I am at war with myself, it’s true, you couldn’t possibly know to what extent, beyond what you can guess, and I say contradictory things which are, we might say, in real tension; they are what construct me, make me live, and will make me die. I sometimes see this war as terrifying and difficult to bear, but at the same time I know that this is life.
I suspect that Derrida’s final interview, published recently as Learning to Live Finally, is one of the most perfect language-objects I have read. The interview was conducted only weeks before he died from an aggressive, terminal cancer, and the simultaneity of living-and-dying is evident, almost shockingly, in what he says. A person, nudging irreparably towards the limit of experience, calling on a radical shift from late-capitalist globalisation and economies of war. A person, so critically engaged that his transcribed language is algebraically parenthetical, relentless. A person, so aware of death that his presence is charged with the overwhelming continuity of emergence. Every word emerges. Every word is an emergency: THIS IS HAPPENING NOW! TAKE NOTICE! THIS IS IS-ING!
In the translator’s notes, it is said that Derrida remarked with sadness that the interview read as an obituary. Yet the presentness of death in his language does not have the ritual finality of a eulogy. Instead, it has the über-geometry of chance and potentiality. The practice of philosophy is the coming-to-terms with death — deathness, deathitude, deathology — and the coming-to-terms with living. The parallel, of course is with language (is it a parallel?) and with a question of survival (the very delicate hyphen between life and death.) Derrida says:
When it comes to thought, the question of survival has taken on absolutely unforeseeable forms. At my age, I am ready to entertain the most contradictory hypotheses in this regard: I have simultaneously—I ask you to believe me on this—the double feeling that, on the one hand, to put it playfully and with a certain immodesty, one has not begun to read me … on the other hand, and thus simultaneously, I have the feeling that two weeks or a month after my death there will be nothing left. Nothing except what has been copyrighted and deposited in libraries.
At heart is a question of sustainability: of experience and of language. And here is the delicate balance. To be at war with oneself, as we all are, with the productive tensions (kinetic energy) of sustainable creativity and attentiveness. Not to be, as it were, an unproductive feedback loop of self-loathing or self-consumption.
