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© 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © 2005 NSEAD/Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Can Improvisation be Taught?

Gary Peters

The aim of this article is to reconsider the (age old)problem of relating theory to practice in art educa-tion by placing it within the largely ignoredcontext of improvisation. In so doing it is hopedthat some of the well-known ‘difficulties’ art prac-titioners have when confronted with the (usuallymandatory) history and theory components oftheir programmes of study might be better under-stood and, perhaps, managed rather differently.

Abstract

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At the centre of the debate between theorists andpractitioners in the arts is the question of ‘rele-vance’: which histories, theories, methodologiesare relevant to the artist in the studio, video makeron location or designer confronted by a brief?Within art education however, the question ofrelevance has been understood in a specific way,casting history and theory in the role of providingcontextual and analytical support for practice,thus complementing and supplementing thatpractice rather than directly engaging with it.

At best, within such an educational model,the theoretically orientated art student developsa more sophisticated understanding of thehistory of their practice and the conceptualconcerns and practical solutions of other practi-tioners, they become more knowledgeable and,often, more self-reflexive: excellent. At worst,such an approach seems irrelevant to the day-to-day productive concerns of the artist faced withthe reality of making aesthetic judgements (oftenon the hoof), solving problems, taking chancesand capitalising on the unforeseen. From withinthis, the predicament of the artist as producer,historical and theoretical models can appearhopelessly rigid, formularised and cumbersome,quite apart from their ‘difficulty’ in otherrespects: their ‘intellectualism’.

As a response to this rather familiar picture,this article will propose, albeit schematically, analternative approach, one intended to augmentrather than negate the current provision brieflysketched above. In particular, it will be suggestedthat history and theory teaching within art educa-tion needs to widen its focus, drawing into itsremit a more direct engagement with thecreative process itself, an approach traditionallyreserved for practitioner/teachers working ‘in the studio’. The central, albeit implicit, claim herewill be that in order to be effective the theorisa-tion of creativity must liberate itself from a wholeset of assumptions inherited from romantic andpost-romantic art and recognise instead theparticular structure of improvisation within whichthe artist works.

At present there is very little writing on improvisa-tion and most of that has emerged within musicpractice, usually written by musicians, as well aswithin the area of dance where improvisatory tech-niques are central. By placing an emphasis on‘self-expression’ and ‘collective interaction’, themusical account of improvisation, while important,has proved less engaged with the particular struc-tureof improvisation. One of the intended aims ofthe current research is to both broaden thisperspective while offering a more theoreticallysophisticated model of improvisation that reflectsmore accurately the particularity of aestheticproduction across the disciplines and which drawsupon primary, although often ignored, aspects ofcontemporary theory.

Although, as said, there is relatively little writ-ten on improvisation, it does quite frequentlyappear in course documentation across a rangeof disciplines in the arts. Within this context, it isevident that a particular model of improvisation isoften assumed, one that connotes a set of posi-tive values that can take on, and often do take on,an emancipatory force that is politically empow-ering and emotionally alluring. The teacher andimproviser LaDonna Smith, who has writtenextensively on improvisation and education, willbe allowed to set the tone here:

The act of engaging in free improvisation willbecome a liberator, and emancipator, for manypeople to touch into their emotional lives in a non-verbal and non-judgemental way. We mustintroduce this healthy way of life [1].

This is stirring stuff, pitched as it is against every-thing that is negative in our experience asteachers, the curricula and bureaucracy that toooften constrain us, the institutions and their‘mission statements’ that deflect or frustrate us,the hoops to jump through … and so on, whowouldn’t want more improvisation? So let us takea more detailed look, then, at the most familiarcomponents of this model of improvisationbefore considering an alternative that, although

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somewhat less inspirational might, perhaps, bemore valuable pedagogically: a suggestion thatwill be left open for debate at the conclusion ofthese current remarks. In the meantime, here aresome key assumptions of what I will callImprovisation ‘model A’.

Model AAutonomyMaking use of Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction [2] between negative and positive freedom –‘freedom-from’ and ‘freedom-to’–, this model ofimprovisation promotes both, albeit with mixedsuccess. It is easy enough to imagine the differentboxes we might want to escape from, and certainlythe role of teacher-as-emancipator is an attractiveone for those who are seeking change. ForLaDonna Smith, speaking from within the contextof music education, the negativity of improvisationis needed to challenge the hegemony of rote learn-ing, sterile instrumental technique and rigid modesof interpretation. She writes:

Sadly, as I look into University curriculums, it is appar-ent that nothing much has changed in the last 30years … There are many advances in the art ofcomposition, in the technology of music, and in thereturn to improvisation as the direct route to self-expression. The need for music departments tochange priorities and create a curriculum to reflectthe present tendencies is imminent [3].

Many of us would agree with that, but, shiftingthese thoughts into the positive register of ‘free-dom-to’, if, as LaDonna Smith goes on to claim,‘Improvisation is clearly a key to unlock the doorsof music making in the future’, what does thisdoor, locked until now, open out onto? Studentsare free-to do what exactly? Giving them ‘permis-sion’ to feel, or ‘invent’ is not enough.Encouraging them to ‘touch into’ their emotionallives in a non-judgemental and non-verbal way,might sound great to the teacher/improviser, butit will most likely be either terrifying or derisory forthe student, either a Roussea-esque forced

autonomy or an embarrassing farce (and neitherforce nor embarrassment have ever been veryproductive pedagogical methods!).

Development, linearityWith this pair of concepts we come upon the‘model A’ improviser’s mode of aesthetic andintellectual movement. The primary concern withself-development is here allowed to hang on theparallel development of a dynamic pedagogythat, through the introduction of improvisatorytechniques, aims to ensure that the student is nottempted to seek security and reassurance in the‘given’– tradition, the canon, ideology, prejudice –but develops to his or her full potential throughendless self-transcendence. Here improvisationis made dependent on a restless curiosity that iseven prepared to risk the work for the sake of thatwhich is beyond the work and then beyond thatbeyond. But, in spite of the apparent radicalismand progressiveness of the above which, on theface of it, might appear to challenge many funda-mental aspects of current educational theory andpractice, it does, nevertheless share with theformer the same developmental, progressive,linear, dynamic, future-orientated structure, albeitin a rather different guise. Both seek the samegoals, more or less, but only differ as to the mosteffective ways of achieving them. A differentmodel of improvisation might challenge thesegoals: but more on that later.

Innovation, the new, the questionLinked to the above prioritisation of movementabove stasis, and the future above the present andthe past, the interpenetration of improvisation andinnovation is commonly taken for granted in thismodel. To improvise is to progressively shed theold and enter the new, to throw off what Nietzschefamously called history’s ‘spirit of gravity’, and‘actively forget’ that past, thus creating the future.This perennial avant-gardism, that seeks ratherthan finds (to echo Picasso) and questions ratherthan answers is clearly an exciting way to thinkeducationally, and it has certainly excited many

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artists throughout the modernist period (one thatstill dominates arts education), but, again, the futu-rity of the future, its absence and otherness can,as Kierkegaard recognised long ago, create aprofound anxiety which may or may not haveeducational benefits (not that I am against anxietymyself! In small doses of course). But seriously, itis precisely this familiar interlocking of improvisa-tion and avant-gardism that, exhilarating though itmay be, obstructs the thinking and formation ofanother model of improvisation, one that,although less exciting, might, perhaps, make amore substantial contribution to arts education.

Self-expressionIt is more than 30 years now since MichelFoucault declared the ‘subject’ ‘dead’, and, sincehis own actual death many poststructuralistthinkers have continued to explain to us why thehumanist affirmation of the ‘self’ can no longer beembraced with the same fervour as in days of old.But, on the whole, such ideas have had as littleimpact on ‘model A’ improvisers as they have onarts educators. As Ben Watson, in a recent book,confidently declares:

To get a grip on Free Improvisation [why the capi-tals?]… anything tainted by existentialism,structuralism or poststructuralism will not suffice. Allthat Parisian nonsense was a product of the failure of1968: neo Kantian despair, pseudo-radicalNietzschean sentimentality [4].

This desperately butch dismissal of everything‘pseudo’ and the (equally sentimental) defence ofthe improviser as one who is securely situatedwithin the movement of ‘living speech’ ratherthan the stasis of ‘petrified forms’ and ‘deadlanguages’ [5], resonates through much of theanti-intellectualism of arts education whichcontinues (theoretical lip-service notwithstand-ing) to assume a pre-structuralist concept of theself, coupled with a romantic or early modernistnotion of expression. Inevitably situated withinobjective structures, both aesthetic and extra-

aesthetic, student improvisation is herepromoted as a means of introducing the subjec-tive into the objective, the singular into thecollective, the self into otherness, the idiosyn-cratic into the formulaic. In particular, it is theperceived directness of improvisation, the imme-diacy that speaks straight from the heart, that ischampioned as the royal road to self-develop-ment and self-expression and emotionalfulfilment. As always, it is difficult to argue withthis without coming over as a Parisian killjoy andpost-structuralist pseud. Surely everyone is striv-ing for these goals? Well, yes, but maybe aslightly more circumspect consideration of theways in which notions of expression and, indeed,expressive feelings themselves are mediated bygiven forms (is any form dead?) might result in aconcept of improvisation that more closelymatches the predicament of the student trying toget a decent education.

Before turning to an alternative model of impro-visation, I would like to make one, more general,point about ‘model A’ improvisation and its accom-panying pedagogy, a point which links back toBerlin’s two concepts of freedom. The argument,as presented above, encourages teachers andeducationalists to introduce improvisation into thecurriculum for two linked but rather differentreasons. On the one hand, thought negatively,improvisation is a means to an end, a way of loos-ening up or, indeed, challenging educationalstructures with a view to arriving at educationalstrategies that are more responsive to currentneeds and current technologies, actually moreabout education than improvisation per se. On theother, improvisation is promoted, positively, as avaluable end in itself, as something to be taught.And this is the problem, whether it be as a wayofteaching or the subject of teaching, improvisation,as described above, is, if not unteachable, thenexcruciatingly difficult to teach. As Kant recog-nised long ago in the Critique of Judgement, anyhuman activity so thoroughly immersed in theconcepts of autonomy, singularity and indepen-dence (even without the addition of creativity’s

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inscrutable dynamism witnessed above) will findno adequate method of instruction, only a peda-gogical manner, the discussion of which will,unfortunately, take us too far off of our path here[6]. Suffice it to say that the model of improvisationpresented above is itself too problematical to func-tion as the solution to our existing pedagogicalproblems, rigidities or insensitivities. Too manyquestions are begged and too many assumptionsmade. In itself, making a space for improvisation,encouraging it, ‘permitting’ it, while laudable, willremain idealistic (and thus largely ineffective) aslong as it adheres to a model that ties it to a move-ment that incessantly goes beyond, transcendsand breaches the given in the name of the new,the unexpected, the unheard-of and the freedomthat is assumed to accompany eternal novelty.Without wishing in any way to counter, critique ornegate this model I will, as promised, turn now toanother way of conceiving improvisation, notbetter or worse, just different.

Model BHeteronomy Understood here as obedience to an externalauthority (one, be it noted, that can be interi-orised), heteronomy and improvisation are by nomeans opposed. Students improvise all of thetime, but if you ask them to improvise they willmost likely freeze, they won’t know what to do.They will assume that the expectation is that they‘make something up’, do something new, act outa certain autonomy: this is not easy (and I don’tthink its very easy to teach them either). But thereis a confusion here, a confusion of ‘model A’ and‘model B’. The improvisation that passes unno-ticed, the ongoing work of the art work, the trialand error, the problem solving, the simple and notso simple pleasures of distraction (doodling, twid-dling, twirling and whirling – I’m not achoreographer! – ‘taking a line for a walk’ as PaulKlee famously put it), this takes place within givenstructures that over-determine the play of thefamiliar and the unfamiliar, the expected and theunexpected, the intention and the accident. Every

time a student picks up a brush or a pen, looksthrough a camera or sits behind an instrument,each time a dancer steps onto the floor or adrama student onto a stage they step into aprofoundly heteronomous space where infinitepossibility is entangled in a dense web of impos-sibility. Niklas Luhmann, in his Art as a SocialSystem, speaks of art as the marking of anunmarked space [7], but this is ‘A team’ avant-gardist thinking, promoting an aesthetic thatmust constantly erase the past – the given – inorder to preserve the autonomous act of creation.One might suggest that, in fact, no space isunmarked, there is no virgin soil awaiting the pureimprovisatory gesture. The given, or what Hegelcalled the ‘there’ [8] is always already there, and itis marked. The artwork does not so much mark anunmarked space as re-marka marked space. Thisdoes not rule out improvisation, it circumscribesand, thus, transforms it. Just how will be dealtwith as we continue.

Repetition, circularityFamiliarity does not have to breed contempt,much of the pleasure of improvisation can berelated to the improviser’s attention to momentsof re-cognition and re-presentation (re-marking)that resist time’s passage. Thought outside ofthe model of incessant self-transcendence, themoment becomes not an insignificant and insub-stantial point on a line, but, rather, what might becalled a space of retention where familiarpatterns and figures are re-hearsed, re-vised andre-configured with varying degrees of obses-siveness. I think of Giacometti’s paintings wherethe work does not develop in a linear fashion, butproceeds through a cycle of marking, erasingand re-marking that, to be sure, stops at a certainpoint, but is never finished. Or his obsessivemoulding of little clay figures until they disinte-grated in his hands, only to start again on anothercycle of improvised repetition: always the same,always different. To read Kafka’s Diaries is towitness something similar, experimentationrooted in the repetition of the given – passages

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starting, re-starting and re-starting again andagain – where, as in his novels, it is the endlessdetours of writing that trap him in the eternalrecurrence of the same, where an ultimate goal(the Castle) becomes increasingly meaningless.Thought thus, within an educational context,improvisation becomes, perhaps, a little lessintimidating for the student, less of a mystery ora ‘gift’ and more to do with what Walter Benjaminwould call the ‘illumination’ of the known. Such ade-mystification also allows improvisation to be,if not taught directly, at least presented in such away that the student begins to identify and hope-fully capitalise on the improvisational dimensionof their own work, a dimension which may havegone unrecognised or have been obscured bythe more daunting otherness of ‘model A’. Ifnothing else, students need to become aware ofthe fact that repetition and difference are notopposites. As Gilles Deleuze has argued, we candistinguish two forms of repetition, the firstbeing the repetition of the same, the secondcontaining difference; the first negative, thesecond positive or affirmative; the first static, thesecond dynamic [9]. This shift of polarity is some-thing that can be taught. Without needing toworry about the preservation of the student’sautonomy or the astonishing novelty of theirwork, the teacher can become involved insteadin defamiliarising the familiar and drawing out thedifference in the repetition that characterisesmost art work. Instead of trying to propel thestudent beyond him or herself, the teacher canbecome more concerned with assisting thestudent to come to a more sophisticated andmore intense understanding of their given situa-tion Interestingly, and in spite of appearances tothe contrary, such a pedagogical strategy, byeschewing a developmental linearity, representsa more radical challenge to the existing structureof arts education than does the more openlypolemical model of improvisation introduced atthe outset: ‘model A’. Perhaps we might say,‘model A’ can’t be taught; ‘model B’ won’t betaught.

Conservation, the old, the answer We must distinguish conservation from conser-vatism. Conservation, understood here as theproduction of difference through repetition,protects the old by retaining it as the necessaryhorizon for the new. By absolutising the new, theavant-gardism of ‘model A’ improvisation rendersit not only abstract (hence its unteachability) but,more importantly, undifferentiated: differencedriven into sameness. The enemy of absolutenovelty is the cliché, clichéd improvisation would,on the face of it, be a contradiction in terms. The‘unmarked space’ already encountered would bea space cleared of clichés prior to the pure impro-visory gesture. As Deleuze, speaking of Cezanneand Francis Bacon expresses it:

Clichés, clichés! The situation has hardly improvedsince Cezanne. Not only has there been a multipli-cation of images of every kind. Around us and in ourheads, but even the reactions against clichés arecreating clichés. Even abstract painting has not beenthe last to produce its own clichés … Every imitatorhas always made the cliché rise up again, even fromwhat had been freed from the cliché. The fightagainst the cliché is a terrible thing [10].

Well, maybe it is, and perhaps the role of theteacher is to help the student identify clichés andencourage them to remove them. This will, inturn, depend upon establishing an educationalregime of critical questioning, where one has tolearn to be suspicious of given answers, ensuringthat they are only allowed to come after the ques-tion and not before. But, then again, maybe wedo not have to devote so much time to fightingclichés, indeed maybe clichés aren’t so terrible. Isit not possible to think of an education that beginswith the given, with the answer, and works withthat? Maurice Blanchot, in a discussion ofSimone Weil, suggests just such an intriguingreversal. He writes:

We enter into thought … only by questioning. We gofrom question to question to the point where the

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question, pushed toward a limit, becomes response… Such a way of proceeding is foreign to SimoneWeil … it would seem that she first responds toherself, as though for her the answer always comesfirst, preceding every question and even every possi-bility of questioning: there is an answer, then another,and then again another answer … Affirming is oftenfor Simone Weil a way of questioning or a way of test-ing [11].

This is not unique to Simone Weil; in truth, and inspite of the critical discourses that have been spunaround it, art practice is more often than not affir-mative in nature. Artists do not devote the bulk oftheir time to negating the work of other artists,they affirm their own. This affirmation is ratherdifferent to self-expression, as will be indicated ina moment, but is better understood as the re-presentation and re-vivification of the given, ofclichés. Improvisation here does not avoid ordestroy clichés, it keeps them alive, indeed it isprecisely the life compacted into clichés (anunspoken history or archaeology of joy, longingand regret) that gives such improvisation its inten-sity. Thomas Mann captures this both beautifullyand poignantly in his novel Joseph and his Brothers,here he describes Jacob’s grief at the apparentdeath of his son Joseph:

‘Crimson and swollen,’ he said, his voice trembling,‘is my countenance weeping. For deep-bowed inmy affliction I sit down to weep, and my face is wetwith the tears that flow down it.’

The words, as one could tell, were not originalwith him. For Noah, according to the legend, wassupposed to have said some such thing, and Jacobmade it his own. And indeed it is good, it is conve-nient and consoling, that from the suffering of ourancestors we inherit right and suitable words inwhich to clothe our own, which then fit it as thoughthey were made for it … Certainly, Jacob could dohis grief no greater honour than to set it on a level withthe great flood and apply to it words which werecoined for that catastrophe [12].

Once again, then, improvisation is here workingwith the known, rather than feeling compelled toprobe the unknown, marking the unmarked; and itis this that suggests a manner of teaching some-thing to the improviser. The task of the teacher hereis to de-familiarise the familiar not in order tonegate it, as with Brecht’s ‘alienation effect’ (admit-tedly, an important pedagogical strategy) but toembrace it anew, the integration of the new andthe old perhaps – the new in the old / the old in thenew. Like a ball-bearing in a pinball machine, it is themovement within and the contact with the giventhat allows the student to illuminate their world andtheir work. But merely ‘permitting’ a space forimprovisation is not sufficient, the teacher needsto carve out this space, needs to produce it,through an exemplary engagement with the given,one that can be repeated and re-produced by thestudent. While this might not amount to the teach-ing of improvisation per se, nevertheless teachingwith and within the known rather than theunknown, with and within the marked and the re-marked rather than the unmarked is clearly a moresubstantial pedagogical enterprise than is the casewithin the abstract idealism of ‘Model A’ improvi-sation: inspirational but dark.

Expression and otherness Just as a reminder, LaDonna Smith’s promotionof improvisation is ‘as the direct route to self-expression’. This image of the improviser as theself at play, one that can be traced back at least asfar as Friedrich Schiller’s notion of the ‘aestheticeducation of man’, assumes a humanism that isnot only at odds with the model of improvisationnow being mooted, but also (for what it’s worth)with the mainstream of contemporary theory.Clearly, improvisation can be expressive, but doesit have to be? Indeed, does art have to be expres-sive at all? I think of Beckett’s famous lament:

The expression that there is nothing to express, noth-ing with which to express, nothing from which toexpress, no power to express, no desire to express,together with the obligation to express [13].

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Yes, expression is an obligation, it is unavoidableanyway (who could be more expressive thanBeckett?), but expression and self-expression areby no means synonymous. It could be argued thatthe real pedagogical value of improvisation is notto enable the student (as self) to express him orherself (if they can do it they don’t need teaching!),but precisely the Other to express him or herself.And yes, the Other is gendered, the given, theclichés all around us, already there are not merelydead structures to be given the slip by the ever-agile improviser, but the congealed expressivity ofreal men and women, silent but present – sottovoce – in what is there and available: the all-too-familiar. To the extent that improvisation puts thisotherness back into play, not as a presence that anbe grasped and owned, but as a fugitive exterior-ity that brings a collective and objective intensity tothis re-vivification of the dead, of dead forms thatare never really dead, to this extent the teacher hasmuch to offer the improviser, not in teaching themwhat to do with this material, but to bringing themto a proper awareness of what it is, of exactly whatis there, of what they have at their fingertips. Tounderstand this is to learn both the possibility andthe impossibility of improvisation, a paradoxicalknowledge perfectly captured here by JacquesDerrida:

It’s not easy to improvise, it’s the most difficult thingto do. Even when one improvises in front of acamera or a microphone, one ventriloquises orleaves another to speak in one’s place. The schemasand languages that are already there, there arealready a great number of prescriptions, that areprescribed in our memory and our culture. All thenames are already preprogrammed. It’s already thenames that inhibit our ability to ever really improvise.One can’t say whatever one wants, one is obliged,more or less, to reproduce the stereotypicaldiscourse. And so I believe in improvisation, and Ifight for improvisation, but with the belief that it isimpossible. But there, where there is improvisation,I am not able to see myself, I am blind to myself. Andit is what I will see, no, I won’t see it, it is for others to

see. The one who has improvised here, no I won’tever see him [14].

Can improvisation be taught? No. Can the impro-viser be taught? Yes, but not how to improvise,rather, to be made better aware of what improvi-sation might be, what it might consist of andwhere it might be found. And, Derrida is right, wemay well not find ourselves there – at the event ofimprovisation – or if we are there, bearing downon the moment enraptured by a dubious auton-omy, perhaps it will be necessary to absentourselves in order for improvisation to be itself:the peculiar resonance of a silent oblivionstretched-out across the persistent formulas andclichés of human longing.

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Notes and References1. Smith, LaDonna: Improvisation as a Form ofCultural Recreation, The Improvisor: the interna-tional journal on free improvisation (online).Available from URL www.the-improvisor.com

2. Berlin, Isaiah (1958) Two Concepts of Liberty.London: Oxford University Press.

3. Smith, LaDonna: Improvisation in ChildhoodMusic Training and Techniques for CreativeMusic Making, The Improvisor (online). Availablefrom URL www.the-improvisor.com

4. Watson, Ben (2004) Derek Bailey and the Storyof Free Improvisation. London: Verso, p. 9.

5. Ibid.

6. For a discussion of method and manner seemy (2004) Means Without End: Production,Reception and Teaching in Kant’s Aesthetics,Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol 38, No. 1.

7. Luhmann, Niklas (2000) Art as a Social System,trans. Eva Knodt. Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, p. 24.

8. Hegel, G. W. F. (1975) Aesthetics, trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 616–7.

9. Deleuze, Gilles (1994) Repetition andDifference, trans. Paul Patton. New York:Continuum, pp. 23–4.

10. Deleuze, Gilles (2003) Francis Bacon: TheLogic of Sensation, trans. Daniel Smith, London:Continuum, p. 89.

11. Blanchot, Maurice (1993) The InfiniteConversation, trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, p. 108.

12. Mann, Thomas (1956) Joseph and hisBrother, trans. Helen Lowe-Porter. London:Secker & Warburg, p. 426.

13. Beckett, Samuel (1983) ‘Three Dialogues’, in Disjecta. London: John Calder, p. 139.

14. This is an unpublished passage quoted inthe film Derrida, directed by Kirby Dick and AmyZiering Hofman, Jane Doe Films, 2002.