‘Something is Happening Here and You Don't Know What it is’: Jacques Derrida Unplugged
2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 26; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/00039810500047573
ISSN1465-3907
Autores Tópico(s)African cultural and philosophical studies
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements I thank Terry Cook (University of Manitoba), Wendy Duff (University of Toronto), Sam Jacob (South African History Archive), Ethel Kriger (South African History Archive), John Samuel (Nelson Mandela Foundation), Kurt Shillinger (University of the Witwatersrand) and David Wallace (Catholic University) for their comments on the first draft of this essay. Whether they tempered and bounded my enthusiasm enough is for the reader to decide. Notes Hamilton et al., Refiguring the Archive, 54. In its Derridean usage, ‘mourning’ is not in opposition to, or antithetical to, ‘celebrating’. Derrida celebrated a celebrating which unfolds from within mourning. What we—we who call ourselves archivists—name archival discourse is but part of a bigger family of discourses which can validly be named ‘archival’. Most archivists don't realise this. Increasingly scholars and practitioners from a wide range of other disciplines are stretching the boundaries of archival discourse by interrogating the concept of archive and applying it within their own disciplinary spaces. Nevertheless, we can still speak meaningfully of an archival discourse and an archival terrain narrowly defined—that space occupied by and defined by those of us who call ourselves archivists. For evidence of this turn, see Burt and Vanpee, Reading the Archive; the special issues of History of the Human Sciences vol. 11, no. 4 (1998) and vol. 12, no. 2 (1999); Hamilton et al., Refiguring the Archive; and Comay, Lost in the Archives. Brien Brothman had sounded the alert two years earlier (see below), but I had not paid heed. In Burt and Vanpee, Reading the Archive. All dates of texts cited by me refer to versions published in English. Derrida and Tlili, For Nelson Mandela. Pre-1996 archival literature has to be one of the dullest bodies of written work imaginable. Obviously there were exceptions to this generalisation, but they tended to prove the depressing rule. For me, the great exceptions were Hugh Taylor and Terry Cook. Happily, the last decade has seen the emergence of a new generation of archivists—some of them influenced directly by Derrida, Taylor and Cook—willing to allow imagination space. To cite seven collaborative works: Chora L Works (with Peter Eisenman), Religion (with Gianni Vattimo et al.), Of Hospitality (with Anne Dufourmantelle), A Taste for the Secret (with Maurizio Ferraris), Veils (with Helene Cixous), Echographies of Television (with Bernard Stiegler) and Counterpath: Travelling with Jacques Derrida (with Catherine Malabou). The seminar proceedings are reproduced in Hamilton et al., Refiguring the Archive. Harris, ‘A Shaft of Darkness,’ 81. Ibid., 61. I have heard many archivists and historians depicting Archive Fever dismissively along these lines. Read especially ‘Circumfession’, and Monolingualism of the Other, or The Prosthesis of Origin. See, for example, Counterpath, 90. (Marranos were Iberian Jews who—formally—converted to Christianity in order to escape the Inquisition.) In this paragraph I draw heavily from a letter to the editor of scrutiny2 (vol. 5, no. 1, 2000) which I co-authored with Sello Hatang. Norris and Benjamin, What is Deconstruction?, 27. Ibid. Ibid., 10. John Caputo describes ‘archi-text’ as ‘various networks—social, historical, linguistic, political, sexual networks (the list goes on nowadays to include electronic networks, worldwide webs)—various horizons or presuppositions…’ (Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 79 – 80). I use the term in its narrow sense. See Note 3. See, for instance, Brothman, ‘The Limit of Limits’ and ‘Declining Derrida’. In fact, I would only name five (these have all published work on their study)—Terry Cook, Eric Ketelaar, Sello Hatang, Tom Nesmith and myself. Brien Brothman and I have made this point before, independently, in the texts cited above. Harris, ‘A Shaft of Darkness,’ 77. Derrida makes the argument for this assertion most directly in Of Hospitality and On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Hamilton et al., Refiguring the Archive, 54. An extraordinary number of Derrida's books were lightly edited versions of papers presented by him or transcripts of seminar proceedings. It would not be stretching things unduly to describe as fictional Derrida's The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. The strongest autobiographical threads are to be found in ‘Circumfession’ and Counterpath. I cite these works in relation to Bob Dylan's novel and first volume of autobiography. This happened most notably when the University of Cambridge decided to award him an honorary doctorate in 1992, and again in the weeks after his death. Derrida (released by Zeitgeist Films, produced by Amy Ziering Kofman, directed by Kofman and Kirby Dick, 2002). The movie was an official selection for numerous film festivals, and won the Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival. I would describe the movie just cited, for example, as an iconic gesture. Hamilton et al., Refiguring the Archive, 38. Derrida, Without Alibi, 95 – 96. In the last book he published before his death, Counterpath, he interrogated his need to keep travelling, and explored the elusiveness of ‘home’. See, for example, Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas and Without Alibi, 125. From the album Highway 61 Revisited (1965).
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