[Newspoetry] October 8, 2004 -- Derrida is dead... Make a note of that...

[emerick at chorus.net]

Derrida is dead.  Oh, yes, his critics have been saying just this for 
years -- and, finally, so they fervently wish to (have us) believe, 
they are now so certainly right -- right today, right tomorrow -- and, 
by force of logical implication, if so, then why not right before, 
right yesterday, right as rain?   Right, according to the mythology of 
right -- and, hey, I don't make up myths, I just name them when I come 
to them, so stop blaming me, always already, for what I have but named 
when I found it -- is never circumstantial -- it is not inscribed by 
certain contexts circumscribing any possibility into some actuality -- 
like buzzards flying overhead, circling a dying body, down there on the 
surface, unable any longer to shift its position against the all-
enveloping horizon.  Right would be, so its mocking myth must ever 
misty-eyed say, an absolute actuality -- eternal, unchanging, 
unaffected == a discoverable, knowable truth, above existence itself, 
an ultra-existence; uber-suffering -- neither beginning in the birth pains of origin, nor ending 
in the death throws of dead-reckoning's certainty, the cessation that 
reduces everything to ground, ashes, dust.

Between such marks, at least one of which no living man could claim to 
know, between the marks of creation and destruction, there -- just 
exactly, impossibly, there -- would be an existence, in the continuity 
of the cusp of originality, the ever-flowering moment of origin-
natality.  The tracing of time by existence has always yet to leave its 
signatory traces by signatures completing itself -- to avow what is not 
in the as-if of a promise that then conditions itself by a pledge to be 
no more than just so, to be just -- by fidelity to an intentioned self 
shall come certainty, never of the world itself but of the I who 
inhabits the world that I create for me.  Intension grandly equates its 
presumption of sameness, its prejudice against difference, to 
rightness.  "Derrida is dead" would mean his own primary work is dead, 
the quotations can now be enumerated definitively, the citations 
offered us as homily can now rest assured, their fear of contradiction 
now may leave this plea!
 ce of fear and its tremblings.  Here, ever after, so they firmly say, 
there can come but the work of the scarabs, the grave diggers and the 
accent markers -- all secondary work is now to be located against the 
fixed pile, the heap or the archive, as to how matters stand, in the 
eternal fidelity of the living to the dead, the here after of those who 
are here after us, hear after, hear laughter in the works he did not 
scribe and to which he may not subscribe, just as he may never 
subscribe to such differences in writings to the margins of 
philosophy.

Derrida is dead.  If I had a simple view of the pleasure that I could 
find in such a moment, I would say that I have now the possibility of 
success in my Derridean studies, to be definitive, to know all that 
there is to know of this man, his writing of life, his life of writing, 
because he is no longer there, no longer writing, as if he meant only 
to torment and tease me for not having had the thoughts that he had and 
that I never would have.  The Other can never be captured, enclosed, 
buried alive -- restricted to being itself, for it could never have 
been just that, no matter how far the illusions of some representation 
run, no matter how shrilly newspoetry sings its bright lays of words, 
no matter how silly philosophy psychodramatizes its dark plays on 
words.