To Yes-laugh Derrida's Molly

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce’, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), p.287. 2 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p.279. 3 Jacques Derrida, ‘Two Words for Joyce’, in Poststructuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (London: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p.146. 4 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p.258. 5 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p.267. 6 Derrida counts 222 yeses. He adds a note to correct his initial count: his friend Noel Riley Fitch counted 354. The Hans Walter Gabner edition revealed 359. Derrida elaborates on the question of number in relation to yes in “A number of yes (Nombre de ovi)”, in Deconstruction: A Reader, ed. Martin McQuillan (New York: Routledge, 2000). 7 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p.307. 8 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p.266. 9 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p.267. 10 References to Ulysses are to James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Garland Publishing, 1984), 18.1. This is the ‘Critical and Synoptic Edition’ prepared by Hans Walter Gabler and released at the Frankfurt symposium in 1984. 11 James Joyce, Ulysses, 7.384. 12 James Joyce, Ulysses,7.411-12. 13 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), p.9. 14 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p.298. 15 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, pp.297-298. 16 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p.287. 17 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p.276. 18 Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles/Éperons: Le Styles de Nietzsche, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). 19 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p.287. 20 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p.287. 21 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p.291. 22 On Derrida's relation to yes, see - in addition to the motto to this essay – Judith Butler's meditation on Derrida's last interview. Judith Butler, ‘On Never Having Learned How to Live,’ in differences 16 (2005), pp.27-34. 23 ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p.288. Freud famously described the scene of the joke as necessarily involving a tripartite participation. See Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New York & London: Norton, 1960), p.224. 24 Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Laughter Presence’, in The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p.379. 25 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p.289. 26 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p.291. 27 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: The Modern Library, 1995), p.228. 28 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p.293. 29 Jacques Derrida, ‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), p.256. 30 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p.308. 31 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’. pp.291-292. 32 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p.295. 33 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p.147. 34 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p.295. 35 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p.297. 36 It is Derrida's gloss on the author function: ‘I do indeed say “my feeling”: that – major – affect which, beyond all our analyses, evaluations, interpretations, controls the scene of our relationship with whoever writes’ (‘Two Words’, 146). 37 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p.287. 38 James Joyce, Ulysses, 7.671. 39 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p.273. 40 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p.305. 41 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p.300. 42 Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Unum quid’, 161; quoted in Jacques Derrida, On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005), p.25. 43 Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Unum quid’, 162-3; Derrida, On Touching, p.27. 44 Jacques Derrida, On Touching, p.28. 45 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p.275. 46 James Joyce, Ulysses, 18.1573-1581; 1604-1609, (my emphasis). 47 Hélène Cixous draws attention to the fact that, by the time we reach Molly's final yes, Ulysses will have taken us through the rituals of life, birth and death: ‘And all is so complete, the living man is so closely enchained that some time passes before we realize this curious absence, absence not of the married state, but of the ceremony. The conjugal state is, in the prime sense of the word, almost the natural state: one is in it’. Hélène Cixous, The Exile of James Joyce, trans. Sally A. J. Purcell (New York: David Lewis, 1972), p.57. 48 See Ewa Ziarek, ‘The Female Body, Technology, and Memory in ‘Penelope’, in Molly Blooms: A Polylogue on “Penelope” and Cultural Studies, ed. Richard Pearce (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994). 49 Joyce's mapping of ‘Penelope’ is well known: ‘Its four cardinal points being the female breasts, arse, womb and … cunt expressed by the words because, bottom […] woman, yes’. James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Viking Press, 1957-1966), vol. 1, p.170. As part of the intertextuality of yes here, one would have to include the famous postcard Joyce received from Nora, with only one word on it: yes. 50 James Joyce, Ulysses, 4.238-39. 51 Jacques Derrida, ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, in Acts of Literature, p.58. See also ‘Women in the Beehive: A Seminar with Jacques Derrida’, the transcript of Derrida's 1984 seminar at Brown University, in differences 16 (2005), pp.139-157. 52 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p.288. 53 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p.288. 54 Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Signs 1, no. 4, 1976, pp.875-893, p.884. I thank Steven Meyer for pointing to me the eloquent work done by Cixous’ interpolation of a comma here. ‘I said yes, I will Yes’ (translating ‘j'ai dit oui, je veux oui’) is ambiguously productive; a more straightforward punctuation would have this segment read: ‘and yes[,] I said[,] yes[,] I will[.] Yes.’ 55 Derrida distinguishes between three configurations of ‘woman’ in Nietzsche. In the third instance, ‘woman is recognized and affirmed as an affirmative power, a dissimulatress, an artist, a dionysiac. And no longer is it man who affirms her. She affirms herself, in and of herself, in man’. Jacques Derrida, Spurs, p.97. 56 Jacques Derrida, H.C. for Life, That Is to Say… trans. Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2006), p.140. 57 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (Orlando, Fl.: Harcourt, 1991), p.11. 58 Jacques Derrida, ‘Two Words’, p.145. 59 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p.295. 60 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), p.259. 61 Jacques Derrida, ‘Two Words’, p.157. 62 Jacques Derrida, ‘Two Words’, p.158. 63 Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), p.198. 64 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p.275. 65 Derek Attridge, Acts of Literature, p.253. 66 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p.279.