Peggy Kamuf

Deconstruction and Love

The conjunction of deconstruction and love will seem an unexpected one to some. It is not an association authorized by the widely circulated image of deconstruction as an essentially negative operation, as if the term were really a synonym of ‘destruction’ and the additionaI syllable simply superfluous. This persistent reduction has come about only after many repetitions, performed most often so as to give someone a pretext for denunciation. Deconstruction has had bad press almost since it first appeared in Derrida’s writings. Things got quickly worse when others began to pick up the term, perhaps because this could be taken as a signal that something larger was afoot and would have to be dealt with more severely. Thus it is that, after several decades of such severity, one cannot approach an essay on deconstruction and love without anticipating a resistance fed by the rumour that deconstruction is essentially destructive and even that it destroys everything we, as members of civilized societies, ought to work to preserve from destruction, which is to say, everything we love, as well as everything we are told we ought to love. Beginning with love itself. At its core, this resistance would be working to protect love itself from destruction. And what could be more natural than that? The nature of this resistance would thus be that of the tautology assumed between acts of loving and acts of preserving or protecting from destruction. As such, it is likely to be activated by very powerful forces indeed.

Derrida on Television

Among so many other things, Jacques Derrida has taught us to look at titles and to consider their frequently strange topology. This attention is particularly rewarded when the title in question entitles a work of fiction, as Derrida has shown with Kafka’s Vor dem Gesetz, Poe’s The Purloined Letter, Baudelaire’s ‘La fausse monnaie’, and of course Blanchot’s La folie du jour, to name only a few examples. I mention this now because, about to speak as part of the programme of this conference titled ‘Applied Derrida’, I sense something like an obligation to address myself first of all to this title (and I would be very surprised if I were the only one here who had felt this obligation). At first approach, the analysis of such a title appears unlikely to uncover topological or referential undecidability of the sort that the title ‘Counterfeit Money’ produces across any possible reading of Baudelaire’s tale or, to take a different but similar example, of the sort the title of Melville’s The Confidence-Man deploys from one end to another of that work: I mean the structural impossibility of deciding whether the title, which gives the fiction its name and a name that already designates a kind of fiction — the counterfeit coin or the confidence-game — whether this title refers to some textual content — theme or story — or to the text itself in which that theme or story unfolds.

The impossible science of the unique being

Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory, by Peter Brunette and David Wills. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989, 210 pp.

Quiet Rebellion: The Fictional Heroines of Eliza Fowler Haywood.@@@Fictions of Feminine Desire: Disclosures of Helloise.@@@Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England.@@@Mothering the Mind: Twelve Studies of Writers and Their Silent Partners.

Recognised period specialists look at a wide variety of nurturing relationships between men and women, both sexual and platonic. Mothering is examined as a component of marriage and as a sustaining force in less traditional but equally creative relationships. In some instances, actual mothers provide the encouragement and unconditional approvals that are hallmarks of the mothering role. Crucial questions are posed such as how and why did these attachments evolve? Are such relationships mutually beneficial? The book offers a balanced feminist approach and perspective and is an important contribution not only to the areas of biography and psychoanalytical criticism, but also to womens studies.

The Gift of Clothes: Of Mme de Lafayette and the Origin of Novels

Our ultimate gratitude to art.-If we had not welcomed the arts and invented this kind of cult of the untrue, then the realization of the general untruth and mendaciousness that now comes to us through science-the realization that delusion and error are conditions of human knowledge and sensation-would be utterly unbearable. Honesty would lead to nausea and suicide. But now there is a counterforce against our honesty that helps us to avoid such consequences: art as the good will to appearance. We do not always keep our eyes from rounding off something and, as it were, finishing the poem: and then it is no longer eternal imperfection that we carry across the river of becomingthen we have the sense of carrying a goddess, and feel proud and childlike as we perform this service. As an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable for us, and art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon. At times we need a rest from ourselves by looking upon, by looking down upon, ourselves and, from an artistic distance, laughing over ourselves or weeping over ourselves. We must discover the hero no less than the fool in our passion for knowledge; we must occasionally find pleasure in our folly, or we cannot continue to find pleasure in our wisdom. Precisely because we are at bottom grave and serious human beings-really more weights than human beings-nothing does us as much good as a fools cap and bells: we need it in relation to ourselves-we need all exuberant, floating, dancing, mocking, childish, and blissful art lest we lose the freedom above things that our ideal demands of us. It would mean a relapse for us, with our irritable honesty, to get involved entirely in mortality and, for the sake of the over-severe demands that we make on ourselves in these matters, to become virtuous monsters and scarecrows. We should be able also to stand above morality-and not only to stand with the anxious stiffness of a man who is afraid of slipping and falling any moment, but also to float above it and play. How then could we possibly dispense with art and with the fool?--And as long as you are in any way ashamed before yourselves, you do not yet belong with us. Nietzsche, The Gay Science (trans. Walter Kaufmann)

Betrayals: An Entertainment

—A PROVOCATIVE TITLE. —It does not necessarily mean an amusement, in the way we speak today of “the entertainment industry” (although . . . ). The word was prompted by something read recently about the untranslatability of the French noun entretien. An essay on Blanchot, it remarked that “interview,” “dialog,” and “conversation,” which are common translations, were all different misappropriations of what Blanchot is engaged with in his book L’Entretien infini. That promptedme to wonder whether “entertaining” or “entertainment” would not be a good translation in some regard. And yet, as an alternative to those otherwise misleading choices, it is what students of translation would surely call a false friend, a faux-ami, which is to say, a word in the target language that is morphologically or etymologically the same (for example, entretenir and entertain) but has a very different semantic range and use from the original word.

Names of War

The ‘word of war’: twice the expression occurs in Antony and Cleopatra and, each time, it stands in for the proper name of Antony, the very Antony who, in the play’s first lines, is chided by one of his men (the lovingly named Philo) for turning his General’s ‘goodly eyes (. . . ) upon a tawny front’, in other words, the sultry face of Cleopatra, which has eclipsed in the ‘captain’s heart’ the real front of battle (I, 1, 1–9). And yet, despite this notorious lapse into the lap of ‘a gipsy’s lust’, Antony’s name remains so attached to the rumours and rigours of war that it can twice be evoked as the very ‘word of war’. First, by Octavius Caesar as he lays out to Antony griefs against his friend only lately returned from the dalliance in Egypt:

Reading Economies (Over Again)

Starting again. It’s a matter of starting again. Which is to say, of restarting, thus of not starting for the first time, not really starting, but continuing to start, continuing not starting, at least for a time. Starting over. And over. Continuing, not starting. Continuing interruptions, which is to say, continuing to interrupt, continuing from interruptions, continuing the interruptions: interruptions without interruption. The phrase ‘to start over’ often holds out consolation for some great loss, some devastating interruption. To ‘start over’ in the aftermath of a disaster is what is wished for the survivors when their grief is still too sharp to permit them to wish it for themselves. There is something to ‘get over’ and then one can ‘start over.’ ‘All is not over,’ they say, and that’s a promise. So then, starting again with a promise. Namely, the promise to write in view of this inaugural issue of the new Oxford Literary Review, newly housed at Edinburgh UP, and newly vested in a newly formed editorial board. Having promised to do that, one should try to keep the promise, and I promise I will try not to fail to do that, I will not try to fail, at least I will not fail to try. But how to keep this promise? How not to keep it? Keep starting over.