Jacques Derrida. July 15, 1930 — October 9, 2004
Though I type two spaces after a full stop the medium does not allow this. Does not erase, leaves no trace, defers indefinitely the second space. The pause before resuming in the next sentence, the battle, which leaves, even on the pages below the page, on the paper untouched by ink, “traces of the violence of pencil strokes, exclamation points, arrows and underlining.” In this and so much more, Derrida spoke to me. Derrida understood.
I once sent him a post card. The Post Card, in my adolescent enthusiasm. Along with a letter, and a cassette. I read aloud the entire novel Celine, which rose to a crescendo with a long cathartic accidental therapy session, in which our heroine, inter alia, sings a line from a musical comedy she imagines, featuring Derrida.
Delivering this Post Card and cassette gift package on my behalf was Simon Glendinning, whom I met on derrida-l in the early days of the internet when earnest seekers could discuss philosophy and literature across the oceans at all hours. Our conversations were intricate and beautiful, spanning more words than a book Simon would later write on Derrida, in a series typical of our times, A Very Short Introduction.
But I digress. I write on Derrida’s birthday. Just to wish. There is no remembering those we can never forget, no mourning those who can never leave us. He would be 85 today. He will be with us forever. Every time we speak (therefore) of a letter.
“Death takes from us not only some particular life within the world, some moment that belongs to us, but, each time, without limit, someone through whom the world, and first of all our own world, will have opened up in a both finite and infinite — mortally infinite — way.”
Of Derrida, French President Jacques Chirac said, “In him, France gave the world one of the major figures of the intellectual life of our times.” Le Monde published a 10 page special issue in his honour.
“Nevertheless,” as Carolyn Kellog wrote in the LA Times, “his library is now in New Jersey.”
In contrast to Le Monde, The New York Times carried an obituary seething with barely concelead disdain and heard it big time from a slew of professors and students across the United States.
It remains in New Jersey that we can pore over a lifetime of Derrida’s notes, many handwritten.
“I know for a fact that she comes from Paterson, Jew Jersey, even though she has this phony English accent and keeps talking about Derrida all the time. I mean, I thought it was a musical comedy or soemthing. I can even hear the music in my head. You know, Derr-i-da, da-da-da, tum, tiddy-tum, tiddy-tum, tiddy-tum.”
from Celine, by Brock Cole.
