Disaster/Event (thing)

This writeup hangs on my dogmatic belief that everyone can laugh and cry. We needn’t choose. Andy Warhol knew it (even if he didn’t always follow it): “A person can cry or laugh. Always when you’re crying you could be laughing. You have the choice” (Warhol 112). The one thing I don’t want to sacrifice (my one stable dogma) is my ability to laugh at the terrible events of my own life, and my ability to cry at the most beautiful. It isn’t that I don’t ‘believe’ in the disaster, its that the disaster can be hilarious; it needn’t be an unbearable burden anymore than it need be uproariously funny. Things change, and they’ll keep changing. Let’s laugh at the painful darkness of our lives! (“Laughter I have pronounced holy: you higher men, learn—to laugh!”(Nietzsche 27)).

On "What if the event turns out to be the disaster?"

• 1. Then we must do what we cannot do. (Maurice Blanchot)
• 2. Well… so what? (Andy Warhol)
• 3. Hilarious and terrible: that can’t ‘happen’ yet it haunts us. (Jacques Derrida)

The disaster, ‘properly’ understood, cannot turn out to be the event. This writeup will be an attempt to flesh out this contention. First, however, I would like to sketch two possible responses to the question. One comes from Maurice Blanchot, and his very weighty and serious meditations on the nature of the disaster and our relationship to it (if we can, properly, be said to relate to the disaster at all). Blanchot sees the disaster as the unattainable possibility that, in its very unattainability, determines all that is attainable. For him, the disaster is a structural feature of our language/thought that cannot be ‘escaped’. Thus, he sees the disaster as a synchronic phenomenon that determines our whole mode of being and thinking; the disaster requires us to grasp it but always destroys us the instant we approach it. The second response comes from Andy Warhol and entails an almost diametrical opposition to the weight of Blanchot’s thinking. Warhol accepts, along with Blanchot, the ontological crisis that the above question poses for us, but his response is to make fun of it. His is a light-hearted response, one that accepts its determined status and answers: “So what?” Warhol, unlike Blanchot, doesn’t allow atemporal (synchronic) structural considerations to freeze his life into some kind of anticipatory, futile stasis. Warhol, personally and ‘artistically’ is utterly dictated by the temporal: the form of his life is run à la mode. The fashionable (or the fashionably unfashionable) comings and goings of the Manhattan art scene determine what shape Warhol’s life takes, even as his life (in turn) determines those comings and goings. For Warhol, what ‘is’ becomes purely a matter of what ‘is’ at the moment; he exchanges Blanchot’s synchronic framework for an entirely diachronic one.

I would like to argue that Jacques Derrida’s text “Envois” offers us a third response to this question: a response that holds any definitive answer in abeyance. Derrida shifts between the diachronic and the synchronic in order to trouble (without rejecting) the whole framework in which the question is posed. It isn’t just that the disaster is or isn’t the event, but that the ontologization ((1)) of the disaster ignores the concept of the disaster qua disaster. That is, Blanchot argues we cannot grasp the disaster but, in arguing that it “is” the event, we enforce stasis on the disaster itself. The same is true for Warhol, but in reverse. What I want to draw out is Derrida’s shifting ground: he moves between ‘time’ and ‘structure’ and allows both the material and the metaphysical to impinge on every aspect of his thinking.

While Derrida doesn’t just ‘dissolve’ the question he does allow us a sort of diversionary therapy, one that doesn’t take it as given that our lives are always already horribly inauthentic. By holding the answer in abeyance, we are given a sort of respite from the endless and futile work of Blanchot and the blank deadpan amusement of Warhol’s Factory. We needn’t always, and interminably, strive for an authenticity we’ll never reach, but we needn’t give up all interest in authenticity either. We can be horrified and amused, terrorized and entertained. And all at once. What more could we ask for? ((2))

Blanchot

It might be helpful if we investigate the ‘nature’ of the disaster. Blanchot writes that

when the disaster comes upon us, it does not come. The disaster is its imminence, but since the future, as we conceive of it in the order of lived time, belongs to the disaster, the disaster has always already withdrawn or dissuaded it; there is no future for the disaster, just as there is no time or space for its accomplishment (Blanchot 2).

The disaster, then, appears to inhabit a peculiar ontological space: it is neither here (with us in the ‘order of lived time’) nor is it there, in the realm of absolute absence, nothingness. (It is neither a Heideggerian Nothing nor a Platonic One).

“The future belongs to the disaster.” My reflections on the disaster will be guided by this phrase. What does it mean for the future to be disastrous? Perhaps the very impossibility of reaching or grasping our future is itself disastrous. Here we are in lived time, constantly moving towards something that we can never quite arrive at.

Blanchot again: “To think the disaster (if this is possible, and it not possible inasmuch as we suspect that the disaster is thought) is to have no longer any future in which to think it” (Blanchot 1). This is the most ruinous aspect of the disaster: even if we could think the disaster (even if we could grasp the disaster as it ‘is’) we could not grasp it, because doing so would be our ruin. To ‘achieve’ the future is to have no future. We can’t get there because getting there means never getting anywhere. Intuitively, it makes no sense to say that the future is made present, or that we can ‘get to’ the horizon.

How, then, could the event ((3)) turn out to be the disaster? If the event is simply the moment of the present, how could it never quite arrive? It seems to me that Blanchot makes the event itself disastrous through an intense focus on ‘authenticity’. He writes

The disaster, unexperienced. It is what escapes the very possibility of experience—it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes. Which does not mean that the disaster, as the force of writing, is excluded from it, is beyond the pale of writing or extratextual (Blanchot 7).

It is because “The disaster is separate; that which is most separate” (Blanchot 1) that it can never be re-presented via writing or (more strongly) our lived experience. The problem for Blanchot is not simply that the disaster can’t ever be reached, but that the disaster (because of its unreachable position) radically determines the possibilities of all our lived experience. To put it even more metaphysically: what we can reach is always already determined by what we cannot reach. We are ‘contained’ by that which we, ourselves, cannot contain. (("Enframing")) ((4))

This leads to Blanchot’s unending feeling of disappointment. If we can never quite reach authentic writing, what can we do? Blanchot doesn’t simply choose to continue writing in the face of this blackened and limited horizon. Rather, he must (like Samuel Beckett's Unnameable...)continue writing. Because the disaster is the unattainable determinant of our lived time, we must always attempt to approach it (even while we attempts to flee it), no matter how futilely. ((5)) Blanchot writes that “there is disaster only because, ceaselessly, it falls short of disaster” (Blanchot 41). That is, there is a disaster only because we never quite measure up to the disaster. For Blanchot, even while we realize that the disaster is intimately bound up with our inability to realize it, we cannot simply avoid it; we can’t ‘forget’ the disaster because it is a structural feature of our thinking (or our language). Thus, Blanchot’s work and life, which unfold in the ‘order of lived time’ do not relate to that lived time, but to a structural possibility that ‘determines’ lived time. Blanchot’s response to the disaster is a purely synchronic one that ends up in an endless gesture of refusal. A refusal to accept silence, and a refusal to give up trying to gain silence. Edmond Jabès writes beautifully of this refusal: “Silence is the kernel of noise. Therefore, God, who is hard silence, cannot be heard, only accepted as the fruit colors are accepted by the hours of the tree.” And “God is after life, where life changes its name” (Jabès 189). For Blanchot, the silent name of God and the disaster are one and the same. ((6)) “And to be silent is still to speak. Silence is impossible. That is why we desire it” (Blanchot 11). The disaster can’t be figured (in our minds or our language), but we figure it as that which can’t be figured. A contradictory impasse.

Warhol

Now we turn from the mystic seriousness of Blanchot to the poppy indifference of Andy Warhol. Unlike Blanchot, Andy Warhol can ‘disregard’ the disaster. At the very least, he can find it uninteresting, something that can be had in red or blue, big or small, on wallpaper or a canvas, in a film or on the side of a bus. For Warhol, the disaster might escape “the very possibility of experience” (Blanchot 7) but that doesn’t mean we have to worry too much about it. Note Warhol on his own experience of the disastrous:

Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all there—I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes say that the way things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually it’s the way things happen to you in life that’s unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it’s like watching television—you don’t feel anything (Warhol 91).

Warhol’s suspicions about the inauthenticity of life are undramatically confirmed after his shooting: he didn’t have one of those patented sitcom “epiphanies” in which experiences became invigorated with new meaning after a brush with the fragility of his own life. ((7)) No.

Warhol’s experience confirmed what he dimly suspected: experiences are inauthentic. We are removed from the ‘strong’ and the ‘real’ as portrayed in the movies. ((8)) When we get shot it’s not like watching someone on television get shot because that would be too real. Instead, our lives are ‘disastrous’ in precisely Blanchot’s sense. We never quite arrive at them; they’re always held out just in front of us.

But, importantly, the crisis of authenticity that leads Blanchot (among others) to the endless despair of a writing that isn’t quite writing, leads Andy Warhol to “Business art. Art business. The Business Art Business” (Warhol 92). For Blanchot, we can’t write, but we must. Warhol responds: “So what.” He writes:

Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, “So what.” That’s one of my favorite things to say. “So what.” “My mother didn’t love me.” So what. “I’m a success but I’m still alone.” So what. I don’t know how I learned to do that trick. It took a long time for me to learn it, but once you do, you never forget (Warhol 112).

So, you can’t write but you have to? So what. While Blanchot refuses to let go of the impossibility of authenticity, Warhol revels in it. Some critics ((9)) want to see in Warhol a critical response to these ‘deep’ metaphysical questions, I would argue that he simply brushes them aside, or makes them banal: he plays them all on the same level. ((10)) The unbearable weight of inauthenticity is displaced in favor of endless confirmation of that inauthenticity. Take Warhol’s eating habits, for example.

I really do live for the future, because when I’m eating a box of candy, I can’t wait to taste the last piece. I don’t even taste any of the other pieces, I just want to finish and throw the box away and not have to have it on my mind any more. I would rather either have it now or know I’ll never have it so I don’t have to think about it. That’s why some days I wish I were very very old-looking so I wouldn’t have to think about getting old-looking (Warhol 113).

It is precisely Blanchot’s disaster that we see here: we want a future we can never have (we ignore all but the ‘last’ piece of candy). But for Warhol the sense of weight dissipates: he’s not ‘worried’ (in the absolute sense I attribute to Blanchot). He just wants to get to the last piece. His whole ‘experience’ (of life, of candy) isn’t called into question by wanting to have it now or not at all, he just eats the candy a little faster.

But, Warhol’s frivolity remains at an impasse just like Blanchot’s seriousness. In my terms, Warhol shifts the focus from the synchronic determination of Blanchot toward a more diachronic mode of existence. Yet, this diachrony soon becomes an equally totalizing framework. When Warhol is shot, the events of his life continue to roll on. Fashion and keeping up appearances become the only avenues of living. Warhol becomes an automaton at the service of the culture he is supposedly ((11)) critically engaging. It is difficult to see how this is possible if everything remains played on one level: how can we ‘act’ if all our actions are merely correspondence with the fashionable? ((12)) Even Warhol’s lightness is tinged with some seriousness on this question (however facetious it may be). He writes things like, “Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery” (Warhol 96) and “An interviewer asked me a lot of questions about how I ran the office and I tried to explain to him that I don’t really run it, it runs me” (Warhol 92). Warhol ends up caught in the same sort of determinism as Blanchot, though Warhol’s is more consciously ‘historical.’

Derrida

In this part of this writeup I am interested in doing two things. First, I want to illustrate that the different rigidities of Warhol and Blanchot can both be ‘taken up’ within the same work, experience, life, etc.. More specifically, I will argue that Derrida does in fact take up both these positions (often at the same time) in his text “Envois”. Secondly, I will argue that in doing so Derrida avoids ontologizing the disaster/event and, thus, calls into question the legitimacy of traditional ontological categories. This, arguably, is the trend his work takes beginning (roughly) with Le Carte Postale and continuing, most forcefully, in Specters of Marx. In place of a philosophical ‘problem’ Derrida gives us a problematization of the problem itself.

Derrida writes: “and if I had to live like this (as I am living), I would not live, I would not make it. Not at all (du tout), not a single instant. Therefore there must be something else” (The Post Card 147). Here we see Derrida’s “narrator” ((13)) struggling with Blanchot’s problem. He lives a life he cannot live, yet he continues to live it, to ‘make’ it. And, because he continues to live, he postulates that there must be something else, something more, something authentic. This is what Blanchot would call the disaster. Yet, within the same set of post cards, Derrida writes:

I no longer know what to do with the “dead letter” that you again spoke to me about, as if it could make me hope for a new “remission” (no, not of the pain, but of an illness that I will not get out of alive, I know it now without the slightest possible doubt, the premises of the thing are fatal, written above our heads, they surpass our forces, and yourself, my God, you could do nothing about it, this is why I am so passive at bottom). No, I do not know what to do with it. I do not wish thereby to give you the slightest hope of reading it one day (I’ve told you and retold you why), no more than you would engage yourself to promise whatever in exchange, in any case to promise it to me in such a way that is clear and that binds you irreversibly. I don’t know what to do with it, which means only: I don’t know where to put it. I wish neither to leave it in the house, nor to hide it somewhere, nor to keep it on me. All the same, I am not going to rent a safe deposit box in a bank (although I did get information, it’s very complicated and doesn’t suit my project in any way) (The Post Card 127).

What I find interesting here is the almost comic intertwining of high seriousness and the utterly banal, or even the utterly ridiculous. ((14)) We see hints of Blanchot when Derrida writes of the ‘dead letter’ “I do not wish thereby to give you the slightest hope of reading it one day” (The Post Card 127). Taken seriously, we might read this as a metaphysical position: the dead letter, which has been discussed endlessly, is authentic communication (writing that achieves silence). The problem is what to do with it, where to ‘put it’. For Blanchot, the dead letter’s position is never quite settled, we aren’t ever really communicating authentically, but we are always already on the brink of silence. We can only almost get there every time. But, at the same time, ‘within’ the same words, Derrida is posing the most banal of questions: where should I put this letter that I don’t want you to read? Should I get a safe deposit box at a bank? His answer is startlingly reminiscent of Warhol: getting a safe deposit box is too “complicated”. ‘You can’t find a place for the metaphysical/material dead letter?’… so what!

The interesting part is that Derrida doesn’t simply replace the banal for the ‘deep’ or profound; he wraps them up within each other, inextricably. The purely material question of the placement of a secret letter hinges upon a position regarding the status of authentic communication, and vice versa. Rather than offering us up yet another alternative to the problem at hand, Derrida wants us to focus on our interest in a solution. Why do we care, or even why don’t we care? And what do either of these positions mean? In this respect, his thinking is closely aligned with some of Wittgenstein’s remarks in the Investigations.

It is the business of philosophy, not to resolve a contradiction by means of a mathematical or logico-mathematical discovery, but to make it possible for us to get a clear view of the state of mathematics that troubles us: the state of affairs before the contradiction is resolved. (And this does not mean that one is sidestepping a difficulty). The fundamental fact here is that we lay down rules, a technique, for a game, and that then when we follow the rules, things do not turn out as we had assumed. That we are therefore as it were entangled in our own rules. This entanglement in our rules is what we want to understand (i.e. get a clear view of). (Wittgenstein §125).

Similarly, Derrida is not attempting simply to ‘resolve’ the conflict, but to get a clear view of it. Blanchot is inextricably bound up in the atemporal ontological commitments of language (and thinking more generally) but the artificial nature of language doesn’t make that entanglement any less 'real'. He has simply ‘followed the rules’ and ended up somewhere unexpected. Warhol, on the other hand, eschews the seriousness and plays it all on the same level. But, in doing so, Warhol ends up ‘dogmatically’ ((15)) ignoring the disaster. In the end, both end up ontologizing the disaster; both end up ‘fitting’ it into a conceptual scheme. Blanchot sees it as the horizon that we cannot turn away from. Warhol sees it as the banal level at which all things occur.

Derrida gets away from these pictures (though not beyond them). By constantly deconstructing each position in terms of the other, and maintaining each position even while he maintains the other, Derrida’s ‘disaster’ is, I think, closer to what Blanchot may, or may not, have had in mind.

The process of Derrida’s deconstruction doesn’t outline a clear position so much as it avoids tracing the outline of what that position might be. He doesn’t say “this is disastrous” or “this isn’t disastrous.” By acting out vignettes of both these positions, however, Derrida can respect the separateness/differential nature of the disaster. He flirts with the disaster (somewhat literally in “Envois”) in order to avoid fixing it.

Conclusion

Derrida writes in Specters of Marx:

Maintaining now the specters of Marx. (But maintaining now (maintenant) without conjuncture. A disjointed or disadjusted now, “out of joint,” a disjointed now that always risks maintaining nothing together in the assured conjunction of some context whose border would still be determinable (Specters of Marx, 3)

This whole writeup can, in artificial hindsight, be viewed as an exegesis of this paragraph, if we replace (or equate!) ‘Marx’ with ‘disaster’. Derrida (or my reading of Derrida) wants to maintain the specters (the separateness, the ‘hauntological’ quality) of the disaster. He wants to maintain this now: in the present. That is: the disaster should not be infinitely deferred to the future, a future that we can never quite grasp. Rather, these ‘specters’ impinge upon our present reality, even in their spectrality. The fact that we cannot ‘grasp’ them does not justify our ignorance; the specters shouldn’t be “played on one level” as Warhol would have it. Rather, we must always risk (with Blanchot) maintaining nothing (i.e. the emptiness of an ungraspable disaster) while at the same time emphasizing that this must happen in the (Warholian) ‘now’. We can’t simply forgo the present for the future nor the future for the present. Thus, the event isn’t ‘simply’ disastrous: the present moment isn’t just an unapproachable horizon. Rather, it is both approachable and unapproachable; we have to learn to live with this rather than against it as Blanchot and Warhol do in their own ways. ‘Time is out of joint’ and we have to become similarly out of joint to live within it. We need to learn to live again, for the first time.

((Notes))

• 1 An ugly word that I’m using here to refer to the ontological determination of the disaster. That is: by ‘ontologizing’ the disaster, we definitively say it ‘is’ this or it ‘isn’t’ that.


• 2 I think Derrida might argue (especially in his earlier works like Of Grammatology) that we might expect something more authentic. In Of Grammatology he writes, “the signifier of the signifier—is beginning to go beyond the extension of language” (Of Grammatology 7). In Cinders: “The sentence avows only the ongoing incineration, of which it remains the almost silent monument: this can be "there," là” (Cinders 37). The tone of those works (and the quotes themselves) is much more similar to Blanchot than the Blanchot-Warhol tag-team that I’ll be sketching out here. However, in other texts, “Envois” and Glas for instance, Derrida seems much more dedicated to questioning his own desires for something authentic (outside language, Being, etc). It is this questioning that I am interested in here. Part of the reason I think Derrida is so successful in occupying both positions is because he has in fact maintained precisely both these positions in his earlier works.


• 3 Throughout this writeup, I will take “the event” to refer to the authentic experience of the present. Thus, if we can grasp the event, we can experience the present in-itself. It seems to me that more subtle notions of the event (Lyotard’s, for instance) can be reduced to something very like this presence. Perhaps different visions of the event are available (Deleuze and Guattari might have one in their book-length essay What is Philosophy, see page 156 particularly). For the sake of brevity, I will limit my attention to ‘event-as-making-present’. (Thanks to frankdeluxe for bringing this potential complication to my attention).


• 4 Derrida makes similar remarks in “White Mythology” where he writes, “If we wanted to conceive and classify all the metaphorical possibilities of philosophy, there would always be at least one metaphor which would be excluded and remain outside the system: that one, at least, which was needed to construct the concept of metaphor” (“White Mythology” 18). Here the idea of the remainder is key. The remainder determines that which it stands outside of, for Blanchot as well as for some of Derrida’s earlier works. I argue that the ‘later’ Derrida (or at least the Derrida of “Envois”) wants to complicate the idea of an outside.


• 5 Blanchot’s insistence on this point seems to draw closely alongside Jewish mysticism, as well as writers like Edmond Jabès and Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein writes: “The results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense and of bumps that the understanding has got by running its head up against the limits of language" (Wittgenstein §119). Jabès, in the guise of one of his ‘fictional’ rabbis, writes: “On the lakes of memory, on the far side of death, silence breathes to let signs survive” (Jabès 288). Silence (read: the disaster), unattainable on the ‘far side of death,’ is that which, apart from signs, allows signs to exist. Both Jabès and Blanchot are convinced of the impossibility (and the desirability) of silence.


• 6 I think here of the cabala: in order to bring about the messianic age, one must recite the true name of God without cessation. Thus, silence is impossible but silence must be achieved (silence only arrives when the name of God is spoken).
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• 7 The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air comes to mind here. After the rather humdrum Carlton Banks is shot in a failed ATM robbery, past clips of his most touching memories roll and we are treated to a teary-eyed, hug-laden reunion in the hospital room. When Carlton is alone with Will (the eponymous Fresh Prince) he swears “things are going to be different from now on.” Things were not different. The difference is that Warhol never had this epiphany and never swore things would change.


• 8 For purposes of brevity, I’m going to ignore any ideas that hint that television might be ‘authentic’ in the strong sense that Blanchot desires. Though I suspect Warhol would see television and life on the ‘same level’ if pressed, space limits my exploration of this suspicion.


• 9 Simon Watney, for instance, seems to paint Warhol as a Foucauldian critic of some sort. He writes that Warhol’s “work and life are intimately tied up with the great themes of violence, desire, and death. Above all, he established a poetics of the provisional, an untimely tragic recognition that there are no necessary connections between the different areas of ourselves as individuals or as members of social groups” (Watney 121-122). That he was “above all” any of these things seems to ignore precisely that Warhol was the timeliest of artists. His Brillo boxes just were Brillo boxes: they weren’t an intricate commentary on the provisional or the contingent. Nor were they a ‘tragic recognition’ of our fragmentary subjectivity. They were Brillo boxes: just like the ones you could have bought in the supermarket. Given his deadpan response to his near-death shooting, one might wisely be skeptical of how ‘intimately’ tied up his life was with the ‘great theme’ of death, for example.


• 10 “Then there’s time in the street, when you run into somebody you haven’t seen in, say, five years, and you play it all on one level. When you see each other and you don’t even lose a beat, that’s when it’s the best… Very light, cool, off-hand, very American. Nobody’s fazed, nobody loses a beat. That’s when it’s good” (Warhol 111). Compare this to the inextricable boundaries of silence sketched above.


• 11 See note 8 above, regarding Watney’s view of Warhol.


• 12 I’m not saying this would be much of a worry for Warhol himself: he seems to be the rare case that can remain completely indifferent and devoid of ‘responsibility chemicals’ in much the same way Blanchot (in his writing at least) seems devoid of ‘frivolity chemicals’. Warhol would probably respond with a “so what” to my tongue-in-cheek seriousnesses here.


• 13 I’m sure Derrida would have something to say about the application of this term to the ‘author’ of his fictional/non-fictional post cards. But that’s the subject of another writeup (book).


• 14 Derrida constantly intertwines humor, the banal, and the serious. In another ‘post card’ he discusses Socrates’ “plump buttocks,” his own lycée years in Algiers, and Platonic philosophy’s incursion into domestic relations within 4 or 5 lines (The Post Card 18).


• 15 This word is just for effect, he would only have been dogmatic if he had maintained a ‘position’ rather than simply lived his life. For brevity’s sake here I’m treating Warhol’s “so what” as a kind of stance, though perhaps not in the way that Watney envisions it as a sort of exposition of inauthenticity (Watney 120).


• 16 This note isn't connected to any part of the text above: I just wanted to note that my sincerity (here) seems to be a sincerity about insincerity; let’s laugh at sincerity! “So what.” I like the idea of using philosophy or "thinking as such" as a joke-machine; even if it is one I (often) like to take seriously, I'm still dubious about its ability to... bla bla bla.

Bibliography

1. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, translated by Ann Smock (University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1995).
2. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill (Columbia University Press, New York, 1994).
3. Jacques Derrida, Cinders, translated by Ned Lukacher (University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1991).
4. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Spivak (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1974).
5. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, & the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf (Routledge, New York 1994).
6. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, translated by Alan Bass (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1987).
7. Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology,” translated by F.C.T. Moore, 5-74 in New Literary History 6 (1): 1974.
8. Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume 1, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop (University Press of New England, Hanover, 1991).
9. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” 17-27 in The Birth of Tragedy, translated by Walter Kaufmann (Random House, Toronto, 1967).
10. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, I just have some photocopied selections from this, sans bibliographic datumz...sorry. I'm really not very helpful.
11. Simon Watney, “The Warhol Effect,” 115-123 in The Work of Andy Warhol, edited by Gary Garrels (Bay Press, Seattle, 1989).
12. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe (the edition I have has no further publishing information; section numbers are given instead of page numbers in the above text).