Re-read Spivak’s Ghostwriting for this week’s lecture on Capital. Spivak uses the occasion of Derrida saying ‘hello to Marx’ (Spivak 1995:78) to make some key points about women in the contemporary condition of financialised capitalism, and offer a reading of Assia Djebar’s Far From Medina and the ghosts of many women that must be retrieved [...]

Zoogenesis

Do check out Richard Iveson’s blog if you are interested in Animal Studies, Derrida, Foucault… expect stuff later on Deleuze, Stiegler, Kafka, Burroughs etc: http://zoogenesis.wordpress.com/

Ghost Dance – 6.30 pm 24 Jan 2010

In 1983 Derrida collaborated with Ken McMullen on the film Ghost Dance. Screening, all welcome – Monday  24 Jan 2010 RHB Cinema Goldsmiths. 6.30 pm. Obliquely linked to the spectres in the Cultural Studies and Capitalism course on tuesdays at 4.    

Burning Books

In a commentary written not long before Derrida’s death, an elaboration of a keynote address he gave to a conference to inaugurate the Helene Cixous archive of the Bibliothéque Nationale, there is a definition of the library as a place ‘devoted to keeping the secret but insofar as they give it away’. It may be [...]

Hitchings

This is for the very wonderful Camille and Nick: Derrida, in his last interview, added a parenthesis as the text was going to press: “I just mentioned ‘secularism’. Please allow me a long parenthesis here. It is not about the veil at school but the veil of ‘marriage’. I unhesitatingly supported and endorsed with my [...]

Megacity topic: Street.

Megacity topic: Street. I’ve just come back from the TCS workshop on Megacity – a volume of the TCS-NEP New Encyclopaedia Project… Megacity is a term for those urban conglomerations that – ill defined as yet – have about 10 millions or more population, expand beyond the confines of the modernist city (whatever that means) [...]

Mind The Gap

I am always suspicious of travellers’ tales, especially those I’ve heard (or told) before. They get refined and streamlined, they come to resemble one’s own version of the Lonely Planet guidebook. Jacques Derrida knew this, commenting on travel narrative – he identifies two ‘risks’ of travelogues in the possible meanings of the terms we use: [...]

closet cleaner – notes from the vault, circa 1988

In Brecht’s play The Life of Galileo, very early on in the piece, Galileo says: For two thousand years men have believed that the sun and all the stars of heaven revolve about them. The pope, the cardinals, the princes, the scholars, captains, merchants, fishwives and schoolboys believed themselves to be sitting motionless in the [...]

Derrida’s Lumps

These opening moves for a talk on Derrida for the Met, which I want to twist to a discussion of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, Mao and Eldgridge Cleaver on the Lumpen – the rogues, the riff raff (voyous, translated as rogues or louts – just what minister Sarkozy called the Parisian suburban youth)… Derrida’s Lumps: they [...]

Derrida by Night.

Abstract for a paper for London Met in December: Derrida by Night. In receipt of the Adorno prize in 2001, Jacques Derrida meditates on what Theodore Adorno had to say about dreams and violence (Derrida “Paper Machine”, 2001/2005:168) What might be made of the work of Derrida on the rogue state, and how could this [...]

BAD MARXISM

Bad Marxism: Capitalism and Cultural Studies, Pluto 2004 ‘Hutnyk packs more dynamite in his sentences than any other writer I know.’ Amitava Kumar, Penn State University Cultural Studies commonly claims to be a radical discipline. This book thinks that’s a bad assessment. Cultural theorists love to toy with Marx, but critical thinking seems to fall [...]