Reading and Resistance

To begin with, I'd like to rethank the organizers of the event on December 8, 2017—Erin Graff Zivin, Natania Meeker, and Akira Lippit—for inviting me to the University of Southern California (USC) to celebrate Peggy Kamuf. It was an incredible honor to participate and a pleasure to see friends and former colleagues. It is equally a privilege to be asked to contribute to this special issue of Discourse that documents the event in a certain way but also, no doubt, restages it, repeats it with difference. Both my presentation then and the proceeding essay here endeavor, impossible as it is, to thank Peggy for what she has done and continues to do to shape USC, the fields traversed by her oeuvre, and—perhaps most importantly—our approach to the institution called "academia," the place or aggregate site that goes by the name "the university," the profession of "professing," and the disciplines commonly organized under the heading "the humanities." The gifts that Peggy offers us as a writer, translator, teacher, and mentor call on us as readers to remain vigilant about not only the spaces we inhabit but also the work or reading of those spaces and our acts of inhabitation.

Since 2010, when I first asked her about a directed reading on deconstruction and the visual arts, Peggy has tirelessly provided support, generosity, and guidance, creating along the way an incalculable debt that I'm only beginning to understand. If I tried to account for all that she's done for me personally and professionally, I could start by expressing my gratitude for her role as

With Lina.

a key supervisor who oversaw my PhD as well as an advocate who encouraged me during countless job searches, invited me on two occasions to the Derrida Seminars Translation Project workshops in Normandy (where I was humbly made aware of my deficiencies in French and English), and nominated me for USC's doctoral student-teacher exchange program with Univeristé Sorbonne Nouvelle–Paris 3, which led to an extended stay in France and drastically changed the trajectories of my life.

But this would merely scratch the surface.

Alongside her honesty, wisdom, sense of humor, and reliability, Peggy's commitment to her students, to her friends, and to the place where many of us find ourselves at or within today, this "place" where a number of us "work" in some capacity—that being the university—has formed a model that I can only aspire to imitate.

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As I mentioned at USC on December 8, 2017, I originally thought about calling my presentation "Peggy Kamuf Taught Me That I Didn't Know How to Read." However, in the end I decided that title would probably sound a bit silly and potentially derail my efforts to address something that I'm still learning from Peggy as both a former student and a reader who is always reamazed by what she writes and says. While my mention of the abandoned title during the presentation was made half-jokingly, I was pleasantly surprised—but not exactly shocked—by its reverberations with Peggy's 2017 essay "Comes a Letter in the Mail: Ellipses of Reading" that, for better or worse, I read a few days after the USC event. Published in a special issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies on the influence of Naomi Schor, "Comes a Letter …" begins with a brief autobiographical remark about Peggy's own rediscovery "of an aborted project that never really got very far."¹ Beyond the fact that the project took up "the subject (so to speak) of reading," as she puts it, I was drawn to Peggy's description of its "delirious," "mad," and "preposterous-sounding" working thesis for a host of reasons I hope this essay will clarify.² For starters, the project's focus, at least as I hear it, concerned the inability to diagnose universally proper, standardized, and normative (i.e., "healthy") methods of reading against those determined pathological, illegitimate, or otherwise dysfunctional. Peggy's self-proclaimed "mad" thesis, the outcome of her...