#jacques derrida

[edwordsmyth]

Derrida, Kirby Dick / Amy Ziering (2002)

[funeral]

This Ego, this living individual would itself be inhabited and invaded by its own specter. It would be constituted by specters of which it becomes the host and which it assembles in the haunted community of a single body. Ego=ghost. Therefore “I am” would mean “I am haunted”: I am haunted by myself who am (haunted by myself who am haunted by myself who am . . . and so forth). Wherever there is Ego, es spukt, “it spooks.” . . . Its translation always fails, unfortunately, to render the link between the impersonality or the quasi-anonymity of an operation [spuken] without act, without real subject or object, and the production of a figure, that of the revenant [der Spuk]: not simply “it spooks,” as we just ventured to translate, but “it returns,” “it ghosts,” “it specters.”) The essential mode of self-presence of the cogito would be the haunting obsession of this “es spukt.

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx

[sivavakkiyar]

interview w/ Jacques Derrida, from Ghost Dance

[davidhudson]

Jacques Derrida, July 15, 1930 – October 9, 2004.

[jacobwren]

"I'd like to write you so simply, so simply, so simply. Without having anything ever catch the eye, so that above all the language remains self-evidently secret, as if it were being invented at every step, and as if it were burning immediately." — Jacques Derrida, The Post Card

[improvisedliturgy]

Derrida is not undermining all distinctions but showing that distinctions are better thought of differentially, as occupying different points along a continuous line, where elements of one thing blend and bleed into others, and demonstrating that the “black-and-white,” either/or way of thinking in terms of binary oppositions—where one thing is simply the lack of the other—is invidious and loaded with traps. We cannot understand men or women if we do not first understand what is womanly about men and manly about women (reversal); both “man” and “woman” are traps that prevent the invention of new forms of gendered existence that shatter traditional stereotypes (displacement).

John D. Caputo, "A Prayer for the Impossible: A Catechumen's Guide to Deconstruction" in The Essential Caputo

[on-poetry]

"I am a dictation, pronounces poetry, learn me by heart, copy me down, guard and keep me, look out for me, look at me, dictated dictation, right before your eyes: soundtrack, wake, trail of light, photograph of the feast in mourning."

—Jacques Derrida, in Poesia (1988).

[shihlun]

Jacques Derrida and Ornette Coleman at La Villette Jazz Festival in Paris, 1997.

Photo by Christian Ducasse