 | KAUFMAN ― Why are you in here now? DONALD ― Nothing, I was just… Oh, one thing, I need a cool way to kill people. Don’t worry! For my script! Ha ha! KAUFMAN ― Um, okay, killer’s a literature professor who cuts off little chunks of his victims’ bodies until they die. He’d be known in the tabloids as “The Deconstructionist. |
Full script over at DailyScript (PDF).
| What DeLillo understood, long ago, is the end of the world would be experienced not as the end of the world but rather as a way of thinking and talking about the end of the world. What he understood is that the toxic cloud that has our name on it would be defined by its lack of definition; that we would never have as much information about it as we need to have or that someone else has; that it would turn into a free-floating void, exactly as withholding as it is encompassing; that it would become part of the landscape and that the landscape would become part of it; and that, of course, there would be footage, endlessly recycled but ultimately inconclusive. No, Don DeLillo has never written about what about BP, Transocean, the MMS, and our thirst for oil have wrought in the Gulf of Mexico. But 25 years ago he imagined the name for a disaster that would come with its own excruciating and tantalizing Zapruder, and that would allow us to talk it — and ourselves — to death: The underwater toxic event. |
Jacques Derrida developed a similar idea about the 9/11 attacks. See Philosophy in a Time of Terror
Tom Junod is an American journalist. He’s also the author of the excellent piece : “The Falling Man” (which is also the name of a great novel by Don DeLillo)
| [W]e repeat this, we must repeat it, and it is all the more necessary to repeat it insofar as we do not really know what is being named in this way, as of to exorcise two times at one go: on the one hand, to conjure away, as if by magic, the “thing” itself, the fear ot the terror it inspires (for repetition always protects by neutralizing, deadening, distancing a traumatism, and this is true for the repetition of the televised images we will speak of later), and, on the other hand, to deny, as close as possible to this act of language and this enunciation, our powerlessness to name in an appropriate fashion, to characterize, to think the thing in question, to get beyond the mere deictic of the date: something terrible took place on September 11, and in the end we don’t know what. |
Quoted from DERRIDA, Jacques ([2001]2003). «Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides» in BORRADORI, Giovanna (2003). Philosophy in a Time of Terror, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, p. 87. Read more via Google books preview.
“The dreamer invents his own grammar. No meaningful material or prior text exists which he might simply use, even if he never deprives himself of them. Such is, despite their interest, the limitation of the Chiffriermethode and the Traumbuch. As much as of the generality and the rigidity of the code, that limitation is a function of an excessive preoccupation with contents, an insufficient concern for relations, locations, processes, and differences (…)”
Quoted from “Freud and the scene of writing” by Jacques Derrida ([1966]1972), tr. by Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale French Studies, no 48, p. 89 (PDF available upon subscription to JSTOR).
Previously on Skandalon : Freud
| An Argentinean judge’s recent decision to drop charges against a philosophy professor for alleged copyright infringement is being seen as a stepping stone to drawing attention to copyright issues in Latin America, according to advocates. Professor Horacio Potel created open source websites to post foreign philosophers’ work in Spanish. The websites were named “Nietzsche in Spanish,” “Heidegger in Spanish,” and “Derrida in Spanish. |
Horacio Potel’s site are working again : http://www.jacquesderrida.com.ar/ and http://www.heideggeriana.com.ar/
This story first began in March 2009. Read more about it HERE and HERE.
