#jacques derrida

This Ego, this living individual would itself be inhabited and invaded by its own specter. It would be constituted by specters of which it becomes the host and which it assembles in the haunted community of a single body. Ego=ghost. Therefore “I am” would mean “I am haunted”: I am haunted by myself who am (haunted by myself who am haunted by myself who am . . . and so forth). Wherever there is Ego, es spukt, “it spooks.” . . . Its translation always fails, unfortunately, to render the link between the impersonality or the quasi-anonymity of an operation [spuken] without act, without real subject or object, and the production of a figure, that of the revenant [der Spuk]: not simply “it spooks,” as we just ventured to translate, but “it returns,” “it ghosts,” “it specters.”) The essential mode of self-presence of the cogito would be the haunting obsession of this “es spukt.

Derrida is not undermining all distinctions but showing that distinctions are better thought of differentially, as occupying different points along a continuous line, where elements of one thing blend and bleed into others, and demonstrating that the “black-and-white,” either/or way of thinking in terms of binary oppositions—where one thing is simply the lack of the other—is invidious and loaded with traps. We cannot understand men or women if we do not first understand what is womanly about men and manly about women (reversal); both “man” and “woman” are traps that prevent the invention of new forms of gendered existence that shatter traditional stereotypes (displacement).

“We have to go very slowly, very deliberately, in relation to all this. Not let ourselves be carried away by presuppositions established in this chaotic world we are living in, where no one knows what’s going to happen. I remember at the Strasbourg Writers’ Conference, where someone confronted the great Martinican philosopher Jacques Coursil, and the two of them debated Derrida. Jacques Derrida was hitting himself in the head trying to explain the end of the twentieth century. And they finished off Derrida: they told him, “Look, your problem is that you’re the savage here, and we’re the philosophers: we’ve switched places. What lies can you tell us about the future of humanity in this era, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in which that fierce, burning point, the war of Sarajevo exists, or the Cuban embargo? Who can have the last word about anything?” Our values have been turned upside down and things have changed so much, and we are at a critical point, in which we have our feet up above our heads and our heads down under our feet. Who am I to determine what’s going to happen? I’m speaking in terms of the world of ideas and of art and literature, because in terms of social conflicts - the Los Angeles riots, or what’s happening in Chiapas right now - these are things that weren’t in anybody’s plans, just like Moncada wasn’t in anyone’s plans either. So it’s not a matter of whether I agree or disagree. I might disagree with Cristina Garcia’s writing on this experience, and of transferring to her literature all the likenesses, the sweat, the dust, that come from this island. I can’t, and no one can say, “Cubaness goes this far and no farther.””

"I am a dictation, pronounces poetry, learn me by heart, copy me down, guard and keep me, look out for me, look at me, dictated dictation, right before your eyes: soundtrack, wake, trail of light, photograph of the feast in mourning."