Nightshift

Nightshift Sarah Wood (bio) I am going to call this one “Nightshift,” although I’m not sure how orderly it is, or how strictly it keeps to the alternation between night and day. Or even if it “works.” (What would that mean?) But there is something here of dark and light, and I wanted or needed song, what the song “Nightshift” calls “sweet sounds coming down” or “voices coming through” from Freud and Derrida and the others who light our way here. So I thought of the title “Nightshift,” or perhaps it should be “The Price of Tears.” In any case, I have an epigraph, from the great musician Ornette Coleman: “The theme you play at the start of a number is the territory, and what comes after, which may have very little to do with it, is the adventure” (Balliet 407)—because this is not the talk you were warned about in the programme: things have moved on, or perhaps I should say after Samuel Weber’s address yesterday, they have moved aside, taken a side–step. I would like to tell you a story, something short, something with what Walter Benjamin—whom I’m bringing along for moral support—calls “that chaste compactness [End Page 1] which precludes psychological analysis” (“Storyteller” 149). It isn’t there yet. What I’m reading to you is happening in what you might call “real time.” I had a story, or what I thought was a story, rather a sentence that fell to me. Then I had the official cover–story of an abstract, and the abstract of the abstract as the first one wasn’t short enough. None of these began to say what I love about Derrida and Freud and Derrida with Freud, nor did they begin to say how it is possible to speak about the night from which writing comes or to say anything with any integrity about these two figures, heroic riders out of, and into, that night. Freud after Derrida: what I’m about to say may be “shot through with explanations” (“Storyteller” 147). According to Benjamin, writing in 1936 in an essay called “The Storyteller,” that’s often how it is these days, and it’s still true. But I don’t want only to explain. What I love, for example, about the way Derrida reads “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” is the way his reading values sensitivity to something that isn’t intellectual, or that is naively counter–intellectual, that is to say, in the first place bodily and verbal. To be more precise, he is sensitive to what comes from or through his body, an experience that is more than physical, and he is also feelingly aware of something in the body of a word that is undeniably greater than the language customarily permits. A soul, I would call it, to give an old and unscientific name to movements of the signifier that betray a life not visible by day and not measured by clock–time. This experience of reading progresses in strange ways that familiar notions of progress cannot recognize or foresee and finds a kind of limit or point of reference in death. I wonder whether when Benjamin’s essay talks about an “intelligence [Kunde] that came from afar [Ferne],” he isn’t thinking of death already (“Storyteller” 147; “Erzähler” 444). Death, the body, lived experience, these are important themes in “The Storyteller.” This death part I still don’t know how to talk about. As Hélène Cixous has pointed out, the word itself seems to thud: “death,” “mort,” “Tod.” As if, when I’m in the region of this word, something happens to the signifier, that shouldn’t. It begins to run too straight, straight to the signified, and there’s an end of it before reading has even started. One might be paralyzed by this. One might feel stuck in the outermost of language, in the region of the last word and the last time. Freud can help us understand what is happening. In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” he invites us to picture the simplest living thing and talks about its “protective shield” (XVIII: 27). The outside...

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