[Newspoetry] Death and Derrida

[emerick at chorus.net]

In his obituary immortalizing the transposition of Derrida from an active tense to a passive voice, MC Taylor reminds us all of the ethical principles of faith.  These principles are not necessarily merely those trivial ideas of faith that acquire a classical religious colorization, as a prime divider of people into sects, into good and bad (or even into divine and evil).  Faith is fundamental fact of each and every existence -- though we separately may differently dispose of its mediational role in our own thoughts and throughout the course of our own lives.

Faith, says Taylor -- in possible echo of Derrida, as if to speak for Derrida, or as if to repeat Derrida (and yet, undeniably, thereby, to also speak for himself, perhaps) -- requires doubt.  And, yet, just how should any being doubt -- assuming, as I must, that doubt is not only necessary (when not to doubt is to discard all reason for any faith) but also an inevitable impediment of faith.  Resistance is as necessary to faith as obedience is.

How much should I, or any being, doubt?  That question appeals to my quantitative, numerological pretensions -- the ones that run toward the sheltering activities of science, of knowing, of discovering how the world is (or, better, so I feel, how the world may be).  It is, in this "may be", an uncertainty as to whether I refer to the actual states of the world, as I believe them to be -- or, perhaps, to the states of the world that I desire to be -- to become from the being that is only possible, not actual.

"May be" also has its fusion pending, the lapse into some "maybe" that is hypothetical, suggestive, promising of some (other) possibility than merely a continuation of the ever fertile, ever fecund "same" -- whose self ever threatens to rise up so monumental as to obliterate any and every other, in the perpetuity of habit, style, custom, culture.

How much I should doubt should be, so I argue, in direct proportion to, constantly in balance against, my belief.  The more fervently I belief, the more avidly should I welcome doubt.  Faith without doubt signifies a self-inflicted blindness, an insensitivity to faith itself, which no longer knows its own being, because it has excluded all others from consideration, even God, himself, if such faith had dared to imagine that it sought to include an idea of God.

Faith recognizes its incompleteness, its weakness, its partiality by doubt.  Faith without doubt becomes a force unto itself -- destructive in its deepest, most inward, fondly sincere intents.  Only those who are most certain would dare to judge as expendable the character, the being, the life of all those representations, those things, those people that oppose them.

In death, that comes for us all, for the ArchBishop, as well, and also came for Derrida, there is a certain certainty -- the kind that certification signifies.  I signed his death certificate, I sang his eulogy, I obituaried him, I buried him: he is most certainly dead.  (To wit, I could here recite the Munchkin Corroner's refrain, in the land of Oz.)

Death relates to the idea of certainty that inhabits (some say infests) the idea of God.  Death, so many faiths say, is the (moment of a certain) experience of (a certain) God.  And, what keeps us alive?  What keeps us from going after this lost/losing horizon, this nirvana experience, of rushing toward certainty, where no secret any longer may hide, where truth has (at last) transparent(al) permission to appear fully before our "eyes" and to our "senses"?  Just this, merely this, and nothing more: doubt keeps me alive -- because Pascal taught us about the gamble -- that guessing wrongly is an enormous mistake.  Where does nothing (a simple zero) co-factor the stakes?  A wise person would defer this gamble for as long as possible, to explore the fork of opportunity's paths as thoroughly as possible -- and, maybe, never place a bet.

Derrida, in conclusion, experienced God, was finally well translated enough so that he might not merely come before God, as if to know God is to be (one with) God, but also, perhaps, if (touching) God is dead (or death), to be dead.  As Fishbane once wrote, suggestively (and quasi-amorously), in the Kiss of God, there happens that experience of exclusive/inclusive love that is death.  There in that moment is that which is marked as death so that nothing later could ever happen again that would be superlative to that moment.  The kiss is as fatal as it is final.

Adieu, Jacques Derrida, to you, I would say these things, as you said so well for (of) Emmanuel Levinas.