Writing Time: The (Late) Oeuvres of Jacques Derrida and William Kentridge

In order to respond to the infinite provocation of a contemporary thinking of time today, I would like to provide two examples of the relevance of the retreat and the return – indeed, a new conceptualization – of time in the deconstructive writing of Jacques Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign, and in the performative poetics of Kentridge’s ‘extended exploration of time’ in the “The Refusal of Time”/ “Refuse the Hour”. Jacques Derrida, the Algerian-French father of Deconstruction; William Kentridge, the South-African artist, performer, drawer of animated films: as a symptomatic, that is, a phantasmatic coincidence in thinking and creative work, these intellectual figures of our contemporaneity both come to the questioning of time, to specific notions of time, sharing a common focus on the ‘instruments’ that make time in the Western world: the written page of the text; the mobilized stage of the performance. In his reading of Robinson Crusoe’s adventures on the deserted island, crossed by Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of solitude, finitude and the world, Derrida speaks of time by focusing on the image of the wheel; Kentridge, on his part, organizes “The Refusal of Time” and sets the terms of “Refuse the Hour” around the clock, the wheel of Fortuna. For both thinkers, the return of the symptoms related to western time is identified with the time of the encounter with the Other. In Derrida’s writing, it is the absolute other of death, in its relation with what is to-come; in Kentridge’s performances, it is the splitting of the ‘I’ into its double, a series of others who act as the propelling force of the future. In my intervention, I will map the return of the symptoms along the paths that Derrida and Kentridge follow on the page of the book and on the threshold between the studio and the external world, reading their goals in the singular approaches to the (im)possible end of the journey into/through time.