There was no signer, by right, before the Declaration [of Independence], which itself remains the producer and guarantor of its own signature . . . The self rises forth here or extends credit to itself, in a single “coup de force,” which is also a stroke of writing, as the right to writing. The “coup de force” makes right , founds right or law, gives right, brings the law to the light of day, gives both birth and day to the law. Brings the law to the light of day, gives both birth and day to the law: read The Madness of Day by Maurice Blanchot.
-Jacques Derrida, Negotiations
I am working on an adaptation of Maurice Blanchot’s Madness of Day. We will open in late November. The original text is a stream of consciousness narrative spoken by a single subject and translates well to a one man dramatic monologue. The work is a deconstructive text in the guise of a narrative monologue. The Subject is slippery, like memory, and constantly falls in on itself exposing its lack of foundation.
I picked up a copy of of Derrida’s Negotiations to do a bit of reading on politically minded deconstructive texts. The idea was general and largely fell into a category of interest that I hold independent of any projects I may be working on. So I get to his reading of the American Declaration of Independence and there I discover his reference to Blanchot, and the precise text we are working with on with this project. It was a wonderful bit of coincidence to have my subway reading turn into a direct piece of research that set me off thinking about the visual language of the play in a number of simultaneous directions.
Taking a clinical setting and applying a Noir aesthetic has so far been a lot of faith on my part. I felt the impulse was right on a gut level from my reading of the text, but could not fully understand it. I now find that directorial impulse becoming clearer in my mind. The world of Noir often has within it issues of mixed or hidden identity. Sometimes this is intentional and sometimes it is a matter of memory loss. Either way, the notion of fixed identity and a solid past are called into question.
Just as the Declaration of Independence creates the United States of America through the written act of signing the document, so too does the ontological experience of the creation of Self occur through the speech act of “I.” Be it verbal or non-verbal, that primal speech act is the creation of Self and does, in the final analysis, determine this particular instance of a mutable identity. For speech need not be merely aural, but can and often is kinetic or visual. The act of cooking is a kind of speech act and exists as much in the combination of food items with heat as it does in the aroma created thereby. The two can not be extracted from one another.
The memory of torture, now fever, can not be extracted from this ever changing self. Rather the Self exists as a continually evolving Mash-Up experience, unable to extract itself from an equally mutable contextual situation. Like the Noir genre and its ever changing broken light revealing a face, now silhouette, now a single hand. The Self, as contextually determined through its constant negotiation with Shadow, and Shadow’s corollary, Light.
“I see this day, and outside it there is nothing.” The perpetual mutability of Self is inescapable. One can alter environment and context but the Self is immutable only in its constant presence. A presence of change. “When [The Law] had recognized my right to be everywhere, it meant I had no place anywhere.” The supreme act of creating a Subject is always already an Objectification of the self. Just as the State comes into to being through the act of the Signature, so too does the Subject become Object through its own recognition of Selfhood.
A bifurcation of the self occurs the moment one becomes authentically autonomous as the Self becomes at once an object of inquiry. One thinks of Phillip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly as a kind of nihilistic realization of this event. Yet, this moment is not static, but rather one stage of an organic process of death and rebirth that echos throughout consciousness. “I had allowed myself to be locked up. Temporarily, they told me.” One might find these confines in Language perhaps, “One became the other. The words spoke by themselves.” Or maybe light, “That was the truth: the light was going mad, the brightness had lost all reason; it assailed me irrationally, without control, without purpose.”
