The natural tendency of theory —
of what unites philosophy and science in the epistémè
— will push rather toward filling in the breach than forcing the closure.
— p. 92

[A] man calls himself [a] man only by drawing limits excluding his other from the play…
— p. 244

It appears…that [a] man…is cultivated [by his culture]: he sprouts, he forms[;]
birthplace is not a matter of indifference…
— p. 222

You step on board, a bit unsteady at first. It’s just the transition from being on solid ground to standing here on this river. You’ll get your legs back in just a bit. I’ll tell you a secret. Whenever you feel woozy, whenever you feel like everything is spinning and you can’t find any place firm to put your feet, just turn your eyes above and look at those steady, unflinching, never-changing sentences. Like stars in the sky, they should help keep you grounded, remind you of your place, which is here on this unsteady, ever flowing, coming from upstream and moving downstream, this never stopping river.

I’ve ripped these three sentences from their context in Of Grammatology. I’ve gutted them their original intent and lashed their remains to top of the mast to keep you and I steady on this passage. It’s no secret that I have a tendency to get lost, or rather, to wander at whim, or rather, to let myself drift. Being adrift comes at no cost to me but at great cost to you, and so I have employed these sentences, or rather, I have hunted, killed, and utilized the remains of these sentences to help keep the boat on course, to guide you and I, almost like stars, to a destination, a place, if I can use that word, where you and I may go our separate ways, each affected by what will transpire over the course of the next several thousand words.

Before I shove off, I feel a need to excuse myself. You and I are about to set out, and over the course of our voyage, I am going to seem as if I have all the answers. The truth of the matter, though, is that I’m just making this stuff up.

Are you still willing to come with me on this passage? Remember, you can jump out of the boat at any time.

Our destination? Ours is not a destination in the sense of here or there, but rather, it is a destination in the sense of a goal. On this voyage, the goal is nothing more than deliverance, to make the delivery of a precious cargo, to carry it from where I found it to a place where it might be safe. But for you and I, it may be enough to sail for sailing’s sake.

Almost. And this “almost” is for two reasons.

First, the almost has to do with you. Your presence here is an implicit acceptance of my invitation to go sailing. With that acceptance, you become my responsibility. Your face peering in at me (as if I am the text itself) brings back to my mind the concept of the other as it plays itself out in the early works of Derrida, specifically in “Violence & Metaphysics: An essay on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas.”

The strangeness of this thought is that I do not know to whom it belongs. I’ve never read Levinas except through Derrida’s eyes, and I’ve never read Derrida except through my own eyes. Is this concept of the other — the other whose face, in it nakedness, reminds me of what I am not; the other who reminds me of the terrible act of appropriation that is at work in the concept of being; the Other who stands opposed to the totality of Being and totalitarian politics of Being; the Other who is separated from Being and Time only by differance; the Other who I must not reduce to anything other than Other; the other who reminds me of what it is to be mortal; the other that is always better than, but never worth more, than me — is this concept of the other my own, Derrida’s, or Levinas’? Regardless of who it belongs to, I belong to it. I am its property. Just as I am the captain, but this river is in control. And when you step aboard, your naked face reminds me that you’ve come to enjoy this river, and that my presence here is purely coincidental.

Regardless of that coincidence, the fact is that I do have presence here. I have to take this journey too, and as the Captain, the river may control me, but I steer the boat…or at least, I steer the boat either with or against the river…or rather…fine, the river permits me to achieve anything in this boat, but still, that doesn’t mean that I’m not here or that my desires are secondary to yours and its. Or does it? And if it does, if the right ethic says that I should forget myself, why is it that I refuse?

And here’s where I come in. I’m going to join you on this boat as a passenger. You must understand that the person I’m about to describe is not me. It is something that will go by the name of “I.” For now, there will probably be some major difference between me and I, enough that you will know who is talking. As the paragraph moves on, however, this difference will surely start to efface itself, to the point where not even I know who is talking.

For about a half-dozen paragraphs, then, I am my own subject.

I am Irish, Roman Catholic, French, British, and American. But all of those words must have no meaning for you, and so I must explain.

I have never been to Ireland. It doesn’t exist in my reality, by which I mean, I wouldn’t know the real Ireland if it bought me a drink in the pub. I wouldn’t claim to know it, nor would I pretend to know it. My Ireland, however, is the Ireland of myth, by which I mean literature, by which I mean James Joyce. My Ireland struggles in the name of a hero who has never stayed long enough to make everything right again.

But my Ireland doesn’t stop having a history in the early morning of June 17th, 1904; rather, it continues to have the history of our contemporary literature, by which I mean the movie Michael Collins, the pseudo-documentary Bloody Sunday, the music of U2, Van Morrison, the Commitments, and countless other sounds and images of a war torn nation. My Ireland is rebellious. It fights against the tyrannous colonialism of Great Britain through the IRA, an army whose tactics can best be defined as terrorism.

At the same time, my Ireland is peaceful, almost communistic, by which I mean that it is made up of communities that want nothing more (and nothing less) than to make their own decisions. These communities are also at ideological war with the IRA. They can sympathize with the passion, but they do not agree with the methods. By identifying myself as Irish, I identify with both of these groups: I think we have to fight, but I don’t want to believe it.

I also identify as the Ireland that is willing to defend itself using whatever methods are at its disposal, regardless of how those tactics are viewed by the larger world. My Irish response to my critics is, “There are no gentlemen’s rules in the war for survival.”

My Irish heritage is also tightly bound up with the Kennedys, specifically, the mythical figure of John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated because he dared to dream of a world without the Vietnam War. This Kennedy has much in common with Oliver Stone’s Kennedy: A slain king. I am an Irish person.

And though my Ireland is Green, I do not believe in Jesus Christ as the Roman Catholic Church tells me to: I am pro-choice; I think women should be priests if they feel a calling to the collar; I think dogmatic religions destroy the spirit; I think the Pope is little more than a political figure; and I think Christianity is little more than a mythology.

And yet, I continue to identify myself as a Catholic, even though I do not believe it. The reason I continue is because of the major effects the Church had on my childhood. It had a hand in structuring me. The nuns said I would be the first American Pope. Of the many effects Catholicism had, the most important to our discussion here are probably my reverence for the image (an effect that was further strengthened by the influence of television, movies, music videos, videogames, computers, etc. on my generation) and my idea of Christianity as progress beyond a conservative, backwards-looking, tradition of Judaism.

Unfortunately for the Roman Catholic Church, the Christ I know was a rebel against authority: the Christ who overthrew the moneylenders’ tables, the Christ who refused to cave for Pontius Pilate, and the Christ who was politically assassinated for spreading the word of love.

I am a Frenchman. It’s taken me a long time to claim that portion of my identity because my American side wouldn’t let me, but in the past few years, I’ve stopped worrying about what the American thinks and realized that, yes, I am French. To me, France is the country that surrendered to Germany, the country that America had to save. But it is also the country where there is such a word as jouissance. Where passion, as opposed to need, is what causes language. Where love seems to be understood as a verb. This idea of France, while acknowledging the surrender, chooses to remember, not the Vichy government, but Le Resistance. This France is a rebellious, weak France, always fighting the losing battle, but fighting nonetheless.

I am British. I am powerful. I am able to spread my tentacles to the farthest reaches of the globe and force those people to speak my language. I am the guide by which others judge themselves. I don’t give up and never give in. Surrender is not an option and neither is defeat. I plough ahead through whatever nature gives to me and I beat it back and take control and make it my own and neglect your needs or wants and sacrifice everything that is other to me. The sun never sets on me. But my time is past, my time became past because a bunch of intellectual ruffians didn’t know any better than to declare war on an unbeatable Empire. Now all my British side wants is civility, and the chance to have its voice be heard.

Because my American side is speaking so god damn loudly. It thinks it knows what is best. It is arrogant. It’s laughed at all the old paradigms, scoffed at an unbelievable history of thought, and flipped off anyone that didn’t agree with it. My American side says, “Stop thinking about the past, cocksuckers, and head West.”

To which my French side says, “Um, if you go any further west, you’re in the East.”

And to which my American side responds, “Fuck you, you know what I mean.”

My French side responds and says, “I may know what you mean, but others do not.”

“Well, fuck ‘em if they don’t like it.”

“The ones that don’t like it, they’ll fight you. You’re already at war. You have been for over a decade, though you might not have known it before September 11th.”

“Well, I’ll crush them. I am mighty and strong and I don’t lose.”

“Vietnam.”

“Fuck you!”

“Us French lost there too. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Fuck you.”

My Irish side laughs and says, “I’ll drink to that. Care to join me Father?”

My Roman Catholic side does, of course, and they descend into the cabin to find a cooler. My British side simply smirks, shakes its head, whispers, “Both the Irish and Romans sympathized with the Nazis. There is no more Empire,” and looks off to starboard.

But the boat is getting too crowded. The sign over on the side explicitly states that this boat is only permitted to carry three individuals. Excuse me for a moment while I somehow swallow all of these different aspects of me and force them to coexist in one container, one body, one “I.”

Now, with that done, I’m sure you’ll want to know, who am I?

I’m a person who values myth and image but does not believe in them, accepts terrorism and subversion as a necessary tactic of survival warfare against a stronger foe, and has no trouble thinking of himself as, at one time, a loser and winner, an Empire/Father/il Papa and a rebellious Son, and a firm believer in progress who doesn’t believe in any grand narrative of Time. Should I mention that I am also white, male, a little brother, and a Gemini?

So that’s me.

You know who you are, even if, in your infinite Otherness, I do not.

And the third person…well, the third person is the other reason why you and I are only “almost” sailing for sailing’s sake. Because this third person, who should be here very soon, is our cargo. I am transporting him, or rather, smuggling him. I are taking him someplace where he will be safe, if only for the time being.

And who is the third person on our journey?

Let us look to the stars that sit above us, those stars that guide us on this voyage, those stars that we have found, whose origins we have created, whose secrets we have mastered, and whose light we have depended upon when we are lost.

Those stars tell us, once again, that there is simply no escaping the fact that Jacques Derrida is a Western, French, Algerian Jew.

[Derrida died in October, 2004. He wrote about his life in several texts. I haven’t read most of them. The Derrida I describe here is my Derrida. And while there is a relationship between Derrida and my Derrida, “this relationship is...but a signifying structure...that opens meaning...as the disappearance of [Derrida’s] natural presence” (Of Grammatology, pp. 158-159).]

The Jewish history is not one we have to recount here. They are the people of the book who are, at birth, always already the outsider. At the same time, they are the chosen people who are, at birth, always already inside the realm of God. They are always already the outsiders and the insiders.

The French history in a post-WWII world is the history of the defeated victors. The French surrendered but when the war was over, they had won. After WWII, they are always already the losers and the winners.

The Algerian history is the history of a victorious rebellion over victorious losers. Prior to its independence in 1962, Algeria was a colony of France. That is, even after the establishment of post-WWII France, Algerians were subservient to the French. They achieved their independence through a mixture of subversive, “terrorist” tactics and popular rebellion. In some respects, then, Derrida’s Algeria was a subversive servant to a master who had lost self-respect.

The Western history is the history of the underprivileged members of society declaring their independence from the privileged members. The people of the West are always already marching on the side of the historically downtrodden.

As a Western, French, Algerian Jew, Derrida is such a wonderful battleground of opposing influences. He is insider and outsider, winner and loser, revolutionary and colonialist, conquered and conqueror, the marching and downtrodden.

Welcome aboard, Mr. Derrida.

He remains silent, like the cargo he is.

Remembering always that the river is in control, shall the three of us begin then?

An articulated thesis, a sharp kick against the dock, a decisive, breath-filled moment after which there is no turning back: Derrida is as a terrorist. Derrida is as a terrorist whose enemy is philosophy. This is an interpretation. But “the original opening of interpretation signifies that there will always be…two interpretations of interpretation.” (Derrida, “Edward Jabès and the Question of the Book,” Writing & Difference, p. 67)

The first, original interpretation is “the saddened, negative, guilty,” and aggressive interpretation. It “seeks to decipher,” and dreams of “the reassuring foundation” (Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Writing & Difference, p. 292). It is a conservative interpretation that sees interpretation as corruption; an interpretation that desires to be intuition, an intuition of what an object means.

The second, other interpretation is “the joyous affirmation of the play…the innocence of becoming…the affirmation of a world…without truth, and without origin which is offered as an active interpretation,…the other affirms play and tries to pass beyond…” (ibid). It is a progressive interpretation that sees interpretation as liberation; an interpretation that senses itself as inspiration, inspiration to become a subject with meaning.

Between these two interpretations of interpretation, a war rages. It is a small war, a secret war, not secret in the way that no one knows it is occurring, but secret in the way that no one knows when and where a battle will break out. This war is as a war between an Empire and its colonies; or rather, it is as a war between an Empire and a stateless, formless, and internal and excluded enemy; it is as a war between an Empire and what that empire calls terrorists; or rather, it is as a war between an Empire and, as they might call themselves, freedom fighters, liberationists — or possibly and simply and more correctly, mujahideen, those who struggle.

As anyone who has ever struggled with reading Derrida knows — that is, as anyone who has ever stopped struggling with Derrida and let him play knows, Derrida comes down firmly on the side of those who struggle.

Because you are a passenger on this boat, you should know where I reside. I support this struggle, this rebellion, this attempt at liberation. And it is for this reason that I am smuggling Derrida out of harm’s way today.

What is this war that I speak of, you may be wondering. Surely it is not a real war, with blood and misery and death. It is not a war fought over land, or even fought over goods, resources, economics. No, this war is not one of those real wars.

Instead, this war is abstract. It is over, literally, nothing. There is no battleground. Where this war is fought, you cannot see: you cannot hear; where this war is fought, your senses cannot go.

If captured by the other side and forced at gunpoint to pinpoint where all the battles in this war are to be fought, I could only choose the non-site that is that space separating metaphor from reality; that space of non-sense.

Metaphorically, then, its site is “a city no longer inhabited, not simply left behind, but haunted by meaning and culture,” a city whose structures can be “methodically threatened” by a military “operation” (“Force and Signification,” Writing & Difference, p. 5-6).

This war, then, only has structures for victims. It threatens no one. It only threatens the place where they live, the site where they find themselves. It threatens, however, only to provoke, to cause action, movement. It threatens the structure with the hope of liberating the living from their imprisonment within that structure. Those who find themselves threatened have forgotten that they are not structures, but individual humans that are individually being.

In this war, Derrida is one of the individuals who threaten those structures, but he threatens them from inside. He is only able to threaten those structures because of what they have taught him. They gave him the reason that inspires him — they have breathed this life of rebellion into him. He is their creation and the threat of their destruction. Derrida did not volunteer for his post. He was drafted, in both of the senses of this word, drafted by the Empire that had taught him to write.

Derrida’s weapon is language, and like any good soldier, his weapon is a part of him. It is not separate, an instrument to be used. He has not mastered his weapon, in the sense that he controls it. He has mastered it in the sense that he has mastered the use of his lungs. He survives, lives, retains his spirit, breathes, because his language “does not fall outside of the body” (Of Grammatology, p. 234). Without his language, he is only as powerful as a magician without his magic wand.

At the same time, he realizes that he is only able to use this weapon because the Empire gave it to him and taught him how to use it, and every time he fights, he finds himself feeling guilty for this wonderful weapon. He is unable to get over the guilt and fight without it — the Derrida who would fight without his weapon is a monstrosity, but it is a monstrosity that is coming, a monstrosity “whose conception, formation, gestation, and labor” both terrifies and inspires him; it is a “formless, mute, infant” — a newborn monster without language (“Structure, Sign, and Play…,” Writing & Difference, p. 293).

But why does he fight? And why do I smuggle him, support him, struggle with him and for him today?

Before I explain that, let me tell you of one of the battles in his past. Let me show the mastery with which he works. I have a map of one of these battles as it played itself out between Derrida and Husserl, where the latter was not even present to defend himself — not present because Derrida’s battlefield is always already an uninhabited city: he attacks not Husserl, but the structures that Husserl has built.

You and I shall stand over this map; peer down into it, the swoops and swirls that signify the subtle but aggressive ghosts that haunt the war-torn landscape. The battle rages for a long period of time, but you and I can satisfy our interests with the opening, introductory thrusts (Derrida, “Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenology of Language,” Speech & Phenomena, pp.107-108).

Phenomenology has criticized metaphysics as it is in fact only to restore it.

To speak of metaphysics is to speak in metaphysics.

It has informed metaphysics about its actual state of affair in order to reawaken it to the essence of its task, to its original and authentic purpose.

Phenomenology is the consciousness of metaphysics, but it is contained as our consciousness is contained within our bodies; it can only operate on the world through what it knows.

This is recalled in the latter pages of the Cartesian Meditations: against ‘adventurous’ speculation, against ‘naive’ and ‘degenerate’ metaphysics, we must return to the critical project of ‘first philosophy.’” [emphasis added]

It is backwards looking, and regards the other interpretation, gazes upon it and judges it as reckless, risky, and innocently ignorant; it criticizes, chastises the other interpretation the way a forty year old will chastise a twenty-two year old: “You must stop playing around and get back to work.”

To follow this movement of critical purification in phenomenology, the concept of form could be used as a guiding thread. If the word ‘form’ translates several Greek terms in a highly equivocal way, we can be sure nonetheless that all these terms themselves refer back to founding metaphysical concepts. By reinscribing the Greek terms (eidos, morphe, etc.) into the language of phenomenology, by playing upon the differences between the Greek, Latin, and German, Husserl clearly wanted to disengage the original concepts from the later and supervenient metaphysical interpretations, which he declared, charged the word with invisible sedimentation.

Even in the midst of this battle, Derrida whispers the motivation for his attack. By looking at the structures he declares, it becomes possible to describe the force that inspired this attack. Husserl’s project is the purification of metaphysical language, where “purification” should be charged by its historically determined German influence, a sense of “purification as a project” that can never escape the force of “the Holocaust as a project.” You and I must never forget the difference between Husserl and Derrida. Derrida himself feels the aggressiveness of Husserl; he understands what is being threatened here by Husserl’s “declaration” of war against the stained, tainted, dirty presence that has corrupted the original, pure, propre language.

But Husserl labors always to restore a primordial sense to these terms, a sense which began to be perverted at the time of its inscription into the tradition; thus Husserl often goes against the first thinkers, against Plato and Aristotle. [emphasis in original]

Husserl labors, in the sense of working towards a goal, a goal whose destination is the origin, an origin that was sullied by what came after: “inscription into the tradition” — Jews as the people of the Book, and as the people of history: “The only thing that begins by reflecting itself is history. And this fold, this furrow, is the Jew. The Jew who elects writing which elects the Jew, in an exchange responsible for truth’s thorough suffusion with historicity and for history’s assignment of itself to its empiricity” (“Edmond Jabes and the Question of the Book,” Writing & Difference, p. 65). Husserl labors, works, to purify the language: he struggles against the language he has to rediscover the language that was lost, once upon a time, before the Jew gained control of history, and thus truth, through the tradition of writing.

Whether it is a question of determining the eidos against “Platonism,” the Form (in the problem of formal logic and ontology) or morphe (in the problem of the transcendental constitution and its relations with hyle) against Aristotle, the force, vigilance, and efficacy of the critique remains intremetaphysical in its motives. How could it be otherwise?

As soon as we use the concept of form—even to criticize another concept of form—we must appeal to the evidence of a certain source of sense. And the medium of this evidence can only be the language of metaphysics.

In order to critique metaphysics, one would need to speak in a different language. If the language of metaphysics is logic, if metaphysics is formal, we must escape the form: we must be outside the form: we must speak in the meta-form, in metaphor. We must not be prescriptive — in the sense of prescribing the remedy in order to counteract the poisoned language that was always already given to us — but instead, we must be descriptive; to critique metaphysics, we must be outside of it and describe what it is and how it works; if metaphysics is work, then we must use the play that is embodied in metaphor to describe it.

For that language we know what “form” means, how the possibility of its variations is ordered, what its limits are, and the field of all conceivable disputes concerning it. The system of oppositions in which something like form can be considered, the formality of form, is a finite system. Furthermore, it is not enough to say that “form” has a sense for us, a center of evidence, or that its essence is given to us as such: indeed, this concept is, and always had been, indissociable from the concepts of appearance, sense, evidence, or essence. Only a form is evident, only a form has or is essence, only a form presents itself as such. This is a point of certainty that no interpretation of the Platonic or Aristotelian conceptual systems can dislodge.

All the concepts by which eidos or morphe could be translated and determined refer back to the theme of presence in general. Form is presence itself. Formality is what is presented, visible, and conceivable of the thing in general.

A bit redundant, but only in the way that using an automatic rifle is redundant: Send as many little bullets into the same place as possible in order to make a big hole. Derrida has found a weakness in Husserl: it is a weakness caused by Husserl’s conscription of Plato and Aristotle. By depending upon them to protect his own, pure concept, he is vulnerable to an exploitation of their weaknesses, an exploitation that is only known by those who have spoken with them: Husserl’s metaphysics, dependent upon Plato’s and Aristotle’s metaphysics, is exploitable by a metaphysical terrorist.

That metaphysical thought - and consequently phenomenology - is the thought of being as form and the formality of form, is nothing less than necessary; the fact that Husserl determines the living present (lebendige Gegenwart) as the ultimate, universal, and absolute “form” of transcendental experience in general is a final indication of this.

Metaphysical thought, necessarily, is a structure. It is built and formed and defended as a structure. Structures, however, ignore the effect of time, completely. Where the living present is absolute, the past and the future (and their effects on the present) are ignored, and if not ignored, then at the very least, they are demoted.

Although the privilege of theoria is not, in phenomenology, as simple as has sometimes been claimed, although the classical theories are profoundly re-examined therein, the metaphysical domination of the concept of form cannot fail to effectuate a certain subjection to the look.

Metaphysics is dependent upon a metaphor of sight. As Derrida writes in another essay, “…the metaphor of darkness and light (of self-revelation and self-concealment) [is] the founding metaphor of Western philosophy as metaphysics…The entire history of our philosophy is a photology, the name given to a history, or treatise on, light” (“Force and Signification,” Writing & Difference, p. 27).

(It should be noted that Derrida’s Western metaphysical metaphor of a “founding” also implies a metaphor of a site upon which a structure can be built. Perhaps I should also note the people whose tradition is to wander, searching, seeking, always moving beyond the present site, which is always already not the Promised Land, a people whose very identity is bound up in the movement of progressing towards. “For this site, this land, calling to us from beyond memory, is always elsewhere. The site is not empirical and national Here of a territory. It is immemorial, and thus also a future. Better: it is a tradition of adventure” (“Edmond Jabes and the Question of the Book,” Writing & Difference, p. 66) — A tradition of adventure: recall that Derrida suggests that the Cartesian Meditations are “against ‘adventurous’ speculation.”)

This subjection would always be a subjection of sense to seeing, of sense to the sense of sight, since sense in general is in fact the concept of every phenomenological field.

In Husserl’s phenomenology, then, there is bottom domination in a hierarchical structure of a categorical language. Sense is the categorical umbrella under which seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling, and smelling find their meaning. In Husserl, however, the sense of sight has dominated the others and claimed itself as the privileged sense. In the world of signifiers and signifieds, the signified Sight has snuck into the royal bedroom of the signified Sense and slit its throat. In the morning, in the glorious light of the rising sun, the signified Sight assumed the robe of the signifier Sense, and it saw that no one recognized the difference. But with its eye turn toward the rising sun, it was blind to those who had long been cast out into the shadows.

The implications of such a putting-on-view could be unfolded in many directions and by proceeding from what would appear to be the most diverse places within the text and the problems of phenomenology. It could be shown, for example, how this putting-on-view and this concept of form permit a movement between the project of formal ontology, the description of time or of intersubjectivity, the latent theory of the work of art, etc.

Permit: a written authorization given by a legal power. The sight hidden as royal Sense, assisted by the concept of Form (which is dependent upon the concept of sight for its existence), permits Husserl to move between his ideas. Husserl is an accomplice in the regicide of the signified Sense and he has sworn loyalty to the order that usurped the throne. It permits him.

Derrida, then, as defender of the rightful King.

But if sense is not speech, their relationship with regard to this putting-on-view no doubt deserves some particular attention. Thus we have here chosen to narrow our perspective to a text that concerns the status of language in Ideas I.

Derrida’s weapon is language, in all of its forms, including the pun. “Regard” and “Perspective” here, are connected to the sense of sight.

While Derrida’s weapon is language, it is also his treasure. He fights against the corruption of language by a single entity; that is, he fights against those who would privilege one piece/perspective/part of language over another. He fights for a democratic language, where there is no central totalizing authority that assigns the pure truth to one class of language and permits the comings and goings of the lesser, stained, sullied, improper classes of language.

Among the determination of this status, the privilege of the formal, and the predominance of the theoretical there is a certain systematic interchange. And yet the coherence of this system seems to be worked over by something outside that relation to the outside which is the relation to form.

Even in a world where it seems all the power comes from the Formal and the right to that power comes from the Theoretical, there is something outside of that relation that really structures it, almost like a secret cabal that has permitted Sight to assume the throne. The privileged Sight, then, is really just a signifier for the privileging power of this other, unknown, unspoken cabal.

Does Derrida mention this cabal by name during this battle? Does he ever call it out, touch its scales, smell the ever-rotting flesh of its ever-deferred demise? Even in this already empty battlefield, can its haunting scream be heard from the moment Derrida put it under the harsh light of its own sun?

You and I could probably scan through the empty cities of several of his already empty battlefields, pointing only to the tracks in the dirt, those traces of Derrida’s decisive thrusts, those stylized movements that identify the person who accompanies you and I as cargo on this journey. Perhaps in his traces will be found the unspoken name.

Before I attempt such a reading of Derrida’s thrusts with you by my side, perhaps I should announce from the outset what you and I are looking for. While I’ve hinted at it above, perhaps it is time that I articulated the opposing forces in this war.

The Empire, as I’ve come to call it, is the empire of structural thinking. It seeks to totalize the concept of pure, objective, truth into a form that is not subject to the effects, the barbarous ravages of time, history, environment; a totalitarian truth that dominates context: a total form to which there is no outside.

The mujahideen, as the Empire might call them, fight against this totalizing movement. They struggle against it, refuse to subject themselves to it. They struggle for liberation, to liberate the subject from the object, to liberate time from space, to liberate force from form, to liberate writing from written, the passion of life from the dead form that the Empire aims to achieve.

But where does Derrida reside? Is he simply a rebel, simply a terrorist?

[My] intention…is not to oppose duration to space, quality to quantity, force to form, the depth of meaning or value to the surface of figures. Quite to the contrary. To counter this simple alternative, to counter the simple choice of one of the terms or one of the series against the other, [I] maintain that it is necessary to seek new concepts and new models…

Derrida, then, seeks for something other than what he has found, for something other than the tradition that he has inherited. He does not seek for an original concept, a natural model uncorrupted by culture. He seeks to liberate, but not toward some thing. He does not seek to move toward: he seeks to escape from — and though he is frightened of the future, scared of what it might mean, he cannot accept the present that he has received: a present that always already contains a bar of soap made from his ancestors.

Derrida fights to keep the same, rational, linear, logical thinking that resulted in the Holocaust from ever being privileged again. The same German thought that conquered French thought, a French thought that can only saved from without and within, a resistance to the authorities that have penetrated it fought inside the already dead cities of a conquered country. Derrida fights this thought in the only way that it is possible, through tactics that an Empire must declare as terrorism. He fights for survival against the declaration of an objective and original and pure truth that can only be found in the past glory, before the degrading infestation of the parasitical influence of the Other.

Derrida fights because he understands that the declaration of a truth found is the annunciation of a slaughter to come.

And you and I have come to the other side of our journey. From here, in the flowing river between the land of the Empire and the safety of its opposite shore, you and I can have a certain vantage point. You and I do not have to choose between them. You and I can operate safely here. “From this privileged place of observation, [one can watch] the play of oppositions, order, and the predominance of extremes. [One can] better understand…” what it is that Derrida is trying to achieve (Of Grammatology, p. 223). He seeks escape and liberation.

You can go with him, if you choose.

I will not follow, for now. My place is here, in the river, between the shores, smuggling out those who need to escape. If you choose to go, I cannot take you all the way. In fact, this is as far I come. You will have to swim to shore from here. The distance is infinite, but you can make it if you know the trick. Since you’ve come all this way, I’ll tell it to you.

Let Derrida breathe into you, feel it swirl within, do not hold it, do not struggle to keep it separate from your own breath, let them mingle, let them play inside you, let them move, let them leap from lung to lung, let them dance through the chambers of your heart, feel them as they slide around your mind, and then, when the moment comes, and you’ll know it when it does, simply exhale.

If you can exhale, you are still alive — and in a whole other place — and in a whole other time — always already.