On a train journey between Taunton and Totnes, late afternoon, as darkness descended, Saturday last, following a discussion on Hippolytus and the ways of the gods, I read with some excitement a review of a recent biography of Derrida (LRB 22.11.12 Adam Shatz, Not in the Mood). Mind you I had never got very far with attempts at reading Derrida directly – but I sensed that if only I knew what the fuck he was talking about I would really enjoy and gain from the experience.
Here’s an early quotation from Shatz:
‘Language, for Derrida, is always saying more than you want it to say; it has a tendency to undermine itself, even to turn against itself; there is no final liberation into some utopia of clarity, transparency and understanding.’
Now that is very interesting. I like it. I like especially the way it echoes my own attitude/thoughts about language in the way that it says both more and less of what was intended; there is always the element f self-revelation; secrets shove their mucky little heads above the parapet. Had I somehow absorbed bits of Derrida from the zeitgeist even though I was unable to read more than a page or two of the man himself. I might say it thus: language is not what we think it is. It’s dangerous stuff. Do we know, have we any inkling of what, say, reading the Daily Mail does to a human being? The question that chugs along after that one is:
What use of language might make me, or encourage me towards being more human rather than less?
It’s a delicate matter and at the same time of the utmost importance.
The next quotation from Shatz that drew my attention is this one:
‘Still his writings are a rich guide to the concerns that drove him: our longing for a reassuring ‘centre’ that could anchor thought; the West’s troubled relationship to its colonial ‘other’; the agonies of Jewish identity; trauma and mourning; the power of the secret.’
OK I’ll leave on one side the question of Derrida’s agony with his Jewish identity, important as it is. And I have to say that the other four items will take me quite a few postings or perhaps even the rest of my life to dig into with any satisfaction (if satisfaction is something that I could ever hope for). Let’s take the first one: ‘our longing for a reassuring centre’. It’s as though Derrida is suggesting that there is a way of life without security; especially without ideological security, the isms that we love to hate but desperately hang on to. Catholicism, socialism, Buddhism, Sufism . . . nationalism, racism, the list is endless.
Shatz provides another couple of lines, manure for me to mix into the soil:
‘We would be better off, he (Derrida) suggested, if we abandoned this search for foundations, and these god-terms, in favour of a ‘Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and the innocence of becoming . . . This affirmation then determines the non-centre otherwise than as loss of the centre. And it plays without security.’
Before and between and following our tasks of housework and hunting and gathering let us play. Like Ovid or Joyce or Will Self – I’m enjoying his Umbrella.
The biography Shatz is reviewing is, Derrida: A Biography by Benoit Peeters