Where the World Ends: The 5th Derrida Today Conference

Description

"One Pace After the Other: Auster, Blanchot, Derrida"

In the work of Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Paul Auster, the pace is a way to think my distance from my self and the inaccessibility of the world of the other. If I am only because I am following and followed at a certain distance, the pace (le pas) is a way of thinking this being not (pas). This pace/not is considered at length in Derrida’s approach to Blanchot’s work, but it also appears in the work of Auster, a longtime reader and translator of Blanchot.This paper, therefore, follows behind Auster and Derrida as they in turn read Blanchot. It reads Blanchot’s observation that “I sense that you are following me, you who are nevertheless in front of me” in the context of Auster’s novel City of Glass (1985) and its account of Daniel Quinn’s pace/not toward Peter Stillman, arguing that, for Auster, the “I” cannot be thought without the other that it follows at a distance. And, for Auster, this “I” lives a “posthumous life, an interval between two deaths,” which is the interval of the pace, the pas within which Auster’s characters mean, to use Derrida’s phrase, “to go write-on-living,” to live on to the end.

Period	2016
Event type	Seminar
Location	London, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International