Sarah Wood

Without Mastery: Reading and Other Forces

Speaks to and helps us address where we are now, institutionally, environmentally and in thinking about reading Without Mastery engages the pleasures and rigours of reading, invoking Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters, Plato’s Lady Necessity, Freud, Derrida, Cixous, animals, angels, ghosts and children to explore our desire for mastery - especially the omnipotence of thoughts. Masterful thinking has brought the planet into environmental crisis. The acquiescence of reading, Wood shows, allows us to make contact with the unthinkable.

Beauty and Admiration in Learning: Louise Bourgeois and Paul de Man

This essay takes up the references to the sublime in Derrida’s ‘The Principle of Reason: the University in the Eyes of Its Pupils’. Kant associates reason, which is the essence of the university, with the sublime. We will approach learning in the university by way of astonishment and admiration, as they are outlined in the account of the sublime in the Third Critique, where Kant relates feeling to reason in a way that explicitly resists the reduction of feeling to what he calls ‘empirical psychology’. Despite this resistance on the part of Kant and others since, including Freud, there is as yet no critical language capable of foregrounding the relation between thinking and feeling, that does not run the risk of being assimilated to psychology in one form or another, whether it be the eighteenth century faculty-psychology familiar to Kant, or a more recent one. To paraphrase Kant on the sublime is to risk merely reproducing a conventional description of learning in terms of the ultimately exalting effect upon the mind of our initially unpalatable encounter with reason in the form of what’s too big to take in – huge mountains, chasms, cataracts and so forth. As if what exceeds the self could by means of reason return to the self and as if everything were to be understood in terms of property. However, there is a reading of Kant that offers us a different risk, one that is powerfully resistant to psychological recuperation: that of bathos, sinking into what Paul de Man calls ‘the prosaic materiality of the letter’. Derrida shows us how much takes place at the surface of writing, where creation begins with letters and sounds, never to return to the one who writes. At this superficial level we also recognize what is traditionally called verbal beauty: the pleasures of rhythm, phonic repetition, accent and tone in writing.

Rats Releasing Other Rats

‘Let us not give up [N’abandonnons pas].’1 What Derrida wants to do at this point is to get through an impossibly narrow place, without leaving anything out, without sacrificing anything. In Glas, the text I’ve just quoted, the way he tries to bring this about is not by following a logic or taking up a theoretical position or an ethical stance, though all these moves can be found in Glas. He goes after, listens out for, succumbs to — you name it — the vocable gl. It’s all about reading and writing, the better to address everything. To read gl or an or ra or whatever, you have to read like an animal, and who knows what that means? This gl is not a subject, not a precept, not a topic, not even a word; it’s just a bit of writing that becomes a character, the hero of Derrida’s text. For Derrida, letters have the quality of ‘animality’.2 They have a strange kind of independent writing-vitality that allows a ‘wandering of language always richer than knowledge’ (EJ, 89). We might therefore begin to wonder whether the desire to end unthinking discrimination against animals, to include animals in ethics, to bear them in mind, to bear our own animality in mind and open ethics to it — whether all these related and enriching desires might be best served by poetic rather than critical or theoretical forms of thinking: by a kind of writing that doesn’t stop to ‘articulate its own justification’ (EJ, 90) as Derrida puts it. At the same time, one might not want to give up the work of sifting and discerning (in Greek, the verb for these actions is krinien, the ancient word that, as is well known, gives us ‘criticism’ and ‘crisis’). Continuing to separate,

All the way to writing

You know you have given up when you begin to dream. Dreaming is the best kind of waiting: it overcomes nothing, it does not try to separate itself from what it wants, from everything it wants. Dreaming just begins. It changes places with whatever comes first, in a sublime confidence without jockeying, disavowal or forgetting. Dreams are the new patience. Remember them; they remember everything. Derrida writes that one day criticism will not have to wait for philosophy: