ABSTRACT
When Jacques Derrida marshals this argument in “The Double Session,” he asserts that mimes and phantoms call into question traditional philosophical assessments of the referential function of language as posited in Plato. The mime simultaneously speaks/writes with the body, the phantom is the haunting presence that describes an absence. To restate and to revisit this claim is not to say something new; but repeat performances are always new interpretations, given that the very existence of an original makes any iteration necessarily comparative. To further such comparative logic, this discussion pairs an alternative identity with Derrida’s authorial position by inviting the deaf-blind American disability advocate Helen Keller (1880-1968) to speak. The argument thus doubles back to “The Double Session” with another rendition of the ideas Derrida canvasses in that essay by interpolating Keller as a new actor on the philosophical stage of enquiry. She shifts between roles and blurs their distinctions, and she encodes the possibility of a re/view-and, in this case, also a revue-in staged scenes that both embody and reply to Derrida’s propositions.
