David Wills

The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)

To begin with, I would like to entrust myself to words that, were it possible, would be naked. Naked in the first place-but this is in order to announce already that I plan to speak endlessly of nudity and of the nude in philosophy. Starting from Genesis. I would like to choose words that are, to begin with, naked, quite simply, words from the heart. And to utter these words without repeating myself, without beginning again what I have already said here, more than once. It is said that one must avoid repeating oneself, in order not to give the appearance of

Deconstruction and the Visual Arts : Art, Media, Architecture

This anthology commprises 17 essays inspired by Derridas writings on art and literature. A variety of interpretations of and critical approaches to Derridas work is included. Short biographies on contributors. Name index. Circa 100 bibl. ref.

Passionate Secrets and Democratic Dissidence

This essay begins in the mode of exposition of the problem of the secret as the link between literature and democracy but moves to respond to Derridas text with a “heretical rewriting,” pursuing the notions of heresy and of rhetorical dissidence and the functioning of the anecdote, which illuminate Derridas account of democracy

Dorsal Chances: An Interview with David Wills

Peter Kilroy and Marcel Swiboda: Part of the initial impetus for this issue of parallax came from – amongst other sources – Martha Nussbaum’s discussion in The Fragility of Goodness of the pas de deux in Greek tragedy and philosophy between the concepts of tekhnē and tukhē. Tekhnē expands beyond the immediate empirical skills, actions and products of the artist/artisan to incorporate a supplementary logical account of itself – tekhnē qua techno-logy, teachable, precise and universal knowledge with which to stave off future contingencies; a will to mastery and control holding out the promise of indemnifying humanity against the effects of the unforeseen: chance, fortune, luck, the whims of the gods or that which ‘just happens’ (that is, tukhē). Tekhnē and tukhē thus appear as antithetical forces or impulses with which humanity must grapple. However, the ‘tragedy’ of techno-logy – its ability to hold together contradictory impulses without resolution – is that its counter-contingent knowledge must realize itself via a detour through matter thereby plunging humanity back within the realm of contingency and pressing tekhnē and tukhē – erstwhile antithetical combatants – into an intimate embrace. The futural, horizonal ‘foresight’ of the former is cut by the vertical blindness of the latter – a fall from above, an unforeseeable touch of con-tingency – as knowledge goes astray in matter. And whilst this contradictory irreducibility might at times be registered in a mode of mournful resignation, at others it appears to prise open the possibility of an affirmative coupling. ‘Art [tekhnē] has a love for chance [tukhē], and chance for art’, as Agathon is quoted as saying in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.

Thinking Back: Towards Technology, via Dorsality

The arguments mobilized here, indeed that mobilize themselves here, do so in the service of what might be called a ‘technological turn’. I employ the contrived reflexivity of the syntagm ‘mobilize themselves’ in order to emphasize the ineluctable effect of a certain mechanicity or automaticity. What mobilizes itself in the technological turn is a function of something that cannot but occur, has already occurred, occurs automatically, is itself already in the service of a machine. The technological turn describes the turn into a technology that was always there. The technological turn, therefore, cannot but occur. And cannot but occur as technological. For I will indeed argue that the turn itself, the notion of the turn, implies a type of technologization. It would be in order to explain something beyond the apparent syllogistic tautology of all that that I develop what follows.

Gravity’s Rainbow and the post-rhetorical

Now everybody — we too, started reading Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973. We haven’t spoken to hitch-hikers in Arizona, like Siegel,1 but we’ve met a few who never got past the first hundred pages, like Leverenz.2 A Sydney film critic and feminist friend thought it was pretentious to be seen with a tattered copy at an academic conference and was surprised to meet someone who had not only actually read it but was almost through a second time. We thought the novel merited at least two readings, being perhaps the most important work of fiction of the second half of the century. And yet most literary-critical responses we read failed to do justice to its importance. Certainly they sang its praises but this amounted finally to little more than a dry and repetitive litany. They failed, it seemed to us, to provide the analytic framework that might delineate the novel’s difference.

Meditations for the Birds

This chapter muses over the status of a recorded bird song in order to raise certain questions concerning non-ratiocinative utterance, and concerning forms of repetition or response. Are the birds making music, or simply mimicking, parroting or aping themselves? Is their song a call and response, a chant, or simply a repetition? Is it a theme and variation, indeed an improvisation, or rather a mechanical repetition, or indeed reproduction? Those questions are examined in the context of Derrida’s call for “another thinking of life, of the living, within another relation of the living to their ipseity, to their autos, to their own autokinesis and reactional automaticity, to death, to technics or to the mechanical [machinique]”; and they are developed through analysis of Descartes’ mechanical imaginings in the Second Meditation, and of the hauntings of reaction in response in his writings more generally. If, for Descartes, it appears that one comes to be by thinking only against a certain background of inanimation, one has to understand that over and against the more general difficulty, which we are only beginning to deal with, of distinguishing auto-motion from automatism.

A Hand to Turn the Time: The Menippean Satires of Thomas Pynchon@@@Writing Pynchon: Strategies in Fictional Analysis@@@The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon

A study of the major fiction of Thomas Pynchon in three contexts: Menippean satire, post-modernism, and American writing. The critical genealogy of the term satire is discussed and Pynchons V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravitys Rainbow are analyzed.

Writing Pynchon: Strategies in Fictional Analysis.

This book explores some of the ways in which contemporary literary theory can be used to read fiction. In particular, it focuses on Thomas Pynchons three novels to date and his collection of early stories. The theories exploited are concentrated in the work of Jacques Derrida which has been variously labelled deconstructive or more recently grammatological. The boundaries between biography, criticism and fiction are challenged to such an extent that the gentre of the text itself is part of the game that its readers are invited to play. Alec McHoul also wrote Telling How Texts Talk: Essays on Reading and Ethnomethodology and Wittgenstein on Certainty and the Problem of Rule in Social Science. David Wills has also written Self De(con)struct: Writing and the Surrealist Text and also Screen Play: Derrida and Film Theory together with Peter Brunette.

Pls Record Book Bid Lot 49 Stop J Derrida

What next? If the dualities in Gravity’s Rainbow match — link and annul — along the lines of the equations or relations we have just been describing, what might be the terms of a critical rhetoric that addresses the texts of Pynchon? That is to say, given the model of Gravity’s Rainbow, how might we proceed to write about the ways the dualities are deployed in his other books? — or indeed about any relation between two or more texts, or pieces of text? And every piece of text by our reckoning is always at least dual — for, as long as we are writing, that relation will fall within the context of a rhetorical, or post-rhetorical one.