Presence vs. DerridaLast night, I found myself at a bar, arguing with a writer I’d just been introduced to. Given our personalities, we were bound to find something to disagree on, but the topic that we disagreed on first was the work of Ben Marcus, a Brown MFA, currently teaching at Columbia, who’s known (or, in most circles, avoided) for his experimental, aka ‘difficult,’ fiction. The real worth of writing, the writer argued, needs to be judged on its ability to communicate, and Ben Marcus, simply, is opaque.
I asked him if he didn’t think Marcus’s work communicated a feeling of unease or disorientation.
Yes, he said, but what’s the worth in that?
(I was feeling aggressive — and aggression, being rare for me, gives me the impression of adventure. So, I pressed on:) If you admit that Marcus does communicate something, I’ve got to wonder if you care more about what’s being communicated than the success of communication — which is a different argument than the one that you were just making.
Maybe, yes, he’s communicating something, the writer said. But what I meant was that he doesn’t engage with the world. That’s what good fiction does.
The world? I laughed. What’s the world?
Talk about relativist, he said. Talk about abstract. The world is … what it isn’t is someone like DeLillo or David Foster Wallace or Ben Marcus going on about the difference between brown and white cardboard for ten pages.
Brown and white cardboard are still part of the world. Everything is part of the world, I said. And when I hear people use that word, I wonder if they’re claiming what they think matters most in the world is the world.
(The argument continued, and I went home later than I meant to.)
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I still don’t have bookshelves in my apartment. Right now, I’m sitting in my living room, looking at the twenty-three moving boxes that hold my books. In my world, there’s not much else besides cardboard.
Since I leave clothes on the floor, and rarely remember to wash dishes, and haven’t made a bed in years, my boyfriend’s made it clear he doesn’t want me unpacking 400-something books without a place to put them. But when he’s not looking, I slice the packing tape with a kitchen knife, hoping the box I’ve chosen randomly has the book I’m missing. Everyday, I think of a new book to miss. And, lately — since last week — I’ve been missing Derrida — the writer who, in college, more than any other writer, I counted as my own.
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The writer at the bar claimed I was being too abstract when I asked him what he meant when he said “the world.” But I think he’s got it backwards. Words and phrases like “communication” or “the world” are hopelessly abstract, and a question shouldn’t be called abstract for pointing that out and demanding definitions.
What Derrida’s texts encourage is a lack of complacency with abstractions, and the values hidden in them. Some may call poststructuralistm Anti-Humanist because it points out that words like “universal” and “human” are often political, cultural, and — to my mind — manipulative — undermining people’s right to disagreement by claiming a Truth that only the immoral or elitist among us could ever wish to reexamine.
Derrida’s texts may be difficult to follow — what can you say clearly when you’re interoggating the accepted clarity of abstract concepts? — but the questioning he inspires is also very simple. A playwright could turn him into a modern-day Socrates — disorienting his companions with simple questions that point out tautologies and find the fracture lines in arguments.
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I was never studious enough to become an academic. And, due to vanity or its opposite, I prefer critiquing my own thoughts to critiquing others’ (even if, in the long run, others’ thoughts might sharpen self-critique). So, I’m sure that I had classmates who read more Derrida than I did, and understood him better, too. But, like children pick favorite numbers and favorite colors — as if numbers and colors could inspire a natural alliegance — I picked Derrida as “my” contemporary thinker. The choice was only partly intellectual; it was largely autobiographical.
Derrida was, and is, the only public figure I know who comes from the same background as my father. Like my father, Derrida was a French Algerian Jew, a breed of French, of Algerian, and of Jewish that history will soon forget. Derrida and my father belong to its last generation, and my reaction to Derrida’s death last week, at only 74, is caught up in the sadness and nostalgia for Algeria that I’ve always seen, and felt, in my father. The two attended the same high school, had the same neighbors, probably saw the same movies, perhaps read the same books.
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My parents divorced when I was seven, and my relationship with my father, since I can remember it, has been difficult. After the divorce, I found his loneliness dangerous, invasive; if it defeated him, he would want loneliness to defeat me, too.
Until high school, I spent the weekends at his house. It was purposefully austere: cement and glass and few pieces of furniture. My father was prone to headaches and sensitive to noise; for the ten years following the divorce, he had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, he says, but I recognize the house’s mood as that of depression. When he was tired, the house grew bleaker. Most of my nightmares, even now, take place there.
But when my father had energy, he became a friend. I never trusted him the way I trusted my mother — I never found his presence reassuring, comforting, or safe. But, while my mother didn’t, in conversation, have much patience for abstractions, my father treated ideas like adventures, and our conversations were adventures we could have together. We’d tease out each idea’s implications, introduce qualifications, point out each other’s contradictions.
At the time, the most exciting topics were the largest: Is there a God? What is a soul? How does history progress? The topics were always slightly mystical, and the answers never knowable.
As I grew older, I became impatient with that grandiose style of thinking, especially when it betrayed any faith in destiny. My father, on the other hand, grew more mystical, and when I began reading poststructuralists like Derrida, our conversations became, to my mind, exasperating. My father told me I over-complicated things, that I was too intellectual; and I took those criticisms as a betrayal, as if he’d encouraged my interest in ideas and then decided my interest had gone too far.
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Will the legacy of poststructuralism be a legacy of cultural alienation? Not for those who disagree with it, but for those who don’t? Will deconstructionism pass away with Derrida, and with it, its practitioners’ academic homeland? Their last chance at “communication”?
Derrida spent much of his career deconstructing the binary of presence vs. absence — but is that of solace to the mourning?
And, then, the question that frightens me much more: was his texts’ presence — for me — simply his?
I like the way you have turned Derrida into your dreamfather figure, and in mourning him, you also mourn the loss of your own, now much more mortal father. Best post in years.
Posted by edwin at October 14, 2004 12:08 PMa beautiful description of the loss and necessity of theory as part of ‘being-in-the-world’ and how we figure out what that means in terms of getting up in the morning. having instigated the argument that introduces this piece through an introduction, i hope i helped a little. and i’d love to see the mystery writer respond. thank you for this one.
Posted by ess at October 14, 2004 02:26 PMThis was wonderful. Tell your friend (or I guess, red flag it) that to “compare” D.F. Wallace and Ben Marcus with Don Delillo is, well, wrong.
Posted by fairest at October 15, 2004 02:13 PMBeautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that.
Posted by LT at October 15, 2004 04:01 PMAn elegant economy of language unfolding with each sentence an intimate view into an economy of elegance into which you fold your meanings.
Cement and glass. Few pieces of furniture. Derrida’s bauhaus, within which reside, on an architecturally strict coffee table, the four books previously mentioned.
Dreams, memories, reflections. Meaning. […?]
I love what you’ve written here.
Posted by Moody at October 15, 2004 10:21 PMThank you. I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to post this — if it made me seem arrogant, pretentious — but I really felt I owed Derrida an attempt at an obituary.
Posted by Nathalie Chicha at October 16, 2004 07:20 PMI think I’ll have to read this man, Derrida. Like the others I was moved by much of what you wrote.
In the meantime,
It serves no purpose *at all* to respond to “must engage the world” with “What do you mean, ‘world’?” Even when it’s two writers talking.
That word, “world”, and others, can be used in non-manipulative ways and it’s reasonable to attack manipulative use, but the “What do you mean?” question is also manipulative. If you inject it into a discussion about some other subject, it turns the discussion into a quagmire and no one ever gets back to the original issue.
Picture me and George Soros at a bar, and he says (hypothetically), “I want to use some of my hedge fund millions to fight hunger.” And I say, “Stop killing emerging economies with currency speculation and you might just do it.” And he says, “I can end hunger better this way”. And then I say, “What do you mean ‘hunger’ anyway?”
I’m saying Soros would be justified in drenching my suit with his martini. Even if he didn’t, the conversation is no longer feasible.
Posted by Mike at October 16, 2004 08:04 PMCommunication assumes the communicator has some esoteric “message” to exotericize…it assumes a knowing, superior subject who is going to instruct and enlighten others. I see writers like Marcus (who I like) as basing their work, consciously or un-, on different premises. Granted they’re pomo, you’d have to admit that pomo got started at least as far back as Hamann in the 18th century, and that’s completely discounting everything like Taoism and other religiouslly-tainted philosophies they might also be linked to. I mean if you look like someone like Chrysippus, he was an anti-wise-man. . same with the Zen monks. Freedom resided in unprincipled and context-specific action rather than in general principles and knowledge-like representations. In other words, one communicated only in the sense that an action communicates, not by giving information which is then to be stored and reflected on. So while you could say ‘experimental’ writers as somehow elitist and civically-irresponsible, you could also see civically-conscious, world-representing writers as intolerably arrogant moralists. The point is everyone’s an asshole. Thank you.
Posted by Gabriel at October 19, 2004 01:00 PMi was so happy to read this — especially given that the brutally fast “news cycle” about jd’s death is officially over. it was great to think you’d been taking this time to think about what his writing has meant for you and your own life, and not just getting on to the next meme. there’s a big discussion going on at my site between the pro_- and contra -derrida contingents, with the pro people sending poems, letter and tributes, and the “con” people askng indignant questions that he would have loved to address at length if he were alive: what is his actual profession, goddamn it? and can’t he just say stuff more clearly?
in this last interview he gave before he died, he sort of addresses nathalie’s second-to-last question above: how does a philosopher who was always writing about, and at, the border (of cultures, genres, comprehensibility, etc.) come face to face with his own death, the ultimate border?
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/082704H.shtml
Posted by lizpenn at October 21, 2004 05:03 PMMy theory prof in grad school was a personal friend of Derrida’s, had conversations with him, in French, about philosophical, academic matters. This prof, Ned Lukacher, lectured like an electrical storm, dark and high-wind and lightning dendritically connecting everything. When one was called upon to speak, one spoke hesitantly, for fear, and one was crushed beneath Ned’s heel.
But I did achieve some kind of appreciation for Derrida, and more for Heidegger, whose “Letter on Humanism” we spent days digging through, and which I don’t really understand, and cannot rearticulate, but can play a couple of riffs from, with variations.
Of which what follows are not any at all.
The writer has no obligations. Words have no fixed meaning. Language is constantly evolving. Everyone has her or his own idiolect. Life is far more complex than any of us know. And far more simple.
But it comes down to this: Arguments are fun, but they are only a game. There are no deep truths uncovered here. If you get upset about any of this, you’re taking it too seriously. Who. The fuck. Cares?
God, am I glad I never made it through grad school.
Nobody’s listening to this, right?
Posted by Jeffrey at October 23, 2004 01:09 AMNathalie, I went to school with you. We had Authenticity class together. You are 100% correct on this issue. And I don’t even like Ben Marcus.
Posted by Fourteen Zero Zero at October 23, 2004 01:44 AMnathalie, it’s just yesterday that i first heard of your site, so the text regarding derrida is the first of yours that i’ve read.
i’ve read it more than once now. it’s beautiful, very beautiful. thank you.
i could stop right here. as all i really want to say is to say thanks. but what you write moves me, and you pose questions i’d like to respond to, so i’d like to continue a little. and then again, these days i’ll take any opportunity to continue speaking of derrida. thereby to somehow continue speaking to him?
please pardon if my remarks are somewhat uncool in blog land; too personal and too abstract, at the same time. that’s the way it goes with language, particularly in a time of mourning.
it touched a cord ( in d-minor, the most friendly of keys according to johann sebastian bach! ) when you say that derrida was your favorite writer, because for many years he has been “my” favorite as well! and for me too, this wasn’t entirely based on philosophical “allegiances”. autobiographical then? i think so, but i doubt that i can say this as eloquently and simply as you have. first of all because this ‘autobiography” is far from transparent to me. so why bring it up at all? because reading your text kindled a hope. the hope that death is not the end, as long as there is memory, the promise of memory, the memory of a promise.
which brings me to the two questions that you pose at the end of your text — of legacy and of mourning. these past several days, i’ve thought about them, obsessively perhaps. i think they are linked, inseperable perhaps.
not for the first or last time, when it comes to “difficult” questions, i turn to derrida. to the texts he delivered over the years in response to the death of a friend. the texts are collected, in english, in a book called “the work of mourning.” ( it wasn’t his intent to make these texts into “a book”, the initiative came from two of his students.) for the french edition, he called it “chaque fois unique, la fin du monde”: each time unique, the end of the world. so there it is - the world - that you write about in your text. what does it mean in this phrase? and indeed, how is one to hear this phrase? isn’t it utterly clear and utterly impenetarable, at the same time?
here’s the aporia. to speak to a friend is utterly unique and singular, each time, something of a secret that is unavowable and unshareable with a third or ” in public”. at the same time, the acknowledgement of friendship is the acknowledgement that one of you is going to be “provisional survivor” and will have to bear witness to the other’s death, share what cannot be shared with others. a pact - a promise - that does not come into effect at the end, at death, but is signed from the beginning.
so mourning is a matter of memory and of the promise, which is to say, of the political ( if this word, i almost said world, has any sense).
how to find the words to say of derrida that death is not the end, as he would have said of/to a friend:
‘Disons que la mort de Blanchot est indéniablement survenue, mais elle n’est pas arrivée, elle n’arrive pas. Elle n’arrivera pas.’
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