Event Television: Derrida's Small Screen

This essay brings Jacques Derrida's appearances on the small screen into dialogue with his theoretical writings on television as medium. Developing the notion of medial "rhythm" outlined in Echographies of Television (1996) and elsewhere, the essay argues that Derrida's reflections on broadcast television are important resources for thinking the protean phenomenon of television in a digital age. Despite his suspicions of the structural distortions of the televisual frame, Derrida adapts the medium to his own ends in gesturing towards what this essay calls a "television of the event." At a time when television's digital mutations offer fresh possibilities for—and obstacles to—thinking differently, Derrida's involvement with the small screen shows that a new relation to television only ever begins by looking at and listening to what is happening before our eyes.