Repetition as the Performative Syndrome of Dying

Keti Chukhrov

doi:10.21476/PP.2019.42236

Authors

Keti Chukhrov National Research University Higher School of Economics (Moscow)/Marie Curie Fellow at Wolverhampton University (UK) http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1281-1201

Keywords:

Dying, Deleuze, Derrida, Event, Repetition, Pleroma, Performativity, Temporality

Abstract

In his Difference and Repetition Deleuze reveals an aporia: repetition is singular, solitary, it is torn away from any original or source; nevertheless it preserves a genetic tie with certain event to which it is a repetition. This solitariness of the repetition is not, however, confined to mere difference between the act of repetition and the repeated source that cancels the original just to differentiate two performative procedures. An act of repetition is solitary only when it evolves in specific time-regime, which even ontically diverges from the regular ontology of time. Deleuze calls such temporality “empty”, Nietzsche defines it as amor fati, Heidegger sees in it convergence of eternity and an instant. The stake in this case is a specific kind of repetitive regime which unfolds as the performative syndrome of ‘dying’ – a “repetition into death” (Deleuze) which paradoxically executes itself as performative plenitude. But who is the Subject undergoing such a syndrome and what should have happened to her/him so as to impose the regime of dying on any act of repetition?

Author Biography

Keti Chukhrov, National Research University Higher School of Economics (Moscow)/Marie Curie Fellow at Wolverhampton University (UK)

Keti Chukhrov is ScD in philosophy, an associate professor at the Department of Сultural Studies at the National Research University Higher School of Economics. Her post-doctoral research was run at the Philosophy Institute of Academy of Sciences headed by V. Podoroga. In 2012-2017 she was the head of Theory and Research department at the National Center of Contemporary Art, Moscow, where she founded research platform Theoretic Inquiry in Cultural Anthropolgy (TICA). Chukhrov is the translator of C.S. Peirce into Russian. She has authored numerous texts on art theory, culture, politics, and philosophy. Her postdoctoral dissertation dealt with the anthropology and ontology of performativity. Her full-length books include: To Be—To Perform. ‘Theatre’ in Philosophic Critique of Art (Spb: European University, 2011), and Pound &£ (Logos, 1999) and a volume of dramatic writing: Merely Humans (2010). Currently she is a Marie Sklodowska Curie fellow in UK, Wolverhampton University. Her present research interests and publications deal with 1.the impact of the Soviet economy on the epistemes of historical socialism 2. Performance studies, 3. Art-systems and 3. Neo-humanism in the conditions of post-human theories. With her video-play “Love-machines” she participated at the Bergen Assembly and “Specters of Communism” (James Gallery, CUNY, NY, 2015). Her Latest video-play “Communion” was in the program of the Kansk video film festival (Moscow, 2016) and at the Ljubljana Triennial U-3 “Beyond the Globe (2016, cur. B. Groys).

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