Browsing by Subject "Derrida"
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Item Conceiving difference through alternative reading strategies:Deleuze, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida and Post-Civil Rights US minority texts.(2009-07) Park, Susan Shin HeeThis dissertation aims at engineering a dialogue between Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Jacques Derrida's conceptions of difference and expressions of difference in Post-Civil Rights US minority texts. I assemble these divergent manifestations of difference under the united cause of resisting a "master" discourse of difference which harnesses difference as the rationale of Modern racism. I begin by introducing the problematic of an established narrative that maintains difference in negative relation to "sameness." This narrative subordinates difference vis-à-vis an imagined white universal subjectivity, evacuating the singular, a-relational difference inherent to the particular. The four chapters of my dissertation argue for a reclaiming of positive, non-dialectical difference by proposing alternative reading strategies. I synthesize Deleuze and Guattari's notions of "becoming-minority," "deterritorialization" and "collective enunciation of minor literature," Deleuze's writing on the "suspension of judgment," and a Deleuzian understanding of Spinoza's Ethics with Derrida's conceptions of "becoming friendship," "becoming literary," "différance," "interval of undecidability," and "lovence." The texts used to bear out these articulations of difference include artworks by Kara Walker and Faith Ringgold, the legal storytelling of Derrick Bell, the album liner notes of John Coltrane and the fiction of Maxine Hong Kingston. This dialogue on difference, between philosophy and cultural texts, produces ways of imagining subjectivities that resist the conception of subjectivity associated with such figures as Aristotle, Descartes and Hegel. These figures are among the "masters" whose discourse of difference I challenge through the uprising of Deleuze, Guattari and Derrida in conjunction with differential writing produced by US minorities.Item Spanish Historical Memory as Archive in Carme Riera’s La meitat de l’ànima(2020) Diver, Collin SThis article takes up previous interpretations of the Spanish historical memory movement and applies the analogy of archive as well as archival work in order to differently recover events of a culturally traumatic past. While recognizing the importance of “archaeology” as a means of understanding this past, the term “archive” is complicated herein and applied as a methodology for conceiving inaccessible past events. Indeed, a lack of access to official state archives has inspired many to explore alternate means of understanding the past, which serve then as alternative archives. The reading of these archives may include the gathering of testimonies from relatives and contemporaries of a deceased loved one, or even perusing keepsakes. Carme Riera’s La meitat de l’ànima (2003) illustrates this process and works as a microcosm of accessing historical memory: in the text, the narrator-protagonist, C, confronts the troubles of archival work and is forced to make assumptions and leaps of faiths in order to understand the lost past of her deceased mother, Cecília Balaguer, whose presence haunts C and the text. C’s obsessive search for the traces of her mother’s life cause her to experience an identity crisis, and she works through the trauma of having no definitive explanation as to who her mother was. Applying Jacques Derrida’s understanding of archive and mal d’archive (or, archive fever) helps to illustrate C’s reconstruction of her mother’s life as well as that of her own, as C reads archives and becomes an archivist herself during her search. Reading the novel as indicative of the Spanish historical memory movement writ large paradoxically suggests that one constant of contemporary Spanish identity is its acceptance of infinite contingencies that could explain a past event. This article briefly examines implications of these alternative, communal archives and how historical memory works to articulate different political projects and claims to power.