Danielle Adair is interviewed at Outward from Nothingness by “Jacques Derrida” about From JBAD, Lessons Learned, her publication in [out of nothing] #0, and the art of learning to die:

Jacques Derrida: I’d like to set aside the usual biographical brushworks, and start instead with your 2006 text and audio piece Reflections By Danielle Adair on Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia. What is your relationship with the California-based conceptual artist Jack Goldstein? For myself, his life near-perfectly illustrated the old philosophical injunction since Plato: to be a philosopher is to learn how to die. Goldstein so sincerely believed in this truth that he gave himself over to it, more and more in fact, until he committed suicide in 2003 (19 months prior to my own death). But even as a ghost I remain impervious to learning knowing-how-to-die. Danielle, how does one learn how to die? And in turn, how to live?

Danielle Adair: How does one learn to die? Well, I don’t know if I agree that Goldstein necessarily did learn. We have art history that shapes a narrative to grant this, but suicide is a profound thing. It is baffling to me, and more so, because I am still in the performance. There are many stage metaphors one can use, and this is hardly an original thought, but for me, there is a challenge of being aware, ‘being in the moment’ as Stanislavski would say, and being totally lost within it, to life. This balance between self-awareness and lack of self-consciousness, play and intentioned work, openness and drive, is the ‘motivation’ in a performance. How does one learn to live, you ask? By keeping this perpetual contradiction at stake. Modernism tells us that. But perhaps it is only in Modernism that such a question, of life and death or agency therein, is relevant or palpable.

Read the full interview at Outward from Nothingness.