Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play and Its Deconstructive Ontology by Rachel A. Naor A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Major Professor: Phillip Sipiora, Ph.D. Sara Deats, Ph.D. Gaëtan Brulotte, Ph.D. Silvio Gaggi, Ph.D. Date of Approval: December 11, 2007 Keywords: deconstruction, trace, différance, drama, textuality © Copyright 2008, Rachel A. Naor Dedication For Millie, Ariel, and Asaf Acknowledgement I would like to express my profound gratitude to my dissertational director, Dr. Phillip Sipiora. Being left without a mentor and director, I view Dr. Sipiora’s directorship as a unique act of generosity. I would like to thank my Marlowe and Shakespeare professor, Dr. Sara Deats, for many years of support and good advice. I would also like to extend my thanks to my committee members, Dr. Gaëtan Brulotte and Dr. Silvio Gaggi, for participating in my committee. I would like to express my thanks to my defense chair, Dr. Victor Peppard, for participating in my defense and for many years of support. I would like to thank my Hebrew Program coordinator, Rina Donchin, for her friendship and support. I would like to thank my drama professor, Dr. Anthony Kubiak, for making theater essential to my thinking. Finally, I would like to express my deep gratitude to my brother, Eli Angel, for his continued care throughout the years and for intervening in crucial moments in the course of my doctoral studies. Table of Contents Abstract iii Part I Introduction 1 Deconstruction 10 Presence 18 Origin, Repetition, and the Spatiotemporal Sign of the Trace 27 Origin and the Idea in the Kantian Sense 29 The Trace—Its Repetition and Its Differance-ial Life 50 Part II Suzan-Lori Parks and the Conceptual Turn 71 The Textual Performance of the Deconstructive Supplement: Parks’s Ontological/Ontic Strife 84 The Foundling Father: Differance as Supplement within the Pathologies of Rep & Rev 90 The “Structure” of Parks’s Differance—Its Idealized Traces and the Self – Reflexive Dramaturge Who Regenerates Them 106 Part (C) 114 Part (A) 142 Part (B) 168 Conclusion 181 Works Cited 186 Appendices Appendix A: Spatiotemporal Trajectory 197 Appendix B: Nietzsche’s Fable 199 Appendix C: Derrida’s Excerpt from Limited Inc 200 i Appendix D: “New Black Math” 201 Appendix E: Illustrated Equations 211 About the Author End Page ii Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play and Its Deconstructive Ontology Rachel A. Naor ABSTRACT I intend to showcase Suzan-Lori Parks’s repetitious, supplemental virtuosity, which is a testament to the fluid, indeterminate condition of her concepts. I seek to demonstrate that in textualizing the quality of absence in the written dialogue, Parks’s The America Play becomes uniquely deconstructive. For indeed, through the absent “presence” of an historically mythified president and a gravedigger’s skewed identity, the play becomes a stage for splinters of historicized, differentiating, repeating signifiers that supplement, even as they redefine, their referential signified. Performing deconstructive thinking, Parks’s textuality is accommodated by a content through which she calls attention to the structures of metaphysics in our discourse, stressing our inability to erase them, and our need to question them through continual self-reflexive thinking. I hope to show that Parks’s genius is apparent in her unique mastery of language. This kind of mastery is revealed through her drama’s connection to conceptual possibilities, which are hypostatize, staged through the materiality of her drama’s textual configuration. In consciously imbuing her pages with representational temporal spaces akin to Derrida’s différance, Parks shows how the supplemental perpetuity of metaphysical signification phenomenally attests to the conceptual, idealized absence it supplements. I speak here of idealization that underlies the structural signified, always already a supplemented absent, which carries metaphoric trappings of phenomenological substance in a form of the iii signifier, returning through a morphemic ideality in the assuredness of its infinite return. I read Park’s intent in The America Play as inherently deconstructive because Parks dramatizes the enigma of the trace; that is, the enigma of its impossible, yet, relentless repetition. In examining the trace and its historical “genesis” through the Idea in the Kantian sense, I will show how Parks’s Rep & Rev, repetitions and revision, textually performs its impossible repetition, which is always metaphysical. In self-reflexively showing the impossibility of metaphysical presences, Parks establishes a need for a persistent practice of deconstructive interrogation, questioning self-assured, metaphysical, dogmatic thinking. iv Part I Introduction The crux of my research concentrates on what I identify as Suzan-Lori Park’s dramatization of deconstructive poetics in The America Play. Specifically, I intend to show how she manipulates Jacques Derrida’s understanding of spatiotemporal1 elements of language production. I will place particular emphasis on the elements that make possible the production of metaphysical2 discourse in the play, a discourse which, as Derrida suggests, is always substantiated through processes of idealization 3 and its reemergence in the economies of the “trace.”4 Parks, I argue, creates structure and context in which she embeds the trace so as to perform the ways in which it propels the differential impetus of différance itself.5 What we gain through an analysis such as this is an understanding of the ontological qua temporal and spatial lingual structures of thinking in the play, which, as Derrida shows, are never unearthed at their primordial topology6. This point of origination is the absence that Derrida identifies as “presence.”7 According to Derrida, this absence is what the discourse of metaphysics supplements. I seek to demonstrate that in textualizing the quality of absence in the written dialogue, Parks’s play becomes uniquely deconstructive. For indeed, through the absent “presence” of the mythified president and the gravedigger’s skewed identity, the play becomes a stage for splinters of historicized, differentiating, repeating signifiers that supplement, even as they redefine, their referential signified. Performing deconstructive thinking, Parks’s textuality8 is accommodated by a content through which she calls attention to the structures of metaphysics in our discourse, stressing our inability to erase them, and our need to question them through continual self-reflexive thinking. 1 Hence, demonstrating sensibility to textual deconstructive performance, Parks manipulates her signs in showing the inherent absence of their signified. In consciously imbuing her pages with temporalizing spaces akin to Derrida’s différance, Parks shows that the physical-poetic-ecstatic of signification is both phenomenal and metaphoric in staging the absent, incomplete dialectics of idea/idealization, which make metaphysical signification possible. I speak here of the idealization that underlies the structural signified, always already a supplemented absent, which carries metaphoric trappings of phenomenological substance in a form of the signifier, returning through a morphemic ideality in the assuredness of its infinite return. This kind of idealization and the impossibility of its tenable hypostatization mark Parks’s textual impulse. I read Park’s intent in The America Play as inherently deconstructive because Parks dramatizes the enigma of the trace; that is, the enigma of its impossible, yet, relentless repetition. The undecipherable origin of repetition, or, for that matter, the untenable presence of all philosophical aporetics9, is the deconstructive nexus—the undecideable. What I will attempt to do is show how Parks creates textuality that comments on a content, which reveals the abyss of the unknowable in the bottomless structure of the genesis of origin. In this, I will necessarily encounter difficulties of course. Yet, it is impossible to analyze Parks’s oeuvre, in discerning a consciousness to problems of metaphysics, without examining her practices of Rep & Rev (repetition and revision),10 which underlie the problematic of revealing the origin of the trace or, rather, repetition as such. An analysis of Derrida’s core notions proves to be invaluable: différance, play, the supplemental, all propelled through the temporal and spatial pathology underlying the enigmatic repetition of the trace. I intend to show how, through 2 a rigorous textual economy, in a collapsing dialectic to content, Parks succeeds in accommodating a deconstructive way of thinking. Moreover, I identify a-traditional textuality in the writing of both Parks and Derrida as their “ethical moment;” that is, an attempt at what Wittgenstein describes as our “urge to thrust against the limit of language . .,” which is for Wittgenstein the first demand on our ethical awareness: “This thrust against limits of language is ethics.”11 Therefore, the ultimate purpose of this project is to demarcate textual activity, which hypostatizes temporality, through the sign’s idealized spatiality in showing how ontological structures of metaphysical discourse occur.12 Indeed, when we consider the kind of dogmatic thinking that metaphysics perpetuates, an economy of ethics becomes significant. Both Parks and Derrida, I argue, fissure an opening for an ethic that is demarcated by heterogeneity of