Oxi: An Act of Resistance by McMullen Ken;McQuillan Martin; & Martin McQuillan

Author:McMullen, Ken;McQuillan, Martin; & Martin McQuillan [McMullen, Ken & McQuillan, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Godfather

Martin McQuillan

For Ken McMullen

Laguna Beach, 8 May 1998

I didn’t have the heart for postcards this time, my stay will have been too sad (death of Jean-Francois Lyotard, with whom I timeshared the same house at Laguna Beach for years—I have been teaching at Irvine, twenty minutes from here, several weeks a year for twelve years—and still other commotions . . . ). A letter just before returning, therefore, instead of cards. I would have liked to tell you of my love for Laguna and for those I call, also in ‘Circumfession’, ‘my friends the birds’ on their white rock. I took some photos of them for your book. Haven’t moved this year, the telephone is hell when the news isn’t good . . . Normally I go several times to Newport Beach, past Corona de Mar (Fashion Island or South Coast Plaza, for shopping or to buy French newspapers), once or twice to Los Angeles, which is nearby. Sometimes I leave Laguna Beach for two or three days on a trip I wouldn’t admit to (Las Vegas, Death Valley, Boulder City, or the Grand Canyon by night train—the South West Chief, my very own American cinema . . . ). Failing always impossible stories—anyway, we won’t have the time or place—be content with dreams from Laguna, as promised.

Jacques Derrida, letter to Catherine Malabou, Counterpath1

In the book La Contre-allée, Catherine Malabou reproduces several items of correspondence with Jacques Derrida, written to accompany the publication of her text ‘L’Ecartment des voies: Dérive, arrivée, catastrophe’. In the letter written from Laguna Beach, in southern California, on 8 May 1998, Derrida tells Malabou about his daily routine when teaching at the University of California (UC), Irvine, and of less routine trips on the Amtrak train, the Southwest Chief, that runs from Los Angeles to Chicago. Derrida says (in the form of a letter to be openly published in a book) that these trips to Las Vegas, Death Valley, Boulder City and the Grand Canyon are not ones he would admit to. The confession is a poignant one, in the context of a letter that opens with the sad news of the death of Jean-François Lyotard, his compatriot with whom he shared a house in Laguna Beach. These train journeys are not to be admitted to, not because they are clandestine, perhaps, but because they are not philosophical or academic in orientation. Earlier in the letter, he tells of a visit to UC, Davis, to speak on de Man and materiality; such travel is proper to the philosopher. Even when he does not want to travel, out of exhaustion or inconvenience or fear of the event, a sense of duty, Derrida notes in this letter, always compels him to attend the academic gathering: ‘neither courage nor masochism but another law, that no longer belongs to the world, dictates to me the compelling need to go’.2 It is difficult not to recognize the need for academics to ‘unfailingly obey some other’ that renders us passive in the attendance of events that we would rather not be at.

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