A paragraph is still missing here
to be written
soon
thoughts on grief, the missing, the loss
the book of loss
You have to start somewhere, with thinking, asking, answering, writing and acting – but there is no completely justified beginning, according to Derrida. This thought forms the starting point – and therefore also a beginning – of his thinking. It can be found at the beginning of his work Grammatology (1967), as well as in the Margins of Philosophy (1972) – this thinking of a beginning, which we must set for our own work for strategic reasons, but which cannot be definitively justified by anything, runs through Derrida’s entire work and will also determine what deconstruction is. Where does deconstruction begin? Where does it begin? Where can it start? Derrida radically questions the regression to a starting point from which everything else could be constructed – philosophically or on the level of auto-biography or on the level of historical social or biological evolution. A metaphysical thinking that begins with the search for the origins or the foundations and proceeds to a reconstruction of these within the order inevitably comes up against the fact that things have not turned out as they should.
But is it possible to re-construct?!
Jacques Derrida transformed the classical figure of difference (différence) into the temporal différance, which sounds the same in French, to emphasize the difference to the former. The meaning of this différance is not easy to determine: negatively, it aims at a difference that, in contrast to the classical figure of thought, is always already ‘there’ and also not ‘abolishable’. Etymologically, Derrida’s neologism refers to the verb différer, which means both ‘to distinguish’ and ‘to postpone’. This means that the moment of a fundamental and irrevocable otherness is structurally inscribed in Derrida’s theory. Derrida’s philosophy is not so much concerned with the subject of alterity, it is a philosophy of alterity that knows no beginning and no end, but only postponement and slippage.
Derrida’s entire work is permeated by the idea of an alterity that cannot be dissolved into a self. We may think of Derrida’s reflections on “de-appropriation” (“ex-appropriation”). These show how the attempt to appropriate the foreign and the other ultimately misses its target, and how the subject is determined both by this attempt and by its failure. This applies to the case of mourning and grief, in which everything remains “in me”, but in which the dead other person resists complete integration. Derrida’s reflections on memory aim to refute the idea of the “reawakening of presence”, i.e. the restoration and visualization of the past in the present. Instead, with Derrida, remembering remains an inconclusive process that functions selectively and never leads back to the remembered past. Repetition, such as the re-recollection of the past in the present, does not generate something equal.
As Hélène Cixous exclaimed with her famous essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” “Write your self. Your body must be heard.” Was & is not yet said with it, in which way. And today we have become familiar with multiple, very different, also contradictory ways of referring - in which way and with which artistic strategies artists confront oppression and violence in their works: oppression and violence are circumvented, imaginary (Irigaray) other worlds are designed, the uncanniness of traumatic experience is dreamlike conjured to give it visual expression, subversive shifts are attempted. We have seen many times how, through confrontation, subversion, through imaginary counter-design and deconstruction, it is a matter of turning around the violent grip on the bodies, the psyches – be it in the gaze, be it entirely physical, be it through social constraints, norms, exclusions.
There is something that cannot be brought together and gathered in language - legein, Greek, means as much as: 1) to gather things together in one place: to read, gather, pick up, collect; or also 2) to see someone, something as part of something: to count as something. However, there will always be something that cannot be collected, read or told in one place, in the place of a person's memory. Something cannot be written, cannot be told and cannot be read. All the narrative can testify to is the gap, the wound that will not close. The trauma. This is the ethical and aesthetic task of preserving this fragmented, frayed, unconnected memory, of narrating in and with these rifts.
Kofman’s text thus points to a different model of storytelling and of approaching trauma, injury. To that It hurts that we have been concerned with today, one that does not attempt to incorporate the past into a coherent and closed narrative, but one that opens and interrogates the past. No possibility of closure of the past. Instead, the step into the future is more associated with opening, with a beginning rather than an end: There is no end to the story of the wounds of the past. The emphasis in Kofman’s text on uncovering and questioning the opening up and questioning the gaps and contradictions in the narrative also underlies my listening here today.
Back to The SCORE
or to The LOUNGE
Things have not gone or become “ideal” – we can read this again and again in all the daily political lamentations and weak ethical demands for changes and a return to morality and order. Things must have taken a bad turn somewhere – either influenced by an external accident or by an immanent “monstrosity”[1], i.e. either by absolute contingency or the immanent principle of the disruption of things themselves. The consequences are “idealisms”, simply put: some believe in the lost paradise; others restore order by claiming to think the loss of order in it. At this point, Derrida points out with Heidegger that both cases are based on a value that is not itself tested: presence. The self-presence of life as a first dimension of the time of presence serves as a necessity to trace the contingent (the time of absence, death, debauchery, accident, catastrophe) back to it – even if only within thought. Breaking with this way of thinking has a multitude of enormous implications – this break releases a way of thinking that, according to conventional understanding, is no longer even philosophy.
With Derrida, the starting point of thinking is always already given, it cannot be completely caught up with and determined – Derrida’s thinking is a philosophy of answering. We already respond to a “Come!” that we receive as a necessity – but whose origin is radically contingent. This way of thinking does not have to lead the contingent back to necessity; it does not have to grasp the catastrophe or the accident, the fact that things have turned out differently than they were originally intended or originally given to them, as secondary to a primary order as a deviation. There is nothing but deviation – things always put themselves at risk – and that is their chance. This is the necessity in Derrida’s thinking.
Art, as Hélène Cixous lets us know, always exposes one, or rather the “wound” of the subject. Art shakes off everything that veils and covers the wound. What then emerges is the truth of a wound that we can only step in front of again to cover again. It is the old topos of the veil that Cixous repeatedly invokes in her work (Cixous 2006). That veil that veils, but that precisely through this veiling can also reveal, expose, and confront with the bare truth in the mode of its concealment. But not only the tearing away of the veil can reveal, there are also modes of veiling that reveal. There is: The unveiling veiling. In the context of Cixous's “autobiographical writing,” it is primarily her own myopia that functions as such an unveiling veiling. It is not the glasses that make one see, but the blind seeing that leads to the discovery of a truth of the subject, as stated in Conversation with the Donkey. Writing blind, „Not seeing is also seeing.“ (Cixous 2022, XX)
Violence disfigures that which it rapes, it tears the form from the body at which it is directed and turns it into nothing but a sign of its rage. Seen in this way, violence acts for its own sake.
Again and again, however, the connection between violent destruction and the uncovering of a truth, as well as the emergence of the new through the violent breaking open of the old, is explored – also in art.
Acts of violence are explored – also artistically – as acts of liberation.
Violence that makes itself the truth is often indistinguishable from that truth that can sometimes also show itself violently, in that it shatters.
This distinction, however, seems important. Violence for the sake of violence serves only itself. Truth, on the other hand, although it can sometimes shake us violently, always remains undetermined and open, it leads to something else, opens new spaces, it is not violence for the sake of violence.
Sarah Kofman begins her short text ’”Ma vie' et la psychanalyse” with a wish: “J'ai toujours eu envie de raconter ma vie” // “I have always had the desire to tell my life” (Kofman [1976] 1987, 18). In her first psychoanalytic sessions, she admits that she was struggling not so much to tell the story of her life as to take control of it. She continues, “It all started when I had nothing left to say, when I didn't know what to start with and what to stop with. What I had told before then came back, but in a very different way discontinuously” (Kofman [1976] 1987, 18). Only when the coherent story petered out, when she had nothing left to say, can she begin another form of storytelling. Where the old way of telling, according to Kofman, was “closed, almost impenetrable-without the slightest break, the smallest hole” (Kofman [1976] 1987, 18), there had to be an opening, the words had to become discontinuous so that they could become uncontrollably different and even surprise themselves with what they now reveal in a new and different way.
At the center, for Cixous, is the “wound” as a resource for infinite speaking and writing, a narrative of the arts, of philosophy as well as of the sciences. The subject circles around it to make sure of it, but also to step back from it to survive. Survival, however, does not mean getting rid of the wound. The fact that every subject qua subject is the place-holder and governor of a wound can perhaps be considered a kind of unwritten “psychoanalytic law”. Often the wound refers to a hole in the symbolic, i.e. in language, which no artist, no text, no work of art can completely escape. Such holes in language Werner Hamacher calls “Sprachsprung” (Hamacher 2019, 61) to name the silence of language, those moments when language breaks. The confrontation with it, however, happens in many ways: through distancing, through transfiguration, through escape movements. Nevertheless, everything that still speaks in art about all the times that may have passed is the marking, the language of a wound. However, not in the form of a narcissistic self-stylization as a victim, but precisely out of resistance to the temptation to stylize oneself as the eternal victim of this or that wounding.
When Hélène Cixous was a child, with all her “very great irritable feelings without a name”, it happened that she kicked and tormented the family dog and it bit her foot, leaving indelible traces that since that time recur in Cixous’ writing with a haunting presence. The “felix culpa” (“happy guilt”) or “blessed wound” is, in fact, what ultimately remains for her, a stigma created by her encounter with the dog, and that allows her to find a transformation of her initially failed relationship with this animal. Perhaps it is even that bite and its indelible trace that has enabled Cixous to turn to Derrida’s theory, in which we find the idea that even the (almost) erased trace can produce further traces. The ability to trace – or mark the absence of presence – implies the ability to almost erase a trace in its interplay between absence and presence. But the erasure of traces leaves further traces, so that the trace can never be completely erased.
