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Saturday, October 09, 2004
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LIMITED INC.
Jacques Derrida has died. My tattered copy of Of Grammatology, the torturously translated edition of his torturous master-text, has long had sentimental value for me. All first-year graduate students in English at the University of Chicago got hit up with it, I think, and we all with great veneration and trembling and perplexity red-lined our way through the thing. My copy is particularly messed up because I’d just gotten a cat when I started reading it, and the cat would follow the movements of my underlining hand and then suddenly pounce. My hand would skate madly over the words and create a mass of red lines. Sometimes the cat’s claws tore through the book’s paper. Although Of Grammatology was baffling and convoluted, I read it with excitement, sensing despite my incomprehension and the text’s density something new and nervy in it. I came to appreciate Derrida’s often funny subversion of established forms of European thought and discourse; his writing conveyed to me a perpetually intense youthfulness. And this is probably why I’m amazed to hear that he is dead. |