Richard Burt is "an innovative and successful teacher who challenges
students and who puts tremendous energy into course design and
execution."
Kenneth Kidd,
Associate Professor and Chair
Department of English
9/9/2011 7:19 AM.
It’s time for you to take a You-Turn
Please email me only to send me class assignments. Otherwise, please talk to me in person after (not before) class or during office hours.
Office: 4314 Turlington Hall
Office Phone 352 392-6650
Office Hours: after class, and by appointment
The current version of this website is the binding one, if you are taking this course.
To say farewell to paper, today, would be rather like deciding on one fine day to stop speaking because you had learned to write. Or to stop looking in the mirror because the road is in front of us. We drive with both hands and both feet, looking both in front and behind, speeding up at some points and slowing down at others. Presumably it is not possible at the same time, in one single, indivisible instant, to look behind and in front; but if you drive well you dart in the blink of an eye from the windshield to the mirror. Otherwise, you’re blind or you have an accident. You see what I’m getting at: the end of paper isn’t going to happen in a hurry.
--Jacques Derrida, “Paper or Me, You Know . . . (New Speculations on the Luxury of the Poor).” In Paper Machine. Trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford UP, 2005), 64-65.
That is my situation. The status of this situation as such has so far not been settled in any appropriate way, unless by imitation, unless at the incitement, the semblance of various other established situations. In the present case this results in timid selection practices, in a certain identification with a figure, a form of conduct, indeed, in a human type whose form nothing seems to render obligatory, or again in a ritual, indeed some other measure that, at a better time, a former time, I compared to that of a driving school, without provoking any protest from anyone. There was even someone among my students, very close at the time, who remarked to me that this was, in reality, what was desired by everyone who was starting analytic career—to receive one’s driving license, as in a driving school, according to paths that were mapped out well in advance and that included the same type of examination.
It is certainly notable—I mean, worth noting—that after ten years I have arrived all the same at spelling out a way that is the one I call the discourse of the position of the psychoanalyst. Let’s say its hypothetical discourse, since this is also what is being put to you this year for your examination. Namely—what is the structure of this discourse?
--Jacques Lacan, “Knowledge, a means of jouissance,” in Seminar XVII The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 42 (47)
This is why since I began I have been moving from aside to aside, from one vehicle to another, unable to brake or stop the bus, its automaticity or automobility. Or at least, I can brake only by lettingskid, in other words, letting my control as driver slip away at certain points. I can no longer stop the vehicle or anchor the ship, master without remainder the drifting, skidding, or sideslipping [dérapage] (I have pointed out somewhere that the word dérapage, before its greatest metaphorical skid, has to do with a certain play of the anchor in nautical language . . .”
--Jacques Derrida,"The Retrait of Metaphor," in Psyche: Invention of the Other, Vol 1, 49-50
