SPAT_11_LN

Harold quite literally constructs his own world with the magic crayon, but I cannot quite recall any stories where he *deconstructs* this new world. Maybe in this moment, if read further, he would reconsider and deconstruct his own-made monster and reconstruct it to a new beginning, folding back in on his desires and initial hopes for said beast. “Derrida conjures and renders double-sided a metaphoric narration that mimes the 90’s pretense of opening to an otherness of ‘the other’ (subaltern, beast, or rock): that is, he performs the prospect of an empathic opening that is itself denied” (244)

One might have wished for Derridean texts examining the pitiable nomenclature that persists amidst this solar haze of discourse—environmentalism, ecology, sustainability, the retro-personifications of systems theory, the regressive othernesses of animal ‘studies.’ One wonders that his servicers or helpers were so entranced by the routine that they had failed to urge him to write toward the ecocidal, being stuck rather in a backloop. This occlusion appears, rather, rhetorically endemic. Why? (245)

It wasn’t that Derrida was too ‘untimely’ but that he constrained his address to the too contemporary in a certain way—performing ‘Derrida’ on request or when urged to respond to academic trends or politics (246)

Caught in a loop of recursion, failing to bring into the contemporary or move beyond, to move beyond Euro-centrism even perhaps? Rather than represent some blindspot or a repression—or some lack as if to be supplemented today—one might see here the riddle of a translation-effect held at bay and to be later released, that of being read by and from the anthropocene. That would be the ‘later on’ toward which J.D. points in saying ‘one has not yet begun to read me.’ This other reading to come is at war with the first, the autoimmune capsule of ‘late Derrida,’ presented as warm milk to the kids, withdrawing the tequila shots of the (not yet) ‘early’ Derrida—not trusting that it was ‘time’ for that, or whether that path would not lead to a pre-emption of the brand (the example of ‘de Man’).

Dealing with cinema and its spectrality, the refusal to write about it: Chirality implies a distinct asymmetry between supposed doubles—the way hands are never specularly doubled or aligned to begin with. On the one hand, what is called cinema is an ‘art of diversion,’ we hear, immersed in by Derrida as escapism (mostly from being in what he calls America, with which it is nonetheless allied). It is also intimate with his early years, transporting him to a fabled ‘France,’ allied to what is without prohibition, to the ‘infantile.’ (247)

Some quote within this, somewhere on page 252 although I don’t feel like quoting it, makes me think of Hannah Arendt’s “The Human Condition” – some kind of call to question the citizenship, to think of the polis of humanity….oh wait there “the phantasmal human polis” – the idea of a peak human terrifies me? But I guess it’s the way things go…

“khoratic” (252) []

Should we build an ode to the khora? []

“Deconstructive DNA” (252)

“Or more positively, might not a cohort brewed in rhetorical skills of the rarest sort open interrogations of the ‘something else’? That is, not only of media spells staging post-binarised dilemmas and telecratic whiteouts (a decapitated ‘America’ forbidden, essentially, to discuss climate change), or the crystallisation of new a-literacies (the wired youth) as regards any ‘era of the Book.’ But more interestingly still, might they not engage (‘deconstruct’?) the labyrinthine discourse today of rogue financialisation and its facades, tools, currency simulation, derivatives, and klepto-suicidal culture (of exponential ‘growth’)?” (253)

Are we the anaesthetized culture, the academics who have given up before starting? That culture’s perpetual relapse into pre-critical and cryptohumanist positions parallels that of geo-political and economic systems more broadly, to say nothing of the unwinding of university programs. Indeed, it mimes the global financial elites’ consolidation of a cognitive crony-capitalist kick-the-can-down-the-road backloop (denial) in which, mathematically, virtual generations are despoiled or cut off (hyper-debt, resource depletion, mass extinctions). (253)

We need an “anarch(ival)ist deconstructive meme” (253)

For footnote 16, what should be the metric of survival? Does not quite say, sends me to another text -- the endless fantastical search down many paths and corridors to the initial, statement and implied meaning begins... Chiral – “meaning not the same as its mirror image” []

“Instead, Derrida gave us specters. (Had it not occurred to him that ghosts were, in fact, mock-uncanny and gothic-literary—think Caspar—in contrast to the plague of zombies and vampires that have exponentially flooded pop culture?)” (255)

Derrida, further on ghosts:



Maybe we should really be consulting Caspar the friendly ghost when it comes to the spectral. That's interesting...Caspar the friendly ghost makes me think of Harold and his purple crayon a bit.



Eyebrows raised, expectant eager nature and similarly shaped, shapeless body. Willing to be so easily projected upon and to project upon others. Does Derrida identify with this mock-uncanny specter? Or is he not taking upon himself the pop culture references but speaking more to the world of the other, of the Kalunga. With ghost-hunters and movies like 'the conjuring' the world of the dead seems closer to our reality, yet at the same time quite otherly, more than vampires or zombies. Although there is a fictional aspect to the walking dead of those two characterizations....

If J.D. turns against the rhetorical moves and performatives he had, laboriously, set in place, it would be as if in the name of yet another justice than that of ‘the otherness of the (human) other,’ or in the non-name of the ‘J.D.’ that had refused to be photographed (255-6)

Refusing a photograph .... the sign of a vampire?! I still wonder what exactly in this reading makes me want to turn back to Hannah Arendt, instead of following the path to more Derrida. Maybe the possibility of unethical doom and a call for the need to be respondent to contemporary issues -- to question the politics of our philosophies and academic meanderings. Also, this:

FINAL THOUGHTS: Whoever thought it was a good idea to make a live-action version of "Harold & the Purple Crayon" for the theatre using masks....the nightmares I can imagine this causing. Childhood favorite book: Ruined. Also, what does it mean when the "real" or "live-action" becomes less real, has less meaning than the on page caricaturizations. The uncanny valley has been reached, but is there even a way out? This also brings to mind the terrifying images of 'real-world' Simpsons characters -- if they were able to step off the page and become your human next-door neighbor. Not that this really has anything to do with Derrida or his others or his Derrideans. Except maybe...