We all have our heroes when we’re young, or, well, at least when we’re obnoxious early-20 year olds who want to shakeup the University by having read the new shit. And, for me, that new shit came in the form of Jacques Derrida, who passed away over the weekend after being really, really sick for quite some time. I didn’t have any real intellectual heroes coming into college except for, um, Hunter S. Thompson and F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce (oh, tell me you didn’t see all those coming from a mile away), and Derrida was the first bit of extracurricular reading I did that wasn’t fiction. Or Thompson. My friend Larry had turned me onto Derrida my first year, but it wasn’t until my second year that I went out and bought a Derrida comic book. Sure enough, that christmas, it was my present to my mom.
What Derrida offered, socially, was a positioning between students and teachers, between generations. I felt that some of my profs just hadn’t read him. And one of the few full profs I’d had, Gerald Graff, had even written polemics against deconstruction. It’s ludicrous to imagine myself, c. late-90s, thinking I’m into something new by going on about hymens and the like, but there you go; I was a kid.
But, more importantly, Derrida made it clear that being an academic could be fun. That writing could be fun, and interesting. That there was, underneath everything, despite the deathly tragic seriousness, a level of play, a level of excitement. Even in the Post Card, when the prose starts getting almost pathetically sad, there’s still something silly about it all, like thinking that the whole thing was actually written on the backs of postcards of an old engraving of Socrates and Plato. He maybe was sort of gimmicky, but it worked, and I’m still having a hard, hard time walking away from his positions, even though it’s starting to seem professionally valuable to do so (hi, Walter!).
I was never a flunky, though, which is good, since I can imagine how obnoxious the flunkies can be. I absorbed his texts (only occasionally straight from his pen), but didn’t really try to become one of those slightly awkward people who would celebrate différance’s being put in the dictionary, as indicated in Derrida, the movie. Yeah, I cut English 101 to go hear him give a speech on “the very idea of the university,” but it was mostly just to see what sort of spectacle it would be. Yes, Homi Bhabha asked the first question. Yeah, my very first day in PhD colloquium I complained that Greenblatt and Gallagher went out of their way in their “New Historicism doesn’t hate on any schools of criticism” to specify deconstruction by name and, then, hate on it. But that was, really, not the critique of a fan-boy—it was the critique of someone who thinks Greenblatt and Gallagher are maybe pumping the last bit of something out of a horse eager to lie down for a while, its racing and stud days behind it. Deconstruction, since it doesn’t exist, can only ever be fashionable or not—it’ll never be old. And Derrida himself, with his turns towards the more political, remained interesting and important.
What’s funny about that is that, except for the interview I read in Pedro’s “Rogue Philosophers: Inventing Traditions in 19th Century Portuguese Novels” (or whatever his class was called), I probably will not read any more Derrida in graduate school. At least not unless I just go off the deep end and make my dissertation about love. It’s possible, but don’t hold your breath—ethnicity and national identity in early 20th Amer. fiction is a much more plausible bet at this time. And that’s sad. I always get a kick out of reading him, and the discussions we had in Pedro’s class were absolutely fantastic, even if I felt often that it was just me and Pedro arguing—or at least feeling out where each of us were. He was a huge Derrida mark—way bigger than I’d ever imagined myself capable of being. And there is something pretty damned cool about that. Who would dare read Derrida in an English class? Foucault, sure. Barthes, maybe. But even so, maybe we’d only read them in a survey on critical theory (oh, ha, which is where I did, for the most part). And is that good or bad? Derrida has a lot of interesting (to me) things to say about literature, and he certainly considered his work to be of use to literary critics. Why have we abandoned him?
Maybe it’s the faddishness of the academic world. Maybe it’s that Derrida can be positioned as ahistorical—to the point of seeming like a formalist fuddy-duddy. Well, he’s a fucking philosopher. Of course there’s an element of ahistorical universalism to him. But he argues that that charge is misguided, too. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t write about American stuff, and, as an Americanist, I mostly read stuff about American stuff. Maybe he’s been discredited (which I sincerely doubt). I like the ahistorical reason, though, problematic as it is. The kind of literary criticism Derrida practices is diametrically opposed to the sort that is now en vogue in prestigious PhD programs around the country. We’re being groomed, to a degree, to be slouch historians—three years ago sorting my fiction section (hell, even sorting my books into fiction and non-) by date would have seemed completely ludicrous. Now I can’t imagine a different way of sorting them. Derrida would probably scoff at that. He’d be right to.
I’m still very proud of my Honor’s thesis, in which Derrida played a rather large role. The rampant ahistoricism would have maybe added a touch of amusement; I don’t know. But those of you who know, know that I wrote that thing under rather intense external duress (top five, lifetime), especially given that the subject matter was 100% a projection of the external duress, creating a collapsing loop that I was just damn glad to get out of, not unlike the poor Portuguese “nun” whose “love letters” were the primary textual focus of the paper (in terms of pages devoted, Sex and the City was probably next, then followed by The Post Card and Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments). Not to get all Martha Nussbaum up in this piece, but, well, there was a symmetry going on that has permanently etched Jacques 7 (J’accepte) into my emotional history as well as my professional/intellectual history. And, pointless as he may now seem to what I’m up to now, I’ll still shed a few tears for the passing of a truly inspirational man.
I’ll close with two parts from the “Envois” that make me a little teary every time I read them.
One day, years ago, you wrote me this that I, the amnesiac, know by heard, or almost: “it is curious to see that generall I do not answer your letters, nor you mine or are we delirious, each alone, for ourselves? are we waiting for an answer or something else? No, since at bottom we are asking for nothing, no, we are asking no question. The prayer .” Okay, I’ll call you right away. You know everything, before me you will always precede me.
(19)
Murder is everywhere, my unique and immense one. We are the worst criminals in history. And right here I kill you, save, save, you, save you run away [sauve-toi], the unique, the living on over there whom I love. Understand me, when I write, right here, on these innumerable post cards, I annihilate not only what I am saying but also the unique addressee that I constitute, and therefore every possible addressee, and every destination. I kill you. I annul you at my fingertips, wrapped around my finger. To do so it suffices only that I be legible—and I become illegible to you, you are dead… No, the very idea of destination includes analytically the idea of death, like a predicate (p) included in the subject (S) of destination, the addressee or the addressor. And you are, my love unique the proof, the living proof precisely, that a letter can always not arrive at its destination, and that therefore it never arrives. And this is really how it is, it is not a misfortune, that’s life, living life, beaten down, tragedy, by the still surviving life. For this, for life I must lose you, for life, and make myself illegible for you. J’accepte.
(33-34)
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