Yitzhak Rabin Building, Mount Scopus, Room 1002 (The lecture will be held in German and the students and colleagues are cordially invited.)

 

The sound of the sea and the cries of the seagulls, Jacques Derrida says: “Everything I say is shaped by my silence, by what I do not say, by what I say”.It was the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) who called the “l’avenir”, the unpredictable future moved into the center of his theory and thus denied any future magic of a predictable future.

This unpredictability is what characterizes Friederike Mayröcker’s writing, as if the author were permanently on the high seas, without a map, but with an inner compass leading her to undiscovered shores. And these are footnotes that the Austrian writer Friederike Mayröcker (born 1924) discovers as a new literary genre. Derrida inspired Mayröcker, for example through his books such as »The Post Card « (1980), »Glas« (1974) or »Jacques Derrida. A portrait« (1991). In the last mentioned book, the US-American philosopher and literary critic Geoffrey Bennington (born 1956) attempts to introduce Jacques Derrida's work, while Derrida comments on and develops this essay in footnotes. Mayröcker notes: “And then, for the umpteenth time, I’ve read this book: Bennington/Derrida, where Jacques Derrida just below, in the lower third, writes the footnotes and Bennington writes the main text. And I never read Bennington. I always read only the footnotes and was delighted. I think I've read the book five times now“.

Unlike in this book, Friederike Mayröcker simply omits the main text. She uses the fragmentary and truncated footnotes, what Derrida himself describes as a dream of a “wholly raw, unprocessed language”, as if it came from an “invisible interior”. No narrative bow, no dramaturgy, instead leaves the author spaces that make room for a poetic intensification and attention enhancement.