I am neither in favour of or against publication. 

I would like to pick up on the author’s use of the word 'deconstruction' in the rationale for this video. Almost everybody, including me, uses this term as if they understood what it means and quite often, as here, the term stands in for something like 'self-reflection' or 'self-consciousness'. If this were true, then filming oneself in the bathroom mirror or in the reverse camera of a smartphone would be all that we would need in order to deliver a 'deconstruction'. Obviously, such selfie-obsession immediately begs the question. What is this self that is being represented here? What do we learn from self-reflection when it is the problem of what the self might be that is the problem. 

But what would it mean to understand deconstruction 'properly'? It would be easy enough to say that deconstruction 'proper' takes two supposedly opposite terms (male/female; dark/light; text/speech) and shows that their distinction is biased and based on a logical impossibility or aporia. This distinction must therefore collapse (deterritorialise, to use Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s terminology) before being immediately reterritorialised into some other binary, a new economy of thought.

In the rationale, Jean-François Lyotard enacts this sort of deconstruction – he wants to be taken seriously as an intellectual but his argument is that we should not take intellectuals seriously. Who then Lyotards the Lyotard? At what point does a point of philosophical logic become a celebration of the selfie-self?  Jacques Derrida discussed the popularization of deconstruction as popular deconstructionism (see the interviews in Points…) and, while pointing to the problematic nature of the latter, accepted that it is this distinction that itself needs to be deconstructed and that deconstruction is fundamentally predicated on facile deconstructionism. 

What do we learn from this video: nothing and something. What do we learn from any video: nothing and something. Should this video be published: yes and no. If the argument is that we need to resist representation then this video represents very little. Who speaks? Nothingness.

Works cited

Deleuze, Gilles & Félix Guattari. 1980/1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (Trans. Brian Massumi). University of Minnesota Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1995. Points… Interviews, 1974-1994. (Trans. Peggy Kamuf et al.). Stanford University Press. 

Thacker, Eugene. 2015. Starry Speculative Corpse: Horror of Philosophy, vol. 2. Zero Books.