Wednesday, May 13, 2020

Deconstruction: The Monstrosity

By having Derrida (and now Lévi-Strauss) arrive at least a day earlier, we have stretched out the storyline a little bit. Given that, we no longer need some of the side material--not directly connected to the main storyline--about Baltimore "waking up" in order to set the pacing and the timbre of the story. We aim to accomplish that in the main story itself.

As far as raw material we've already determined we might use, such as this side material, we are loathe to throw it out. Instead we can probably use all, or almost all. of those vignettes if we determine that we will stretch them over the course of the main story, which is the four days of the conference, plus at least the day before. We are going to tell a lot of back story, as we've seen, and jump around in time (at least going back to late 1950s in Derrida's own life) and place (Paris, at least) in the way stories do these days, and which audiences are used to. But we will frame it all within the duration of the conference and the conflict between the two principals.

One thread of that Baltimore side material that we will certainly want to keep is the woman giving birth in the hospital. All of those scenes---their house, them leaving the house for the hospital, the attending physician in the waiting room, the admitting room door--will be seen. Eventually we will see the birth itself. When we will see that? I think it is obvious. We will see it presumably in Act Three when we see Derrida give the last line in his own conference speech. This is the sentence that begins Here there is a sort of question..., and ends on the word monstrosity, which Prof. Fry at the start of Lecture 11 suggested would make an excellent starting point for a semester project paper.

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