Arkady Dragomoshchenko. Ghost Secretary

She is called the most provocative philosopher.
She herself describes herself as the arena of class struggle between the “smart-assed girl” from Brooklyn, the “regular professor” and the “sophisticated Parisian”.
Author of The Telephone Book: Techonology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech ; Crack Wars; Finitude's Score.
A book called Stupidity is expected to be published soon.

Gossip
(from an essay by Avital Ronell Street-talk)

Rumors are in the air. Most often, coming from mysterious sources, from “nowhere,” always located outside of me, rumor indicates that something is happening somewhere around. Rumor buzzes in the ears, using them as amplifiers. The auditory canal of the ear, like the corridors of the political lobby, is stitched with rumors. Since word of mouth appears out of nowhere, it is useful to remember Benjamin and his understanding of Shakespeare's understanding of news. For this purpose, let us turn to the greatest text itself, based only on rumors.

"Hamlet", in short, is built on the concept of the speaker "nowhere" and "nothing".

The meaning of the tragedy and, in fact, the information that the tragedy conveys about itself originate in a certain form of “nothing,” and this allows us to admit two sources of narration. The first is connected with Horatio, who, in turn, in order to determine the second source, presses his mouth to the sentry’s ear and begins: As the whisper goes...

The second source as the total beginning of all rumors is, of course, a ghost. The story he told is itself rooted in something reminiscent of the nature of word-of-mouth text transmission. At the same time, we must not forget that Hamlet's father died from poison poured into his ear and the effect of the tragedy is, in fact, a pretext that triggers the circulation of poison - from mouth to ear - in a great circle of espionage and infection, which are separated from each other, like to the eavesdropping Polonius, the thinnest barrier of a curtain. Infecting and paralyzing everything and everyone, not excluding the body of politics, the rumor, whose father is only the ghost of fatherhood (Heidegger’s “It is beyond me”), is what Hamlet is looking for confirmation of. Thus the ghost conveys poisoned paternity to every open ear.

The road to the north

If you go straight, don't turn past the mailboxes and don't go down the slope of an invisible deviation, it is quite possible to come to the intersection of two corridors, and then, turning sharply to the north, you will immediately see her office. He is recognizable. My grandson gave me a compass before leaving.

“The main thing is to understand where the north is, Arkady. The rest will be found,” said Philip. I shook his hand and promised that I would try to get into it in the first few days. The science turned out to be simple. North is where the Empire Building is. In the morning the sky above it resembles the sky above Kherson at 9 o'clock in the morning . Whereas in the evening, looking at the same sky, it is possible to be carried away by a dream to the Mediterranean: Knossos, Marseille, Olya Florenskaya, some Pelasgians...

There are so many announcements and posters stuck on the door of Avital Ronell's office that as soon as one glances at them, the papers literally lose any meaning. In the blink of an eye, merging into a planetary message, which immediately crumbles into Klimt’s croupy melancholy. I first met her in Berkeley, I think it was in '94. We drank - I coffee, Avital tea. Kathy Acker was still alive . There was no smoking in the cafe anymore. It's drum hour on campus. The word "cyberpunk" was just coming into fashion. We talked about her “Telephone Book”, I conveyed to her a question from Sasha Sekatsky, who by that time had acquired a taste and translated the most difficult chapters on Heidegger 1 - does she really believe that one needs to philosophize with a hammer? In Mondo magazine, where an interview was published with boss girls of the West Coast (Katie Acker, Andrea Juneau, Avital Ronell), Avital is incredibly beautiful. The Three Graces of the Traveling Thesaurus: Julia Kristeva, Susan Sontag, Avital Ronell.

- What about it!? Nietzsche was wrong about many things, but here he is undoubtedly right.

Autumn is like autumn

When I reminded her of this on October 12, 2000 in New York, she replied that she was also certainly right, but try, they say, today to lift not just a hammer, but an ordinary stone from the ground... Then, clasping her hands, she invited to a seminar by Professor J. Derrida, which, as it turned out, he regularly “leads” on Tuesdays at 3.30 in the main building. I happened to encounter him in the first days of September in the evening on the floor of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. I was looking for a water place, this is the way out.

We couldn't say more, because outside the windows on all sides the great march of the university's Fall Fest'2000, the autumn festival, had begun. About what on occasion.

The microphone worked with the immutability of a beacon. When the sound went away, those sitting in the front rows turned into multi-armed Shivas with five writing pens per hand.

When the sound returned, the first rows covered their ears, to match ordinary people in Dostoevsky's scandal, and the last - I was there and honey, etc. - leaning back, the great ones, like all the Gatsbys in the world, did not write anything down at all.

Behind, as usual, sat knowledgeable people (idle, let’s say, people, our people).

About those who bear fruit with gifts

In one of his acoustic returns to those in the know, the professor said that history is not a process at all and, of course, not progress; history does not need time .

To create history, you need something other than temporality - you need power and authority . Because history is a disposition of isolated events, and an event cannot be produced if force or desire is impossible.

As an example, the professor cited his first meeting in some natural science museum in Paris with a fragment of amber, in which, at the moment of Pompeian death, two insects froze, closely intertwined with each other - “Yes, one of these creatures sucked blood from the other,” thundered Professor (for whom he thundered, and for whom he moved his lips) - yes, this sexual act never achieved orgasm, but this is an event, despite the fact that it happened 250 million years ago."

And, in conclusion: history is not a thread, not a carpet, history is only isolated events of power.

But the talk at the seminar was not so much about history as about Paul de Man. And not so much about Paul de Man, but about Rousseau, more precisely, about the red-pearl scarf that Jean-Jacques lost without regretting it at all - we were talking about the truth of confession, confession, about the fact that the machine of confession is inextricably linked with machine "letters" that any confession, in essence, is an attempt to ask for forgiveness. An apology, at worst. However, the very expression of this in a letter immediately leads the “natural” and hidden “request” into the mainstream of the letter, into the mainstream of the event. Which, by definition, cannot be a confession, since writing and subjectivity are initially different things. If, of course, we intend to write about it or even just talk about it.

After class, I asked the professor why he didn’t give as an example Kafka’s story “ In the Colony ,” where the machine of inscription, literal inscriptio with needles into the body, becomes a machine of recognition, confession and simultaneous inscription of that / and in the one who actually created it, more precisely , saved.

“Perhaps,” he said, “Kafka gives us so much... But any gift, as we know, is just an attempt to appropriate the one to whom it is given.”

Secret

- Well, isn't he a monster? - Avital asked the next day.

- He is a perfect monster, he is simply unterrestrial! - Avital said the next day.

“He read for three and a half hours!..” I said the next day, sitting in her office behind the door, on which the posters stuck on were losing the meaning of the message, acquiring the charm of Klimt in Borovsky’s presentation.

- Oh yes, he could read for another three hours, but tomorrow he flies again to Chicago, and then again to New York to fly to Paris for the weekend and give several lectures and conduct a seminar there.

“I’m just ashamed,” I said.

- Aren’t we all ashamed here? - Avital asked the next day.

The next day was like this: it was good. In general, it’s good not during the day, but early in the morning. Morning is like a cemetery. You come and remember.

I went to see Avital again. The student, his eyes sparkling , almost spelled out, syllable by syllable, what kind of work he intended to write about “deconstruction.”

But I beg you, reader, we will not give away the secret and we will not tell anyone what it is - deconstruction . Although what a secret it is now! Everything is incredibly simple - “to see, read, understand and suddenly see again for the first time and everything at once” , and then whoever wants, even if he wants more than Slavoj Zizek 2 .

But perhaps everything is not so simple and the secret will be revealed to me on the night of October 27, at the “Celebrating Deconstruction” ball (that’s what it says on the invitation card: Celebrating Deconstruction). On the tiny red rectangle, in addition to words, there is also an image of either the triumphal arch of Paris, or the arch from Washington... garden, square, square, finally.

Write

I say: Avital, after the release of "Phone Book" you were called an ivory tower terrorist?

And she - that this is just a problem of naming and place. That the ivory tower is just a fantasy. Regarding terrorism, she is rather an anti-terrorist.

- Everyone knows what I'm after. I want universities to become the most hospitable home for all dissidents, rebellious people, a place where thought finds all sorts of ways to blow itself up...

- But you are not only a professor, not only a philosopher...

- Writer, yes. Another question is what does this mean for me. Scripture never stops dying. This, probably, is the endless ending of writing, writing, literature. Psychoanalysis is kind of dead, isn't it? Deconstructivism too.

In Freud's Totem and Taboo, the brothers gather to kill their father in order to take his power - in the end they kill him, but how do they feel? Absolute emptiness and sadness. Because, having become dead, the father gained even greater power over them.

As for me, I can compare myself with Hölderlin's Diotima. When the philosopher Empedocles threw himself into the crater, she began to “read” his sandals - that is, she began to understand what was left of him. She became a reader of the most hidden traces, traces of his contact with the earth.

On the other hand, when they ask me if I am a writer , I don’t know... a writer is a man, and this implies that he owns , knows how , wants , controls ...

No. Of course not, I seem more like the secretary of some ghost.

Photo by the author

1 The book (Telephone Book, original) was stolen from Sekatsky along with his suitcase at the Tashkent station. I then got him another one - alas, its fate is still unknown to me. The translated chapters were published in Mitya's Journal. Hello Mitya.

2 “In this sense, we could say ,” writes S. Zizek, “ that the deconstructionists are essentially still “structuralists” and that the only “poststructuralist” is Lacan, who affirms pleasure as the “real Thing”, the central impossibility around which each grid of signifiers is structured."