Abstract
A gap appears between space and depiction, beginning a thread on the limits of representation as an idea central to the performance of theatrical, cinematic, and literary mise-en-scène. Spaces narrate beyond containment in Joseph Cornell’s shadow boxes, in Barton Fink’s peeling wallpaper hotel room, and resulting from an unhinged door in Tristram Shandy. Serial writer-performers Hamlet and the Ghost, Charlotte Rampling, and Bruce Willis recur. Hedda Gabler walks through space and time like Müller’s Ophelia in Hamletmachine in a future production of Ibsen’s play comprised of my books. This staging of books will test what Heidegger meant by objects that are ready-to-hand (performing the use for which they were intended) and present-at-hand (performed upon by our theory to reveal the metaphysics of presence).
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Notes
- 1.
Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 145–46 and 149; Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 13; Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions, Volume I: The Book of Questions; The Book of Yukel; Return of the Book, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England, 1991), 16–17; Paul Auster, Leviathan (New York: Viking, 1992); Sophie Calle, Double Game (London: Violette Limited, 2007), ii.
- 2.
David Markson, This Is Not a Novel (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2001), 106.
- 3.
Ibid.
- 4.
René Magritte, La Trahison des images (The Treachery of Images, 1928–1929).
- 5.
Derrida, Paper Machine, 5.
- 6.
Blanchot, The Book to Come, 228.
- 7.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1969), §§341–43.
- 8.
John Ashbery, New York Times Magazine (1980), quoted in Anne Carson, trans., Antigonick (Sophokles) (New York: New Directions, 2015), 5.
- 9.
Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 159.
- 10.
Roubaud, The Great Fire of London, §81 (91), 157.
- 11.
Heidegger, Being and Time, II §71: 370–72, 352–54; Safety Last! (dir. Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, 1923).
- 12.
David Markson, Reader’s Block (Normal: Dalkey Archive Press, 1996), book cover, 9 and 10.
- 13.
Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 26–27.
- 14.
Ibid., 40 and 41.
- 15.
Ibid., 12, 14, and 21; Robert Browning, “Memorabilia” (1855); Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment” (wr.1796; pub.1816).
- 16.
Nikolai Gogol, The Inspector General (1836), in Nineteenth-Century Russian Plays, trans. F.D. Reeve (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 293.
- 17.
Jalal Toufic, Forthcoming (Berkeley: Atelos, 2000), 23, 30, and 31.
- 18.
“Whereas any fact can be described falsely, the rules that make it possible to describe the facts cannot be described in any way at all.” Donna M. Summerfield, “Fitting Versus Tracking: Wittgenstein on Representation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, ed. Hans D. Sluga and David G. Stern (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 132–33.
- 19.
Willard Van Orman Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1960), 48 and 51; Jerrold J. Katz, “What Mathematical Knowledge Could Be,” Mind, Vol. 104 (1995), 504–5.
- 20.
Quine, Word and Object, 50 and 51.
- 21.
- 22.
Spoken by Hedda Gabler to her dull writer husband, Tesman. Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler, Act II.
- 23.
Heidegger, Being and Time, §57:277, 267.
- 24.
Steve Coogan plays “Steve Coogan” in The Trip (dir. Michael Winterbottom, 2011), The Trip to Italy (dir. Michael Winterbottom, 2014), and The Trip to Spain (dir. Michael Winterbottom, 2017). He co-stars in these three films with Rob Bryden, who plays “Uncle Toby” in the movie version of Tristram Shandy, which takes its subtitle from the novel’s last line: “L—d! said my mother, what’s all this story about—A COCK and a BULL, said Yorick—And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard.” Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 457.
- 25.
Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 420, 423, and 430.
- 26.
Ibid., 431.
- 27.
Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 2004), 99 and 101–2; Heidegger, Being and Time, §82 (a):430, 408–9 and 432, 410 n.30.
- 28.
Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt, 1978), 14; Immanuel Kant, “Prologmena,” Werke, Vol. 3 (Franfurt, 1970), 245.
- 29.
Arendt, 11–12.
- 30.
Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 434, 434 n.6, and 435.
- 31.
Ibid., 435.
- 32.
Ibid., 424.
- 33.
Ibid., 434.
- 34.
Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler, trans. Brian Friel (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), 3. All citations refer to this edition.
- 35.
Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, §91, 127 and §§92–93, 128.
- 36.
Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hoftstadter (New York: Harper Perennial, 2013), 5.
- 37.
Ibid., §93, 129.
- 38.
Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, §128, 179.
- 39.
Ibid., 186.
- 40.
Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, §93, 129.
- 41.
Cited in Michael Inwood, “Presence and the Present,” in A Heidegger Dictionary (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 173.
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Golub, S. (2019). Book (Decomposition). In: Heidegger and Future Presencing (The Black Pages). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31889-5_2
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