Derrida and America

Description

"Derrida in America, by way of Auster"

This paper relates to the question of whether American writers of today can be read through ideas drawn from deconstruction. It begins by suggesting that even as Jacques Derrida asks, “What does it mean to follow a ghost?” (Specters of Marx 10), so does the American author Paul Auster. Auster has written about ghosts and writers since his first major work, The Invention of Solitude, and this paper argues for Derrida’s position among the ghosts that Auster follows in his writing.

In his most famous work, City of Glass, for example, Auster clearly engages with questions of repetition, iterability, context, and the materiality of the word. In this story, a writer follows a man through the streets of New York, wanting “to believe that all his steps were actually to some purpose” (61), but finding that any meaning he discovers in these repeating same-but-different steps is marked by uncertainty, by absent origins and ends, by chance and accidents, even from the first step. And the step itself, which is a form of writing, is “out of joint,” being both the footstep just taken and the footstep soon to be taken, marking “the articulation between what absents itself and what presents itself” (Specters of Marx 25).

Auster’s writers, therefore, speak to “the figure of the acolyte, which accompanies, with its negative, the anacoluthon, which does not accompany” (Derrida, “‘Le Parjure,’ Perhaps” 182); they find themselves in their writing for another, in this way stepping between death and life. Auster’s work, therefore, theorises on the nature of reading and writing as ethical practices, as living practices, related to the past and future, to mourning, to betrayal, and responsibility. His writing after Derrida is about learning to live, finally, but in memory of those who lived before.

Period	2009
Event type	Conference
Location	Dublin, IrelandShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International