Deconstruction and Improvisation: Experimental Humanities Today with Erin Graff Zivin

“It is indeed necessary to improvise, it is necessary to improvise well,” Jacques Derrida told a crowd of unsuspecting Ornette Coleman devotees who’d come to hear Coleman perform with German pianist Joachim Kühn at the Parc de la Villette on July 1, 1997.

Coleman’s fans did not react well to the experiment: in fact, the heckling eventually caused Derrida to leave the stage before he’d finished reading (improvising, pretending to read) his text, despite Coleman’s encouragement. Yet while Derrida’s performance might have gone awry (he describes it as a disaster unlike anything that had happened to him in his years of standing before large audiences), the event (or non-event) enables us to delve further into what I will insist is a necessary encounter between deconstruction and improvisation: a meeting, a duet, an encounter that may have needed to fail to be worthy of the name event. Finally, I’ll suggest that such experiments, risks, and improvisations offer a model for critical (post-)humanistic praxis today.