The text on customized signs of this sort ranges from polite (on a lawn next to a driveway in Brentwood: “Do Not Enter this Driveway! Merci.”) to grotesquely threatening (on a chain-link fence in front of a Southwest Baltimore rowhouse: “This Property Protected by Two Pitbulls with AIDS!”). Both examples provided by Neil Hertz, whom I duly acknowledge with thanks.
Peter Szendy, “(No) More Ears: A Preface to the English-Language Edition,” in All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage, trans. Roland Végsö (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), x.
Jean-Luc Nancy with Adèle van Reeth, Coming, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 33.
Kevin Sack, “Door-Busting Raids Leave a Trail of Blood,” New York Times, March 18, 2017 The footage accompanying the article reveals the blurred line between policing and home invasion →.
Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 3.
Plato, La République, ed. and trans. Georges Leroux (Paris: Flammarion, 2004), 581.
Daniel Heller-Roazen, No One’s Ways: An Essay on Infinite Naming (New York: Zone Books, 2017), 15–18.
Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 8, 9.
Jacques Derrida, “Ants,” trans. Eric Prenowitz, Oxford Literary Review 24 (2002): 17, 20. French original: “Fourmis,” in Lectures de la différence sexuelle, ed. Mara Negron (Paris: Editions des Femmes, 1994), 69, 74.
Wai Chee Dimock, Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 110, 166.
Jacques Derrida, “Justices,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, Critical Inquiry 31, no. 3 (Spring 2005): 691.
Irving Goh, “From the Editor: Prepositional Thoughts,” Diacritics 42, no. 2 (2014): 4–5.
Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 29, 28.
This call to “being” comes through in Pink Floyd’s song “Comfortably Numb,” which kicks off with the sound of someone knocking on a door and repeating “Time to Go,” followed by the lines: “Hello? (hello) (hello) / Is there anybody in there? Just nod if you can hear me / Is there anyone home?” The lyrics also register a dream/drug state or underwater sensation of experiencing an address that looks intelligible but whose message remains unheard: “Your lips move but I can’t hear what you’re saying.” See →.
Jacques Derrida, “What is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” Critical Inquiry 27, no. 2 (Winter, 2001): 177.
Gustave Flaubert, Letter to Louise Colet, in The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, vol. 1: 1830–1889, ed. and trans. Francis Steegmuller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 159.
Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Further references to this work will appear in the text abbreviated as “D.”
Jean-François Lyotard, Le différend, (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1983), 20. Further references to the French original will appear in the text abbreviated as “LD.”
The problem of trauma, its veridical perception, fiability, and litigatability, lies at the heart of Lyotard’s endeavor. In the introductory pages of the first chapter, the differend is posed in relation to the Holocaust denials (Robert Faurisson et al.) that were raging at the time. Lyotard cites Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s response to the Faurisson affair in his Les juifs, la mémoire, et le present. Réflexions dur le genocide (Paris: La Découverte, 1981). My thanks to Hent de Vries for drawing out the connection in Lyotard’s work between the dilemmatics of differend—“Either you are a victim of a wrong or you are not. If you are not, you are deceived (or lying), in testifying that you are. If you are, since you can bear witness to this wrong, it is not a wrong, and you are deceived (or lying) in testifying that you are the victim of a wrong,” (D, 5)—and the debate in France around the existence of the Final Solution.
Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantellle, De l’Hospitalité (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1997).
Nancy writes: “If listening is distinguished from hearing both as its opening (its attack) and as its intensified extremity, that is, reopening beyond comprehension (of sense) and beyond agreement or harmony (harmony or resolution in the musical sense), that necessarily signifies that listening is listening to something other than sense in its signifying sense.” Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, 32.
Samuel Weber, “Afterword,” in Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 114.
Cathy Caruth, “An Interview with Jean Laplanche,” 2001 →.
Drawing out the especial significance in Nancy’s writing of the “knock,” Irving Goh offers an astute analysis of “the political implications of risking accidental knocks in ‘the risk of existing,’” as a “counterpoint to” or “‘jamming’ of” contemporary biopolitics.” Irving Goh, “The Risk of Existing: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Prepositional Existence, Knocks Included,” Diacritics 43, no. 4 (2015): 10, 19.
Glenda R. Carpio, “Going in for Negroes,” Public Books, May 23, 2017 →.
Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 22. Moten is building off of Hortense Spillers’s landmark essay “‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe’: An American Grammar Book” (1987), in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 203–29; and Saidya Hartman’s seminal Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). For an important analysis of “the auditory in the operations of the cinematic pornotrope,” see Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Subject (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 106.
On the sound of the siren and the joke, see Zadie Smith, “Getting in and Out,” Harper’s, July 21, 2017 →.