Wednesday 8th February - Joanne Brueton (UCL) and Paul Earlie (Balliol College, Oxford)

JOINT SESSION: Jacques Derrida 
17.00-18.30
New Seminar Room, St John's College
Wine and Nibbles provided

Papers and Discussion 
Jo’s talk focused on Derrida 1974 text, Glas, and its relation to Jean Genet’s essays on Rembrandt. She interrogated the idea that meaning in a text can only be determined equivocally, challenging linear reading and probing the relationship between text and the space around it. She argued that the oblique becomes an optic for interpretation par excellence as it fragments and multiplies meanings; that its impulse demands engagement and textual agitation, exceeding language while questioning its very structure.

Paul's paper analysed the concept of 'spéculation' in Derrida's 1980 text, 'Spéculer - sur "Freud"'. Paul showed how Derrida turns to Freud's notion of 'speculation' in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) to provide a means of questioning phenomenological accounts of scientific method and progress. He argued that far from being a philosopher inattentive to scientific problems, Derrida's texts on psychoanalysis constitute a privileged means of reengaging and reenergising the relationship between deconstruction and science.

Questions were asked about the role of etymology in Derrida’s writings and how this related to word play and sonority; about the notion of voice in his writing; and about metaphor and its effect on reading. Thanks to Jo and Paul for such a stimulating, dynamic session!

'N'y allons pas par quatre chemins?*' Figures of the oblique in Jean Genet and Jacques Derrida
Joanne Brueton

© Anish Kapoor, When I Am Pregnant, 1992–1998, sculpture

Abstract
In 1972, the radical journal Obliques, defined as “une revue, à dominante critique, [qui] puisse avoir un espace où le discours critique soit contrarié, contesté, piégé, dynamité par une parole contradictoire […] pour toujours bifurquer dans d’autres directions”,[1] dedicated its second edition entirely to Jean Genet. In 1974, Derrida published his genre-defying text Glas whose fragmentary structure sought to “rendre le texte imprenable, bien sûr”.[2] We can find an oblique aesthetic at play in both Derrida and Genet’s writing: ubiquitously deployed in the former, and latently derived from the latter; and this paper offers an analysis of the purpose, behaviour and figuration of such indirection. By exploring the oblique in terms of its anamorphic, implicit, and liminal connotations, I argue that it becomes the metaphor of interpretation par excellence. It is through this oblique optic that Genet and Derrida prompt us to think about our structures of epistemology, encouraging us to consider the interstice between words as a locus of meaning, and find signification in that which resists direct communication. In its etymological parity with ‘limus’, to mean both askew and residual waste, the oblique points to a void or remnant which cannot be appropriated by the structures of language, but which constantly slips from them: an ever present absence which both reveals and exceeds the very frame that denies it.

*Jacques Derrida, “L’Offrande Oblique” in Passions, Paris: Galilée, 1993, p.26
[1] René Zahnd, Henri Ronse: La vie oblique, avec des textes de Jacques de Decker [et al], Lausanne: L'Age d'homme, c1996, pp.15 & 5
[2] Jacques Derrida, Glas, Paris: Éditons Denoël/Gonthier, 1981, p.90b

Joanne Brueton read Modern and Medieval Languages at St John’s College, Cambridge, and is now in the first year of her PhD at University College London. Her thesis looks at how geometry offers a figure of subjective experience in Jean Genet’s writing, and seeks to explore how a geometric ontology influences figural processes of writing in general. Her other research interests include Hélène Cixous, Samuel Beckett, Georges Bataille, Frank O’Hara and modern literary theory.

Psychoanalysis between Science and Fiction: Derrida’s ‘Spéculer—sur Freud’ 
Paul Earlie

The ‘Fred and Ginger’ Building, Prague. An example of deconstructivist architecture

Abstract
By focusing on Derrida’s use of the key term ‘spéculation’, this paper reads La Carte postale: de Socrate à Freud et au-delà (1980) as a text centrally concerned with problems of science and scientificity. While previous accounts have highlighted the importance of autobiographical traces in Derrida’s reading of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), I argue that this interpretation stops short of a complete and holistic account of Derrida’s text. Such an account can only be given once three distinct senses of the word ‘spéculer’ are seen to be inextricably related: namely, the ‘specular’ structure of self-other identity (exemplified in the fort-da game of Freud’s grandson Ernest); ‘speculation’ in the economic sense of investment, reserve, and return; and the kind of metaphysical ‘speculation’ that Freud’s positivism is determined to isolate and exclude from his analysis. In highlighting the implicated nature of this personal-economic-scientific speculation, 'Spéculer - sur Freud' provides a privileged means of engaging issues of science and empiricism in his writings and therefore offers a reply to critical readings which stress the supposedly anti- or a-scientific character of Derrida's work.

Paul Earlie is a third year DPhil student in French at Balliol College. His thesis examines the influence of Derrida’s reading of Freud on the formulation and development of deconstruction. His other interests include literary theory, modern European philosophy, and literature and thought in France from the Belle Epoque to present. He has also studied at Trinity College Dublin, St John’s College, Cambridge, and the Ecole Normale Supérieure.