Sorglose Nacht

We have there two orders of order: sequential and jussive. (JD: Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, 1)

Hristina Tasheva worked for years cleaning houses in Amsterdam.

"Tasheva has collected hundreds of notes used to communicate with the people whose houses she cleaned, with messages such as: ‘Hi Hristina, how are you? Do you please want to clean the fridge? Thank you. The cat is back home. Nice weekend.’

[ … ]

Tasheva, who studied agricultural economics in Bulgaria, thought she was wasting her time. She feared that if she had children, they might call her stupid for leading such an empty life. To do something meaningful, she started taking photographs of herself at the houses she cleaned." (Do you please want to clean the fridge?)

[ … … … ]

“A phantom can…be sensitive to idiom.” (Archive Fever, 85-86)

“…the archive is made possible by death, aggression, and destruction drive, that is to say also by originary finitude and expropriation.” (Ibid, 94)

“The last door opens, of course, at the last sentence of the book. A remarkable and necessary notion, decisive precisely where nothing is decided. It is not by chance that this last door takes the form of a promise, the promise of a secret kept secret. What happens when a historian promises to keep secret on the subject of an archive which is yet to be established?” (Ibid, 71)

When Prospero…becomes annoyed when his daughter’s attention wanders, she placates him by saying, “Your tale, sir, would cure deafness.” What an extraordinary idea: to tell a story where the words themselves would cure deafness. This is…the logic of “incantation”. As a magician, Prospero has such a power.
So [do] programmers.

So I read a book about cochlear implantation, called Rebuilt. Now, this is a very interesting area for those who would say that they are interested in what Derrida has to say. I tend to sometimes allow technology to focus the lens of a text for me, and here is a perfect example. In fact, I was shocked to read this book, and find that the author failed to mention the issue of philosophical speech primacy even once, through repeated references to “cultural theory” documents, naturally including The Cyborg Manifesto.

A cochlear implant is a small, complex electronic device that can help to provide a sense of sound to a person who is profoundly deaf or severely hard of hearing. The implant is surgically placed under the skin behind the ear. It is basically a small computer, with about as much power as an old 386dx, which stimulates the auditory cortex more directly in the absence of working stereocilia, the fibrous sound-receptors on the cochlea. The cochlea itself is a small, snail-shaped organ which receives sound like field grass receives wind, and transmits these motions electrically to the auditory nerve. It is composed of three fluid-filled sacs, the tympanic canal, the vestibular canal and the cochlear duct. The part of the cochlea that transmits the sounds to the nervous system is called the organ of corti. Separating the tympanic canal and the organ of corti is a structure called the basilar membrane. The electrode array of the implant, which pulses sound to the auditory cortex (as defined by it’s software), is placed in the scala tympani along the basilar membrane. Now I will read to you from probably my two favorite books of all time:

Timbre, style and signature are the same obliterating division of the proper. They make every event possible, necessary, and unfindable.
-Jacques Derrida, Tympan, Margins of Philosophy, xix

Each existence appears in more ensembles, masses, tissues or complexes than one perceives at first, and each one is also infinitely more detached from such, and detached from itself.
-Jean-Luc Nancy, Cosmo Baselius, Being Singular Plural, 186

Now, as a language-user, spend the night dreaming of writing a text that makes the deaf hear - that re-opens speech - someone is working on this now: namely, Prospero-tron. The embodied inversion of speech-primacy - writing as the techne to open the circuit of speech. In other words:

Welcome back to wonderful auditory world, Caliban, through the power of writing: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language!” (The Tempest I.ii.366-368)