Original scientific paper
Derrida's Quasi-Transcendental Interweaving of Invention and Interpretation
Andrea Hurst
; Philosophy, Centre for Advanced Studies, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Port Elizabeth, South Africa
Abstract
In both "Psyche: Inventions of the Other," which stresses the "paradoxical predicaments" in which the concept "invention" remains tied up, and "Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce", which focuses on the related aporetics of interpretation, Derrida’s multiple deconstructive performances uncover the aporias that beset the traditional and seemingly obvious relationship of priority between invention and interpretation that governs, for example, Kant’s analysis of the relationship between taste and genius. As I hope to show in what follows, Derrida demonstrates both that invention strictly speaking is ruined by interpretation, just as interpretation strictly speaking, is ruined by invention. One cannot demarcate a domain for the one that is not always already contaminated by the other, and this mutual contamination means that both "invention" and "interpretation" cannot become entirely true to their concepts. That is, both invention and interpretation strictu sensu are impossible. Derrida’s way of thinking, therefore, demonstrates that there is no logically coherent basis for the invention/convention distinction that is all too often used to support the traditional belief that a musicologist’s sole task is merely the second-level analytical interpretation of musical compositions already so inventively brought into being by artists. This is an attitude that neatly excludes musicology from the domain of cultural production, which, it is often supposed, absolves the discipline of the responsibility for cultural critique at the coalface, as it were. In my view, then, the importance of Derrida’s pattern of thinking for critical musicology has to do with its power to address the dangers of ideological blindness that are the result of placing musicologists and/ or artists strictly on opposite sides of the invention-convention coin.
Keywords
Derrida; deconstruction; quasi-transcendental logic; economic/aneconomic invention; interpretation
Hrčak ID:
64284
URI
Publication date:
14.1.2005.
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