Abstract
Challenging origins as a legitimate source of authority, Roland Barthes, among others, has proposed that the unity of a text lies in its destination, rather than in its origin. In “The Philosophical Interview: Queer(y)ing Performance,” Magnolia Pauker suggests that it is neither the beginning nor end points that provide a cohesive force, but rather the in between aspects of discourse. Consequently, she advocates for the form of the philosophical interview as a potentially “queer performance” whose multidimensional textuality invites a conversation with those present and yet to come. Displacing attention from origins and endpoints, the philosophical interview emphasizes thinking as an interactive process in which external influences blend and clash. The inherently philosophical affinities of the interview have long been neglected, despite its apparent proximity to the philosophical dialogue first championed by Plato. It is time, however, that such a practice command our renewed attention, as the act of calling into question within the scene of a “live” performance resonates with distinct affinities to Performance Philosophy. Moving between philosophical form and performance, the interview stages this between as the very scene—or gap—that brings philosophy and performance together.
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Notes
- 1.
Alain Badiou, Plato’s Republic: A Dialogue in 16 Chapters, trans. Susan Spitzer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 3. While dialogue and interview are not interchangeable, the question of the relation between the two deserves further attention.
- 2.
Jacques Derrida, The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 12.
- 3.
Marcel Broersma, “Journalism as Performative Discourse. The Importance of Form and Style in Journalism,” in Journalism and Meaning-making: Reading the Newspaper, ed. Verika Rupar (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2010), 17.
- 4.
Michel Foucault, “Polemics, Politics and Problematizations,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Trutb (Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol.1), ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1998), 111.
- 5.
60 Minutes presents a prime example.
- 6.
The same that returns, however, is never the same: each return is at once a repetition and a dis-articulation, at least potentially so. As Foucault explains with regard to his archaeological method: “We must not forget that a rule of formation is neither the determination of an object, nor the characterization of a type of enunciation, nor the form or content of a concept, but the principle of their multiplicity and dispersion,” Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 191.
- 7.
Judith Butler, “Critically Queer,” GLQ 1 (1993), 18.
- 8.
Chantal Mouffe, “Critique as Counter-Hegemonic Intervention,” European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies (April 2008). n. pag. Web.
- 9.
Unpublished interview, March 4, 2011.
- 10.
Judith Butler, “When Gesture Becomes Event,” in Anna Street, Julien Alliot, and Magnolia Pauker, Eds. Inter Views in Performance Philosophy: Crossings and Conversations (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 174.
- 11.
The genealogy of this “scene” is both theatrical and psychoanalytic.
- 12.
Roland Barthes, “Death of the Author,” in Image—Music—Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), 146.
- 13.
Ibid., 148.
- 14.
Nicholas De Villiers, Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 154.
- 15.
Maurice Blanchot’s refusal to give interviews is well-noted, as is Barthes’ disdain. There are others such as Jean-François Lyotard and Louis Althusser, who have few published interviews. Yet, even Jacques Rancière, a vocal critical of the increasingly coercive relationship between intellectuals and the media has conducted numerous interviews and a new collection is forthcoming.
- 16.
Jean K. Chalaby, “Journalism as an Anglo-American Invention: A Comparison of the Development of French and Anglo-American Journalism, 1830s–1920s,” European Journal of Communication 11(3) (1996).
- 17.
For more information on the proliferation of new journals, see Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
- 18.
Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
- 19.
Here, I am invoking Derrida’s notion of the supplement, particularly as it deliberates upon the devalued work of pedagogy.
- 20.
See, for example: Derrida’s performance in Derrida, directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering (USA: Zeitgeist Films, 2002); Michel Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980); and Pierre-André Boutang, Gilles Deleuze, and Claire Parnet, Lábécédaire de Gilles Deleuze avec Claire Parnet (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012).
- 21.
De Villiers, Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol, 154.
- 22.
Ibid., 151.
- 23.
Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 8. Cited in Edward Said, “The Problem of Textuality,” Critical Inquiry 4(4) (1978): 704.
- 24.
See, for example: “An Ethics of Pleasure,” “History and Homosexuality,” and “The Cultural Insularity of Popular Music,” in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews 1961–1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996).
- 25.
As when Foucault, responding to J.A. Miller’s reference to the Lacanian axiom that “there is no sexual relation,” claims not to have known it. “The Confession of the Flesh,” 213.
- 26.
“The Masked Philosopher,” in Foucault Live, 302–307.
- 27.
Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 151.
- 28.
Fons Elders, Foucault—The Lost Interview, video, 15:46, 20 March 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzoOhhh4aJg.
- 29.
Paul Atkinson and David Silverman, “Kundera’s Immortality: The Interview Society and the Invention of the Self,” Qualitative Inquiry 3(3) (1997): 309.
- 30.
Derrida.
- 31.
Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 115.
- 32.
Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, “Intellectuals and Power,” in Foucault Live, 75.
- 33.
Gilles Deleuze, “What is a dispositif?,” in Michel Foucault: Philosopher, ed. Timothy J. Armstrong (New York: Routledge, 1991), 159.
- 34.
Michel Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 42.
- 35.
See, for example: Joseph Margolis who reads Foucault’s last interviews as a series of “specimen remarks…[that] should help to pinpoint his slide back to the idiom of the self,” ultimately proclaiming “I am afraid it is all too easy to collect the confirming evidence. I find it, for instance, in a late interview,” Joseph Margolis, “Foucault’s Problematic,” in Foucault, ed. Robert Nola (London: Frank Cass, 1998), 54–55.
- 36.
Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 182.
- 37.
Deleuze, “What is a dispositif?,” 166.
- 38.
Ibid, 165–166.
- 39.
See also: Deleuze, Foucault.
- 40.
Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–1983, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 20.
- 41.
Ibid. My emphasis.
- 42.
Ibid., 21. My emphasis.
- 43.
José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 186, 189.
- 44.
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 4.
- 45.
Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” 194.
- 46.
Gail Mason, The Spectacle of Violence: Homophobia, Gender and Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 2001), 26.
- 47.
Dina Al-Kassim, “Psychoanalysis and the Postcolonial Genealogy of Queer Theory,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45 (2013): 345.
- 48.
Personal interview, August 2011.
- 49.
Dina Al-Kassim, On Pain of Speech (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 1–60.
- 50.
Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 84, 112.
- 51.
Judith Butler, “Speaking of Rage and Grief,” PEN World Voices Festival, The Great Hall, Cooper Union, New York, April 28, 2014.
- 52.
Lee Edelman, No Future; Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1990).
- 53.
Athena Athanasiou and Judith Butler, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (New York: Polity Press, 2013), 165. I read the hypenation through the Deleuzian concept of the stutter. ‘Response-able,’ while leaving “the form of expression intact…makes the indicated affect reverberate through the words,” Gilles Deleuze, “He Stuttered,” in Essays Critical and Clinical (London: Verso, 1998), 108.
- 54.
Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 84 and 112.
- 55.
Ibid., 84.
- 56.
Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 41.
- 57.
Deleuze, “What is a dispositif?,” 159.
- 58.
Judith Butler, “Critically Queer,” 18.
- 59.
Diana Taylor borrows this term “from the contemporary Spanish usage of performance—performático, or “performatic”—in order to avoid employing performative and performativity as the “false cognates” of performance.” Diana Taylor, “Translating Performance,” Profession (2002), 47.
- 60.
Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28(3) (2003): 808.
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Pauker, M. (2017). The Philosophical Interview: Queer(y)ing Performance. In: Street, A., Alliot, J., Pauker, M. (eds) Inter Views in Performance Philosophy. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95192-5_2
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