Jacques Derrida

Yeah.

One thing when I was reading the text, one thing I was immediately thinking about is the-- I mean, if we were to kind of contextualize the theoretical references here, such as Derrida's Specter of Marx or Mark Fisher's Lost Futures diagnoses, those kind of texts came out of this background of like the kind of deep political dis-disenfranchisement in the West, right? So Derrida was very much writing this kind of post-post sixty-eight mood of searching, searching for a kind of revolutionary subjectivity and the lack of any revolutionary horizon, and the same as Mark Fisher is coming out of a real frustration with any kind of meaningful notion of left politics since the entire Europe, really.

But obviously, UK is more of a cogent example in that regard, the degeneration of party form.

So that kind of cultural pessimism very much come out of that type of general feeling of defeat.

sidetracked on this, but so anyway, my first thing when I decided I wanted to be a professional in this, I thought I had all these gaps, and I was trying to fill them.

I was rushing to try to fill them, and then somewhere in my master's program, I realized that's not really possible and you you can't i don't think you can learn anything effectively from a position of deficit where you just think ah there's no way i can possibly know enough to understand even the 10 pages i just read or the 100 pages i just read and so what that pushed me to try to do is is to try to find ideas that cut across a lot of what i was reading and so one of my Early, I don't know, one of my early insights, I suppose, or things that I was looking for in a lot of different texts was what did people do with the idea of like a palimpsest? or like the trace and I'm not maybe I was inspired by by Freud a note upon the mystic writing pad which was something that like really really made sense to me that short essay like like really made a great sense to me about how Freud understood the psyche and there was already this You know, this connection with that essay to things that Derrida was interested in, and he was very hard for me, but I felt like I understood Mystic Writing Pad, and that helped me understand a little bit of what, like, Derrida was getting at, and I felt like, okay, here's, like, a little bit of a link, so what can I do with this? And this led me to think about this idea of, you know, of palimpsest, and this was...

Something I explored, I think, actually, in my first journal publication, which is on the work of Brett Eason Ellis.

It's published in the International Journal of Zizek Studies, and it's on a theoretical idea of palimpsest, which is something I was really interested in.

[laughs]

... by Barthes and Derrida, which seems to have had a rather powerful negative effect.

[laughs]

Would you tell a little bit about what you took from that?

Well, so my first teachers had been followers of, uh, the German-American Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss.

Uh, but- Postmodernism hit Cornell like a freight train in the early 1970s.

Uh, we had a number of professors that had been students of Jacques Lacan or Derrida.

Michel Foucault himself came to, uh, Cornell.