Derrida remains

Tempted to say "persists," and suppose that he would have "appreciated" the joke -- never just a joke -- of the sense of the psychological, the symptom, repetition compulsion.

More than perhaps anyone, ever -- and is this impression of the superlative audacious, despite being perhaps also formal, formulary, obsequious, marked by a bias of affiliation or association, one too liberal, elective, willful, unnatural, astray -- or is it even audacious enough? Is the "perhaps" the too formal and polite, the careful, the qualifying, the equivocating that is already a trait of him, a symptom, something the rest of us caught, picked up, from him?

More than perhaps anyone ever, Derrida gave us, the rest of us, the ones he leaves, "behind" as they -- we -- say, remains. He gave us, the remaining, the remains. He gave us, left to us, to understand this, to extend the understanding of this, to see the opening of this to anything: to remain, the remaining, the remains, remainder, legacy, the phantomal, sur-vival.

He rehearsed this act so often. His work as an aggregate (he might say, rather than a whole, a totality) was this work, this play, this memory, this tribute, this living of the other, of the others. But even particularly, so often he marked his survival of others, his mourning. He performed as eulogy this much more general matter of the other, this contingency, haunting, submission or opening before volition, incorporation -- this hosting. He performed this so well, gave us the form of this, there's a temptation to say he gave us the form of his own eulogy, and with that, the sense, not without "gentle irony" (as he once said of another), or parody, or that ingenuous and gracious mischief in the tone of his voice "behind" his insistent look (a deadpan countereffect that was mostly inadvertent, as J. Hillis Miller suggested, but nonetheless somewhat like a Buster Keaton act), of Derrida's death as an act in more than one sense, another of his performative performances. The joy in this would be no less in the mourning.

Difficult not to think, too, in spite of the "better" judgment not to give it a place here, not to make it part of this place, the others who also rehearsed the act so often of the death of "deconstruction," always so hastily, prejudicially, smugly, nonetheless ceremoniously. Difficult not to be tempted by the gesture of holding up this "real" death, as well as all the sur-viving it would imply, in this work, this operation, this act, acting and activity of Derrida, this gesture of and towards an operation called "deconstruction" much more dogmatically by its detractors, that Derrida never claimed as his property. So quick and so clamorous were there some -- many -- to declaim this work as anti-, nihilistic, irrational, against life as some fixed or platitudinous value, when what remained even before, even under the name of Derrida living, to be read by these, was the affirmation, the "yes, yes," the undoing of this very opposition of death as anti-life.

More than anyone, perhaps -- but then his was always a gesture to others -- Derrida's labor, his prodigiousness, his generosity, his thriving, his exorbitance, was in showing us sur-vival, in writing. Sur-vival of writing, of the "text" (as it also unfortunately became too pat a way to put it). His writing was the demonstration of this sur-vival of writing, that even in this supposedly dead, unliving form, nonetheless capable of usurping life itself, there is the living play of meaning, which even we living can no more expunge than do without.

And it is as if Derrida, only now, becomes corpus. Only now, in the supplementarity of his passing, of having -- ineluctable fact of the unbelievable, incommensurable, impossible -- left us, to ourselves, an us without him, does Derrida have a body, what remains, the decline of the corpse and corpus, the body to account for.

No wonder the effect of the loss of him is also so much the legacy: the feeling that there is nothing we can say (bereft, without restitution), that there is nothing left to say, goes hand in hand with the feeling that there is so much, an everything, left to say, to be said, no less so in the body of Derrida. The former cannot surmount the latter, cannot surmount the insurmountable: the meaning of unending, the unending of meaning. That will go on going on under this name, too: Jacques Derrida.


-- Greg Macon