Responding: A Discussion with Samuel Weber

This interview was conducted by email correspondence during September 2001. On September 11, the World Trade Center in New York was destroyed and the Pentagon badly damaged by a series of attacks. Although the interview had initially been conceived as a contribution to a collection of essays on the work of Samuel Weber, which would concern itself with the discussion of his work in general, the participants felt compelled to respond to these events. In what follows immediate reactions to the attacks and subsequent developments as they unfolded therefore contend—perhaps uneasily, but also perhaps productively—with a series of reflections on Weber's thinking, writing, and critical practice over a number of years. What characterizes the discussion overall, in terms both of its "content" and its very "taking place," is the question of a critical or "theoretical" discourse acting itself out in relation to a series of phenomena, acts or events to which it is bound to respond. It is a matter of judgment whether this distinctive and distinguishing trait of the discussion pulls it apart, or whether in some way it pulls it together. But such a characteristic trait nevertheless engages a whole set of questions and problems (to do with repetition, singularity, the uncanny, and so forth) which in turn might be taken as characteristic of the work of Samuel Weber. Questions and responses have been dated to preserve and to highlight the temporal dimension of the "event"—both of the interview taking place, and of the occurrences happening on an international scale that the discussion could not help but address.

Wortham/Hall:
September 10, 2001

Samuel Weber, taking into account a large body of work written over a number of years, the range and scope of your interests is obviously very varied and broad. For instance, you write on psychoanalysis, literature, philosophy, aesthetics, the media, technics and technology, institutions, and theater. And yet what is striking is the extent to which certain texts, readings, and critical moves tend to be revisited or replayed on a variety of different occasions. To take just one example: you return more than once to the question of aesthetic and reflective judgment in Kant, to show how, in this part of Kant's critical philosophy, cognition and judgment take place on condition of an other. From this point onwards, you are able to discuss problems of aesthetic form, of parergon and institution, and of the "fateful and ambiguous legacy" that Kant bequeaths to the institution of the humanities. But this reading also allows you to suggest that such processes or operations of cognition tend to theatricalize knowledge, to transform the grounds of knowledge into a rather more unsteady—or even comedic—platform upon which we witness certain styles of mimicry being performed or staged. Here, then, the ambivalence that attends humanistic knowledge seems to rest upon a question of theater. Furthermore, in Mass Mediauras, the Kantian problem of aesthetic judgment would in turn appear to set off your work on Heidegger and his account of the "goings-on" of technics. ¹ In this context, technological understanding, activity, and development depend on very ambivalent processes of securing that begin to unravel as man endeavors to "gain a stand" and to "establish himself" by means of the knowledge of beings that Heidegger calls techné. Technological man thus orients himself in a way that begins to look rather theatrical and, to go further, perhaps even spectacularly comedic. Such a problem of orientation, then, connects a discussion of technics and technology to problems of cognition and judgment, to questions of aesthetics and form, to the matter of theater and, indeed, to the question of the institution.

In returning to a particular text or reading, then, such connections, reorientations or transformations obviously emerge in a way that powerfully assumes and replays the problem of repetition and iteration that are discussed in a number of places...