the word "émotion" occurs but three times. Indeed, this text is the record of a willed flight from emotion, which is all but banished from the ambling thoughts strung together in the reveries. The experience the text aims to record is the "sentiment de l'existence depouillé de toute autre affection."1 Emotion is associated with agitated movement and random reactions of a kind the writer-walker wants to avoid. But precisely because the work is in flight from emotional agitation, it keeps emotion's image in its rearview mirror, so to speak. Looked at from this angle, one may see how a certain idea of emotion is being repeatedly defined by this text. We can begin to discern that image by looking at the three occurrences of émotion. The first is from the Fourth Promenade, when Rousseau is recalling how a friend almost knocked the young Jean-Jacques's brains out: Je ne vis de ma vie une agitation pareille à celle de ce pauvre garçon voyant mon sang ruisseler dans mes cheveux. Il crut m'avoir tué. Il se précipite sur moi, m'embrasse, me serre étroitement en fondant en larmes et poussant des cris perçans. Je l'embrassois aussi de toute ma force en pleurant comme lui dans une émotion confuse qui n'étoit pas sans quelque douceur. (OC 1:1037, emphasis added) Despite the gruesomeness of the accident, this is a sweet memory, associated with the uncertain emotion "qui n'étoit pas sans quelque douceur." It is sweet to recall how the poor perpetrator manifested sincere affection toward me, Jean-Jacques. At the thought I might be dead, he almost went mad. In its next occurrence, émotion is likewise associated with a child's spontaneous show of affection toward Jean-Jacques, now a lonely old man: Je marchois distrait et rêvant sans regarder autour de moi quand tout à coup je me sentis saisir les genoux. Je regarde et je vois un petit enfant de cinq ou six ans qui serroit mes genoux de toute sa force en me regardant d'un air si familier et si caressant que mes entrailles s'émurent. [...] [J]e suis repassé plusieurs fois par Clignancourt dans l'espérance d'y revoir cet enfant, mais je n'ai plus revu ni lui ni le pere, et il ne m'est plus resté de cette rencontre qu'un souvenir assez vif, mêlé toujours de douceur et de tristesse, comme toutes les émotions qui pénetrent encor quelque-fois jusqu'à mon cœur. (OC 1:1089-90, emphasis added) [End Page 132] Like the preceding anecdote, this one recounts a chance event as the occasion for émotion. Both are sweet memories insofar as the other's affection for the subject was made manifest by unmistakable signs: actions, gestures, and bodily eruptions like cries or tears. They also share a particular trajectory, which is most apparent in the scene between the old man and the child. The dreamy walker has been startled out of his reverie by the shock of an outside force, the child's impulsive embrace. Seeing the benevolent face of the boy, he is moved, "mes entrailles s'émurent." The movement of émouvoir draws the subject out of himself into a social space where he becomes an object for others. There he is seized by the knees, by the genoux, that is, also by the jenous, where the singular I and the plural we gap into each other and leave a trace of inappropriable otherness. Later on, we'll come back to this recollection so as to read there a scene of Rousseau seized by writing in his body. The space of the je-nous is always potentially the danger zone for the walker-writer, the agitated zone of plural passions he has fled. In the encounter with the child, this dangerous move is compensated by the face "me regardant d'un...

Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity by David Simpson

David Simpson. Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern: Poetics of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. 292. $99. David Simpson's gorgeously written, audacious study gives us a haunted Wordsworth, an occupant and observer of a modern capitalist world's ghost-ridden dark and twilight zones (3). By characterizing him these terms, Simpson is part calling attention how obsessively William Wordsworth's verse treats figures--like the discharged soldier of Prelude, Book 4, the old Cumberland beggar, or Margaret The Ruined Cottage--who are spooky their de-animated, death-in-life demeanor and their tragic disconnection from human sociality. He is also underlining how Wordsworth's self-representations partake of the same spectrality, so that the poet somehow wanders lonely even when, as Dorothy Wordsworth's journals indicate, he ought by rights describe himself as enjoying company. To approach this Romantic ghost world Simpson takes a path distinct from that followed by the many Romanticists who, while aligning Wordsworth and Freud, have foregrounded the elegiac strain verse that seems forever be rehearsing loss (of Lucy, of a younger self, of his brother John) and that brings the dead back only lose them once more. spectrality this book treats is likewise misapprehended if construed as a link connecting Wordsworth the Romantic period's Gothic tales and ballads and so as yet another indication that a poet his day perforce lived (as Thomas Love Peacock complained) in the days that are and was obliged make exploded superstition and premodern custom his stock-in-trade. On the contrary, the ghost-seeing recorded by Wordsworth's verse and demanded of his readers is not the product of a backward look, but rather, Simpson insists, a marker of this poet's ongoing relevance. Wordsworth's specters express the conditions of their time, which is ... still our time and as far as we can see the time still come (11). poetry which they feature is the vehicle of an unresolved history we still inhabit (13), one reason Simpson has found himself returning it, making this his third book on Wordsworth (Wordsworth and the Figurings of the Real appeared 1982, and Wordsworth's Historical Imagination 1987). In its dramatization of indigence, dislocation, and disconnection, guilt and sorrow, Wordsworth's poetics of modernity represents, Simpson avers, a signal resource with which theorize the conditions of human existence a modern lifeworld shaped by the achieved dominance of the commodity form. In Specters of Marx--a key resource for this argument--Derrida pondered the claim about the specter haunting Europe that had opened Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto and noted that there are several times of the specter. By returning, the revenant might testify either to a living past or a living future. capitalist societies who post-1989 triumphally declared communism history--obsolescent, a dead end--should have remembered, Derrida suggests, that precisely never dying the ghost remains both to come-back and to come (trans. Peggy Kamuf [Routledge, 1994], 99). Through brilliant readings of an immense range of Wordsworth's poems, Simpson seeks a similar fashion rebuke accounts of Wordsworth as history, a figure so distant time from us as be over and done with. (Generally this is his students' response, he notes an Introduction whose attention the travails of pedagogy will, for many academic readers, occasion gleams of recognition and remembered sensations of sad perplexity.) For Simpson, the ghostly figures Wordsworth's works, rather than blasts from the past, haunt the present from the present itself (145). Thus Simpson's Wordsworth finally places little credit the Burkean traditionalism and attendant notions of an organic social solidarity that he sometimes espoused. He is notable, rather, for his insight into the abstraction, hollowness, and deadness that commodification introduces into human relations. …

To follow: the wake of Jacques Derrida

This book collects 10 years of Peggy Kamuf's writing on the work and friendship of Jacques Derrida. This study discusses the key aspects of Derrida's thought, either from a single work or across several texts. Kamuf engages with a broad array of his work, from the 1960s to the posthumous publication of his teaching seminars. She also considers press interviews and the collaboration on a film. These close readings are punctuated by brief recollections from their long friendship. The chapters trace a reflection that undergoes the sudden event of Derrida's death. Rather than take this interruption as its premise, however, the book sets out from Derrida's own teaching that mourning begins with friendship and not just at the death of the friend. Thus, the strict chronology of the chapters, from 2000 to 2010, highlights a general illusion of 'before' and 'after' that comes undone over the course of the sequence.

Déjà Vieux: Derrida's Late Conjuration of de Man

Déjà Vieux: Derrida's Late Conjuration of de Man

In the Name of the Event: The Deconstructive Conjuration

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.

Whither Fanon?

Whither Fanon?