Is there a book or not assumes we know what a book is. We want to ask a different question Gets at hunatotexuality og Prospeor’s Books, not their resumed materiality.Burn but his books versus I’ll drown my books. The book is and is not there, but it is imagnined takes two very different forms. Spectrality takes us ot bio—different notion of the island—mangaement of life and eath—ut with a n economy of loss without loss.Fake death in Much Ado About Nothing—not directed at the female body, purification.Chief focus will be on Taymor’s tempest in art because tshe shows the books “drowning in the end title sequence. Made me think that Prospero too is among the living dead—every third thought shall be my grave—kind of like Robinson Crusoe for Derrida—not fear of being buried alive, but fear of burying alive or burning alive. Drowning as neurotic compromise formation. He can live on only because he is as spectral as he is human. His wife died in childbirth—embryonic fluids? Miranda’s birth as another kind of shipwreck?First, Derrida makes the title the condition of the archive. In “Title to Be Specified,” he writes: “the noun titleer would signify two things. In Old French, a titleer (titrier]—was a monk responsible for the archives of a monastery. He was an archivist, the archivist par excellence, for if every archivist must prevail over the order of titles—how can there be an archive without a title [pas d’archive sans titre]—what is to be said of the guardian of titles?”i ii Second, translation complicates ableit in microscopic ways, the philological task of determining what is to be glossed and how it is to be glossed.iii A kind of enlightenment at work, but perhaps closer to what Derrida says about phantasm and sleep being more vigilant than waking5.1. Boatswain’s return“rigged as wen / We first put out to sea. 223-24The “strange noises” of the isle awaken the sailors:I were well awake, / I’d strive to tell you. [sleep compromises capacity to retrieve form the archive, to tell—] We were dead of sleep . . 229-230We were awaked 235Even in a dream, were we divided from them / And brought moping hither. 238-89 boatswain goes back to the beginning—we first set out to sea—and skips to the end—when they were awakened—so they have no story to tell]And more diversity of sounds, all horrible, 234 (Horrible horrible, most horrible?)

Ariel leaves the crew of the ship asleep, as if in a cryonic state. Echoes the way Prospero has put Miranda asleep. “Lie there, my art”—ambiguous referent (another crux) of “art” as either Miranda or his cloak and staff, his daughter or his props.

Ferdinand asking Miranda if she is a spirit or a human; Miranda asking if Ferdinand is a sprit (Geist in German translation).Miranda: What is’t, a spirit? . . . It carries a brave form. But ‘tis a spirit.” 1.2.410; 412

Prospero: No, wench, it eats and sleeps and hath such sensesAs we have—such [anticipates Prospero’s “Dost thou think so spirit? And Ariel’s response “Mine would, sir, were I human.” Prospero: And mine shall. / Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeing . . . 5.1.19-23] This gllant which htou seestWas in the wreck, and he’s something stained With grief. . .413- 416Prospero addresses Ariel as spirit a few lines later Spirit, fine spirit, / I’ll free thee 1.2. 421.

Ferdinand: My prime request / Which I do last pronounce, is (O, you wonder!) / If you be maid or no?Miranda: No wonder, sir. But certainly a maid 426-28

The question devolves into a question of whether Miranda is a virgin or not.The German is Jungfrau.

Ferdinand “Weeping again the King my father’s wreck” 1.2. 391Ferdinand wonders if he is dreamingWhen Alsonso and Gonzalo are put to sleep, so to speak, they survive a near death experience after Gonzalo is awakened by Ariel.

Mourning is given time yet being skipped over—drowning means there’s no corpse. Lost at sea. No burial. Just storage. Even Alono’s body is not really a corpse, just rich and strange. It’s already been turned into a sort of monument, turned into the subject of a song which is and is not a requiem.(For Ferdinand, it seems to be requiem.)

In addition to the skipwreck in Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, there are also the ships (Antonio’s) that are to have sunk in The Merchant of Venice but then turn out miraculously to have survived and come to harbor. The Merchant of Venice is yet another revenge tragedy turned comedy / romance.

Re-zones the island form a utopian space to a living dead border also a human and spectral and human monster—

Assumed I am the king Ferdinand and Alonso mourning, the mistakenly assumed deaths. Every third thought will be grave.

Why is the book the vessel that cannot be presented—why is the library the space that enables

Not is it real or not, but what kind of real? Should I be mourning? How should I take up my relation to this thing I am now archiving? That we are talking through and should I keep this? Or is it just a dream—Prospero. a retrieval the island becomes an archival space. In 1.2. Prospero brings back stories, he is the database and that search engine. He’s the software designer, not the hard drive. The play is a revenge tragedy. The book –I’ll drown my book—how is the story of P’s being set adrift in his books and for him to drown his books thereafter? How is that story told in Milan?

Hear spirits in two ways—magical utopian space and as a grave, as archive, because it is coded by P’s books, then what is the relation between being setting adrift and generic crossing and conversion from revenge tragedy to romance? How does that play with the shipwreck with a romance motif that is coded as tragic, as total loss? Alonso forced to live as if his son is dead, then have him returned to him by Prospero—letting live or letting die—sovereignty becomes the management of life. Foucauldian biopolitical moment at the end. But the book will be drowned? To do what to separate from the ship? From the ship Prospero is going to get back on?

Remember me—remember—Prospero as Hamlet.

Speech argument doesn’t work because people aren’t sure if they are speaking or hearing speech.

The book would have drowned to begin with if they had met their intended fate.

We never see the ship after the shipwreck even though it is restored—Ariel says to Prospero.

Abandon ship narrative, not a shipwreck.They take their chances with drowning. They’ve decided to risk drowning. He decides to drown his books. What does it mean to drown a person as opposed to drown a person? A figure of an archival oblivion: forgive and forget. Forget about it. Crimes to be pardoned. Pardon and perjury. Forgiveness. Hostipitality. Friend and enemy. Witness, testimony, and archive. Engage the Foucauldian moment at the end of The Tempest with the end of Beast and Sovereign Vol. 2

Also a species difference because Caliban is left on the island with a story that the lay is not even interested in writing because it is not interested in telling, just a sort of

Spirits as alcohol—bottle—alcohol—drowning your years in booze. Another liquid oblivion. Putting out the fire the books, so the fire is put out.

Turns into a the narrator of lost opportunity—Caliban narrates the misfire when A and S stop for the trumpery. It’s too late to get to the books.

Propsero’s hour is now at zenith—there’s an exipiration on his power. Extradition.

Youtube toy Tempest video and the toyboat tempest in a bathtub scene in Prospero’s Books.Prospero's Book as a life preserver

book as boat.Book / boat / bark / bottle?It’s like the threat of an archive whose time is up, the moment when the archive becomes a crypt.

Ahead of its time. Still of the obsolete past in the future from Bernard Tavernier’s science-fiction thriller, Death Watch.http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film4/blu-ray_reviews57/death_watch_blu-ray.htmThe idea of a burial at sea strikes me as being so odd. Shouldn'tthere be a word for it? Cremation, inhumation (buried in the earth),and "marination?" Right, that one's taken.

Btw, when Derrida discusses cremation and inhumation in The Beast and theSovereign, 2, he doesn't mention burial at sea.

Derrida’s notion of a text’s “sur-vivance” on what Derrida calls “unreadability”: sur-vivance involves various media transfers, various material supports, or subjectiles, as well as various tropes for not/non/un/reading. We can think about Ariel's full fathom five in relation to survivance, use The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, to talk about "sea change" and drowning books. The dead not dead fantasy seems to depend very specifically on water--on a shipwreck that isn't, on a father drowning who didn't. Are all of these nearly immediate recuperations

necessary for the book to be absent as a prop, to be drowned off stage, to be diverted by a bottle from Caliban's desire to burn but his books? Strange economy of survival, the corpse, and the book without embalmment, the book as balm, not blame, here.

Survivance—as a structuring strucutre that genrates a series of differeneces that

matter or don’t accrding to at various historical moments, what copy you have, what

lanuguage it is in, what edition, hardcover or apperback, paper used, etc. and

revivified by the reader. Wetwares storage notion of the archive. Diffference

betweenarhcival materials and their publication—recursive since new editions can

be published.

Assumption is that paper only is paper once it is written on—only papers with

writing in the ordinary sense can be archived. But move from archive to publication

introduces media that remediate the archival materials.

Sur-vivance of living dead book.From corpus of book to corpse of author, reader on the side of live. Turn to account

of survivance and posthumous publication.

What is commonly called the “afterlife” of a book is given a more technical meaning

whereby survival as a metaphor for preservation becomes a notional term, “sur-

vivance.” The translators of Derrida in The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 2 leave the

French neologism untranslated and without annotation apart from informing the

reader the “words ‘living on,’ ‘to survive,’ and ‘survival’ are in English in the text.”

(131,n30).

Survivance is, in a sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a

sense that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death.

(130). The book is not exactly a corpse that continues to live, as it were, as it

decomposes or is put to various medical uses before being buried or cremated.

In Robinson Crusoe, Robinson Crusoe himself, both the Robinson Crusoe who speaks

and the one keeping a journal, all that they—there are already a lot of them-might

have desired is that the book, and in it the journal, outlive them: that might outlive

Defoe, and the character called Robinson Crusoe . . . . Now this survival, thanks to

which the book bearing its title has come down to us, has been read and will be read,

interpreted, taught, saved, translated, reprinted, illustrated filmed, kept alive by

millions of inheritors—this survival is indeed that of the living dead. As is indeed

with any trace, in the sense I give this word and concept, buried alive and swallowed

up alive. And the machination of this machine, the origin of all techne, and in it of

any turn, each turn, each re-turn, each wheel, is that each time we trace a trace, each

time a trace, however singular, is left behind, and even before we trace it actively or

deliberately, a gestural, verbal, written, or other trace, well, this machinality

virtually entrusts the trace to the sur-vival in which the opposition of the living and

the dead loses and must lose all pertinence, all its edge. The book lives its beautiful

death. That’s also finitude, the chance and the threat of finitude, this alliance of the

dead and the living. I shall say that this finitude is survivance. Survivance in the

sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense that is not

thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death, a survival that is

not, in spite of the apparent grammar of the formation of the word (ueberleben or

fortleben, living on or to survive, survival), [<that> is not] above life, like something

sovereign (superanus) can be above everything, a survival that is not more alive, nor

indeed less alive, than life, or more or less dead than death, a sur-vivance that lends

itself to neither comparative nor superlative, a survivance or surviving (but I prefer

the middle voice “survivance” to the active voice of the active infinitive “to survive”

or the substantualizing substantive survival), a survivance whose “sur-” is without

superiority, without height, altitude or highness, and thus without supremacy or

sovereignty. It does not add something extra to life, any more than it cuts something

from it, any more than it cuts anything from inevitable death or attenuates its rigor

and its necessity, what one could call, without yet thinking of the corpse and its

erect rigidity, the rigor mortis, if you will. No, the survivance I am speaking of is

something other than life death, but a groundless ground from which our detached,

identified, and opposed what we thing we can identify under the name of death or

dying (Tod, Sterben), like death properly so-called as opposed to life properly so-

called. It [Ca] begins with survival and that is where there is some other that has me

at its disposal: that is where any self is defenseless. That is what the self is, that is

what I am, what the I is, whether I am there or not. The other, the others, that is the

very thing that survives me, that is called to survive me and that I call the other

inasmuch as it is called, in advance, to survive me, structurally my survivor, not my

survivor, but the survivor of me, the there beyond my life. (130-31)

Like every trace, a book, the survivance of a book, from its first moment, is a living-

dead machine, sur-viving, the body of a thing buried in a library, in cellars, urns,

drowned in the worldwide waves of the Web, etc., but a dead thing that resuscitates

each time a breath of living reading, each time the breath of the other or the other

breath, each time an intentionality intends it and makes it live again by animating it,

like . . . a body, a spiritual corporeality, a body proper (Lieb and not Koerper), a body

proper animated, activated, traversed, shot through with intentional spirituality.

(131)

This survivance is broached from the moment of the first trace that is supposed to

engender the writing of a book. From the first breath, this archive as survivance is at

work. But once again, this is the case not only with books, or for writing, or for the

archive in the current sense, but for everything from which the tissue of living

experience is woven, through and through. [“tissue” becomes a metaphor for “living

experience,” but “tissue” is not woven, so Derrida deliberately mixes his metaphors

and derails “tissue” skips on to “weave” in place of “tissue”] A weave of survival, like

death in life or life in death, a weave that does not come along to cloth a more

originary existence, a life or a body or a soul that would be supposed to exist naked

under this this clothing. For, on he contrary, they are taken, surprised in advance,

comprehended, they live and die, they live to death as the very inextricability of this

weave. It is against the groundless ground of this quasi-transcendentality of living to

death or of death as sur-vivance that, on the one hand, one can say that “Robinson

Crusoe,” the name of the character and the name of the book, were, according to a

first desire or a last terrified will, according to a will and desire attested to by this

book, by all the Robinson Crusoes in their homonymity or metonymy, [were all]

buried or swallowed alive; but also, on the other hand, . . . one can and one must, one

must be able, in the wake, the inheritance, i.e., in the reanimating and like the

experience reanimated, reawakened in the very reading of this psycho-

anthropology of cultures and civilizations projected by Daniel Defoe and Robinson

Crusoe, one . . . must be able to wonder what is happening today to a culture like

ours, I mean in the present modernity of a Greco-Abrahamic Europe, wonder what is

happening . . . in the procedural organization of survivance, as treatment, by the

family and/or State, of the so-called dead body, what we call a corpse. 132

Course called “Living to Death”

in the procedural organization of death as survivance, as treatment, by the family

and / or the State, of the so-called dead body, what we call a corpse. . . . not just in

the universal structure of survivance . . . but in the funeral itself, in the organized

manner, in the juridical apparatus and the set of technical procedures whereby we . .

. deliver the corpse over to its future, prepare the future of a corpse and prepare

ourselves as one says prepares a corpse. . . . this fantasmatics of dying alive or dying

dead (132)

Unreadable is part of an infrastructure of sur-vivance—also about contingencies

created by media transfers. For us, unreadability is a point of purchase on sur-

vivance.

Sur-vivance is not exactly new. Derrida in “Living On: Borderlines” (reduced to

“Living On” in the second edition of the book in which it was originally published)

and Derrida on death would be difficult to catalogue. Also livance.

The DVD menu is worth discussing (will match Anonymess discussion).It begins and ends with Prospero and is all shown as if underwater.There are two shots of books "drowning." There is also shot of theship burning in the distance.

The ship also burns as it is wrecked by Ariel, and there's a shot ofit fully restored in a harbor.Anyway, I am taking notes as I watch. O am a half hour into the film.

The film is good for us in that it highlights the play's not soobvious opposition between burning and drowning.The fantasy you identified is operative all over the play, I amrealizing.  Like Miranda freaking out when the ship goes down andProspero reassuring her; but then Ariel has to reassure Prospero, whocontradicts her own reassurance of Miranda and is similarlyreassured--almost the same words--not a hair on their heads harmed.Ariel just gives a more detailed account of what happened to thesurvivors.  Ariel also talks about the ship burning (in the play)--Ihad forgotten that.

Interesting too what gets a flashback and what does not--there's noflashback for Prospera getting few books with Gonzalo's help or of herlibrary  WE see no books in a flashback of Prospera and Miranda (baby)on the boat in which they are set adrift.

Just wondering f the issue of the book not being a prop and being bothsingular and plural is related to drowning as a figure for thedisappearance of the prompt book in production--or its being a prompt(there, but invisible, off-stage).So The Tempest as a kind of tele-prompter / ing?We might want to discuss the invisible blood writing in Faustus too,by way of contrast.  No book burning there, but also no bookdestruction, no tearing up a book, or tearing out a page; nofigurative desire, as in R and J, to "tear" a "name" ("Had I itwritten")

Julie Taymor’s The Tempest; opening title over a sand castle—begins to melt in the rain, Miranda is holding it; cross-cutting between ship and Miranda running; The bed catches fire; ten cuts to Prospera, then Miranda running to her, ship burning in the distance; as inside of ship catches fireShot of Prospara in the menu is shot when she turns the clouds back after the storm and after the ship as sunk.No flashback of knowing how I loved my books, furnished with me”Ariel merges form watery reflection and makes a splash, literally, as his entrance.Flashback after he merges to the shipwreck—ship on fire, Airel surrounded by fire too. Citing lines about sulpherous ship—so there is textual motivation for showing it burning.

Boat burning versus book burning.Ariel quotes Ferdinand mockingly “o devils here” (sounds like Caliban)But are they safe?

Not a hair perished.

Look. The ship is hidden. So we see the ship in harbor completely restored. Taymor wildly accelerated what we learn only in the final scene of the play, giving us even more reassurance, defaulting the audience to her Ariel-centric reading of the play, as if the audience were Ariel.

Ariel is transparent, moves around with a sound effect in a kind of fastforward tracing.Flashack of Ariel being trapped in the pine; cut back to Prospera with background of forest splashing down the screen as the new background comes into view-a variation of the wipe, or inversion of it.“invisible to every eyeball else”

Porspera on Caliban. We cannot miss him. He does make our fire. Fetches in our wood.Caliban gets no flashbacks when he tells the story of showing Prospera the island.

Miranda gets the abhorr’d slave . . . I taught thee language” linesProspera so slave hence—the actor was in Amistad, playing a slave; also in Gladiator.

Ariel sings full fathom five under water, superimposed on shot of Ferdinand hearing ad looking around to find who is singing, in a series of shots, “Where should this music be?Follow it or rather it has drawn me, it begins again. Falsetto—a bit like Greenaway.Full fathom, under water, but also in a forest (through which Ferdinand is walking—close ups of both Ariel and FerdinandThe ballad does remember my drowned father.The film’s diegesis separates “realism” from “magical” special effects, and also combines them, overlaps, in some sequences, differentiating the spirit Ariel from the “real” human characters.

Myself am Naples, ever since my father.

Ariel appears only in shots with Prospera—not in sots of Ferdinand and Miranda. “I charge thee that thou attend me.”(Prospera telling Miranda the tale—would cure deafness—doe’st thou mark?”—Prospera thinking her call doesn’t trough? Tat she has to keep replacing it, redialing? As if Miranda were not there, as she couldn’t tell by looking to see if Miranda is listening or not?

Ariel’s pine-trees and paper? Pre early modern, I guess. Rags, not ood pulp as source of paper.

Cut to fire in Prospera—“so lie there my art”

Prospera didn’t harm a hair of any crew member, she tells Miranda.Lots of chemical bottles full of liquids in her cave, out of focus in and in soft focus or in focus with racking focus.

Flashback montage cross cut with Miranda’s speech—and to Prospera. Flashbacks in bluish hue. Shot of Gonzalo given her a “package,” a sheet covering something square (the books?) here is also a chest in her boat.Boatswain is blackMusic sounds a like Nymanish

Foul water shalt thy drink

Prospera’s Books

DVD menu loop shows everything happening as if underwater; the ship is shown burning; there are two separate shots of books “drowning”; begins and ends with Prospera; she is in close up at the end, eyes closed, then open, as if it had been her dream; begins with low angle shot of her in her cloack with her staff—she never holds her books, no library.

Or garments are as fresh (Gonzalo repeats what Ariel has already said). Same economy of destruction and restoration—through “made wet”Burns cross over from prop to non prop from burning to drowning. “drown my books” last se of “drown” in the play?

Dream/Re/Work

End credits:Books fall—music—then a woman sings the epilogue to a minor key song—afer producer credit Visual effects supervisor Kyle Cooper“which was to please”followed guitar—then “now I want spirits to informcast members show

to title The TempestA Julie Taymor filmAnd cones to below the end the line credits books have Laurence Sterne marble covers“let your indulgence (repeated)last book disappearssets me freeNow I want spirits to inform” and the epilogue repeats released by prayer

More guitar—also a lead guitar-builds louder, same loopNow I want spirits begins over againBy prayer . .which pierces so, pierces that it assaults, mercy itself and frees . . PauseA’as you from faults from

Coda Betha WilliamsLet your indulgence, let your indulgence set me free as final credits appea adnd copyright.

One last book—big—with extra pages, then sound, then an icon with a page, three more icons, then warning,Antipiracy warning

Gallagher never did back to me, btw, after he got back to me about notgetting back to me. We could start with our different reading of thesame passage from Marlowe’s Faustus, if we wanted to do.

Greenaway’s piss streaming Ariel versus Marlowe’s blood-streaming?

Hi Lowell (and Julian),

I taught your ELH essay today, and had a few more thoughts after rereading (I like it even more than I did before) regarding blood writing.   Julian and I have discussing your essay on the phone. I have two sets of questions.  If you have left the essay behind and have no interest in what I am writing, please feel free not to respond. :) Julian, please contribute at will.  :)

The first set of questions bears on the streaming of blood (live streaming avant la lettre?).  You note the connection between Faustus streams his blood to write / sign the deed of gift and Christ's blood-stream.  I was thinking about the relation between congealing and dropping.  The drop of blood, or half a drop Faustus longs for is, I think, an alternate response to the congealing of his own blood, a kind of after reading of the "homo, fuge" invisible ink inscribed on his arm.  He can divide the blood as a way of streaming it and also stopping it.   But is the drop going to go into Faustus or on him?  Is he going to drink it? Or is it supposed to wash him clean?  The drop seems to me not to fit into Faust’s topography--leap up, hold me down, hide in the earth, etc.  Nor does it fit into his temporality (time is running out; my time is up).  When is the drop going to drop?  Why, exactly, doesn't it drop? What is the economy of the drop?  Why can it be divided?  God kicks in as he is stopping it--but if he is, then he is like Mephistopheles (esp in the B text).  What de Man would

call the formal materiality of inscription  seems to have the kind of uncanny effect you discuss within the blood-streaming of time.  The drop is another instance of blood writing, but a writing that does not write, or cannot write off, Faustus’s sins.

The second set of  questions I have bear on how the uncanniness of material / messianic time is compressed in the signing / Homo, fuge scene itself.  The congealing precedes Faust saying the same line twice. This is just reiteration one could rightly say.  However, the scene of blood writing here is already uncanny before the blood congeals.  The blood letting directed by the text ("cuts his arm") would not happen on stage.  Nor would the actor actually do what Faust says: “I cut mine arm, and with my proper blood”  And even if one were to try to use squibs to fake the cut, one would still be pretending to cut one's arm, not cutting one's arm, which is what the stage direction directs.  And it is hard to imagine how the actor could fake cutting his arm and then fake the blood congealing.  (Julian has talked about this with me.)  So the language of the play and the body of the actor are already dislocated.  Disabled, even.  "I can write no more." I realize, btw, that I am not asking any questions.  :)    When we get to the "inscription" of "Homo, fuge," we have entered further into the uncanny.  We do not know what inscription means here.  Who wrote this? With what?  blood?  Ink? Invisible ink?  The medium is not specified. Then "Homo, fuge" is repeated just as "Faustus gives to thee his soul" was repeated earlier.  And mirroring or echoing the congealing and clear again of the blood, we get an inscription with visible / invisible ink / blood/ tattoo? 

So my quasi-question bears on the centrality you give to congealing (and blood writing) as the caesura that derails ethics.  Isn't the signing a problem as soon as we get "cuts his arm"?  And doesn't uncanniness in various forms (para-deja vus, repetitions of structures, kick in before the signing is over. I am quite sure I am far for the first person to notice this, but Faust’s elision form the line he cites twice is not included in his reading of the contract / deed of gift.  Blood is a medium as well as material.  Faust cannot upload himself, cannot broadcast himself.  He cannot receive Jesus. 

In relation to the economy and medium of blood, I was wondering about the paradox of a deed of gift. The gift cannot be contracted. It is not a debt.  Faustus is "given time." Yet not really.  The deed inscribes a gift exchange: "I, John Faustus . . . , by these presents, do give both body and soul to Lucifer"

Body and soul is a phrase that is also repeated, btw.

So the uncanniness of the signing--congealing and inscription, gets sorted out, sort of (not), in the deed of gift.  It becomes just a deed after he reads it out:  Mephistopheles says "Speak, Faustus, do you deliver this as your deed?"

Odd that he is asked to speak since he has just been speaking.  But then Faustus us uses "give" in his response:

"Ay, take it, and the devil give thee good on 't!"

 

"Deed of gift" has devolved into a kind of semic deed and asemic gift.

You suggest that blood recalls ink (pitch burned, sacrificial, etc).  But I wonder if Marlowe’s notion of blood streaming changes our understanding of writing of texts (which you appear to be entirely semic) and ironizes or activates a more or less latent ironization of materiality and messianic time as always already uncannily uncanny.  The spectral “precedes” the material.  The text itself is a specter, a record to be repeated and (not, when it comes to blood) re-enacted or even shown (only Faustus sees the blood stream). The text does not know anything.  Not even that. At least not for sure.

 

P.S. The hopeless inadequacy of Drucker’s binary opposition between matter and non-transcendental writing (Derrida’s trace?) makes itself apparent.

Faustus will never end, but he will not die. So the requests Faust makes us are non-sensical.  A character contemplates its own end, it is not human. Theater as transcendental object. Inventory moments in which the play letters on setting in motion a direction that make the diegesis collapse.

i Ibid; 198-99; Parages, Paris: Galilée, 1986, 219-47; to 227.

ii Derrida’s practice of using “faux-tires,” of “half titles” in The Post Card. Peggy Kamuf

has a footnote on "faux-titres" in Derrida’s Given Time: 1: Counterfeit Money, trans.

Peggy Kamuf, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 198) 94 n. 16: “In typography, a

‘faux-titre’ is a half title or bastard title. (Trans.)” Transliterated into English, “faux-titre”

means “false title.”

iii On Derrida’s interest in the archive and the shift from print to electronic media, see

Richard Burt, "Life Supports: 'Paperless' People, the New Media Archive, and the Hold

of Reading," in New Formations special issue on "Materialities of Text: Between the

Codex and the Net," eds. Nicholas Toburn and Says May. Forthcoming, 2013.

 “Homo fuge” moment. All moments are in a play world, not part of the real world. You’re watching a kind of living death, character between Marlowe’s live and the character’s lives or actor’s reanimation.

Prospera’s Bu(t)chdrowning books burn in Greenaway's P's Books Water is all over the film.  The shipwreck is written in bluish waterthat is supposed to be ink.Toy boat. Water is all over the film.  The shipwreck is written in bluish waterthat is supposed to be ink.Toyboat.

The shot above of the book is rather theological—apocalyptic but in a perverse way—Amen.

The word “creature”—Ferdinand called creature by Prospero to Miranda. “Thing od darkness” Caliban. Animal and Ariel—where the bee sucks there suck I.Lacan on bees reading in Seminar Book XX, chapter 4. [A;lo bees disappearing due to isecticides that mess up the pollen and hten disorient the bees so that they can’t make it back a-hive. Puts the B in Bare life.Speech—taught me language—Ferdinand—you speak my language. Man as speaking animal—but animal also speaks—so do spirits.

Ariel talks about the ship on fire—burning—rather than sinking, getting overwhelmed by waves.

Le Livre Ivre

Caliban as drunken Symbolist poet—ban ban ca ca caliban. Kissing the bottle as kissing the book.

In German TV Der Sturm, Ariel comes out dressed in the identical clothes Prospera is dressed in when Ariel says in English—modernized, not Shakespeare—the bit about how Prospero should forgive his enemies.