Both Derrida and Solanas are interested in the aims and finality of the concept “man.” Admittedly, that may be where their improbable rendezvous ends, some here on an existential corner of 1968, situated among the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Hampton, and Bobby Kennedy, at the moment they shared the beat of a feverishly agitated Zeitgeist. These events may seem miles apart on the cultural shock charts, yet they are linked in ways that urge us to reflect on their ineluctable contiguities. In June of that year she gunned down Andy Warhol as he was speaking on the telephone. In 1968 Jacques Derrida brought out his pathbreaking essay, “The Ends of Man,” and Valerie Solanas began earnestly distributing SCUM Manifesto. Ronell’s piece is excerpted from the introduction to a new paperback edition of SCUM Manifesto, out from Verso now: At the Verso blog, Avital Ronell writes about Valerie Solanas and her SCUM Manifesto, highlighting the fraught social context that shaped the startling text and its author.
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