Thora Birch

           

            It seemed to me on Thursday as I braced myself for a wet ride to Philosophy class that this semester has been a particularly wet one. Our very first class happened in a snowstorm, we had several rainy days including one with freezing. One might argue, “What do you expect from winter and spring but wet weather?” But here’s a comparison: I’ve been going to the food bank almost every Wednesday for almost a year and never once have I been soaked by rain or snow while standing in line.

            So my ass was wet again when I got to Alumni Hall. Our lecture for that day would be on Jacques Derrida, but on the day before that I hadn’t been able to download the pdf of his lecture “The Ends of Man” that had been posted on Blackboard because the download kept getting an error message. I tried to find it in a search, and I did find references to it, but no actual pdfs of the specific text. I went on Pirate Bay and found a couple of very large collections of Derrida’s books. I started a couple of downloads of those compilations, but they were moving too slow to be ready by lecture time and besides that I hadn’t any idea if the text I had been looking for was in any of the books. When Noa came into class and sat behind me, I asked her if she’d been able to download the file. She told me that she hadn’t even tried yet, but went online to see and had no problem accessing it right away. She offered to email it tome but I suggested that she just transfer it to my flash drive, which she did.

            Professor Gibbs told us that even though our exam in-class essays will only be on Levinas and Derrida, one can’t help but write on Heidegger when writing on Derrida.

            Before beginning his lecture on Derrida, the professor wanted to give us one more theological dimension from Levinas in which he refers to Exodus 33. God was eager for Moses to lead the Jews into the Promised Land. Moses though was reluctant and kept on trying to weasel out of it. Finally Moses agreed to do it on the condition that god would show itself to him and take cultural value in his world. God told Moses to position himself between two specific rocks and that then it would walk by him, revealing only his back because nobody can see god’s face and live. The idea that phenomenal contact with god is lethal is very old. It’s certainly more ancient than the Greeks for whom the gods would show themselves at the drop of a laurel wreath. When the Romans invaded Jerusalem and went into the temple they thought it was hilarious that the Holy of Holies was empty. There was no payoff! The hypermetaphysical principal is that only the back, that is, the trace can be seen. One can’t see god’s agency but only its effects. The back represents tracing withdrawal. Gone in a time before memory. Gone in an absolute way because there is no time in which god was present. His non-presence is a profound absence. This emptying of the present is Derrida but the irony is that you can bounce it all back to Kierkegaard. We see the trace in the face of the other. This ground of meaning is unground. It’s not just a backdrop and it is always gone before you can remember it. This is what it means to be in the image of god, to find oneself in this trace. The face breaks through the horizon. The trace is intrinsically ambiguous. One can always reduce the trace to a cosmological trail, but there’s something more. The concept of evidence is put in question and this may be either anti-philosophical or the place where philosophy begins. Transcendence never appears but leaves a trace that questions the realm of the imminent.

            Gibbs says that he has a strong reading of Derrida. Some of his colleagues say that chaired anthropologists should not read Derrida because he is a philosopher but also that philosophers should not read him because he is not a philosopher.

            Jacques Derrida was an Algerian Jew, and there were lots of them. When he moved to Paris he tried to be a real Parisian grammatologist.

            Derrida disrupted the assumption that writing is secondary to speech. The conventional thought is that speech is present and writing is not now. That writing represents the death of the author as the meaning is deferred until later. That writing breaks with the origin of the present. But Derrida suggests that the meaning of writing is waiting for the next person.

            I can sign in to prove that I am here right now, but my signature proves that I am not here. Every signature is a counterfeit. This grammatological twist bothered everybody.

            Unlike Levinas, Derrida was not an observant Jew.

            Derrida’s style, like Marx, is that of a commentator who reads others. He rarely writes in his own voice. He wrote essays that were strange readings of other philosophers but he didn’t consider them to be commentaries. He had grammalorrhoea and wrote and wrote and wrote as if his life depended upon it.

            This essay, a commentary on Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism is a shocker.

Why write this way as opposed to arguing? Derrida thinks that thinking depends upon a close practice of reading and disturbing previous writing. It’s not analysis, it’s not critical thinking or critique or imminent critique. It’s a specific deconstructive mode of engagement.

I raised my hand and the professor, looking slightly annoyed, nodded in my direction. I asked if he’d call it a “conversation”. It seemed like a pretty good question to me at the time until he answered it and then it seemed like it had been a stupid question all along. His response was, “I don’t know! As far as I know Heidegger never had a chance to respond!”

This deconstruction serves to disrupt a familiar reading contention between contention and performance. It means reading very hard texts and it is hard work.

In Derrida’s book, “Margins of Philosophy”, from which this lecture is an extract, he occasionally writes in two interacting columns. The margin is not just part of the argument, but also helps to create it. The deconstruction of “The Ends of Man” takes place in “The Margins of Philosophy”.

Kierkegaard wrote a seven-page footnote on jokes.

“The Ends of Man” is the resurrection of Nietzsche over Heidegger’s dead body.

Philosophy colloquiums are always political. He was at this particular colloquium as a representative of French philosophy. He told the audience that there are no philosophical nationalities. If there is philosophy there is no French or German philosophy. Are there national doctrines, styles or languages of philosophy? Is German philosophical language gobbledegook? Philosophy is universal, so it does not need an international colloquium.

But maybe philosophy is bound up in tongue. Can we think in someone else’s house? Do we need Esperanto? Whenever Derrida lectured in Toronto, he spoke French. In the 70s at U of T, lectures were in more than just English.

Derrida is postmodern and postcolonial. All of these different worlds are on the same field with no hierarchy. What if there is another place where philosophical colloquiums do not make sense? This is weird in the history of the human race. One can ask about slavery, music and clothes, but not about philosophy.

The Professor told us that he is the president of the International Rosenzweig Society.

Why is there a philosophy about the ends of man when history could care less? Philosophy is culturally located. Lateral horizons are done in philosophy.

The rain was coming down even harder on my way back home and so I was pretty wet when I got there. I peeled off my wet clothes and hung them up, then I put comfortable dry clothing on. I did some writing for about an hour and then I took a siesta.

About two hours later, as I headed back downtown, the rain had eased back to a little more than spitting. I managed to not be very wet when I got to University College.

Our final lecture of the Short Story course was on Shyam Selvadurai’s “Pigs Can’t Fly”, from his novel, Funny Boy, which is about the construction of nationhood in Sri Lanka.

            Andrew Lesk asked about the genderization of nations. Germany is seen as a “fatherland”. I looked this up later. In French, almost all European countries, including England are feminine, because their French names end in “e”. Most of the other countries, like Canada are considered masculine. The novel speaks of the role of identity in nation building.

            Andrew offered the opinion that despite the fact that there are some queer politicians in the United States, they are a long way from every having a queer president. He compared this to the fact that we have a lesbian premier here in Ontario. There has only been one state governor that came out as gay and he announced his resignation in the same speech.

            Funny Boy is a coming of age and of being story.

            Andrew asked if the main character, Arje, in the story, “Pigs Can’t Fly” is gay. I said, “We don’t know”. Andrew said that later in the novel it is revealed that Arje is gay, but all we know from this story is that he likes to cross dress.

            The idea of queer identity in once colonized countries like may be a western import. Some ex-colonies in Africa claim that there are no homosexuals in their nations at all.

            Despite the fact that Arje dresses up as a bride when he plays with the girls, the fact that he gets to have a coveted role of bride is the result of his male privilege.

            This is a culture that deifies women.

            When Arje is called to account for his gender choices, violence ensues.

            Calling a woman “fat” is to make her queen.

            Rituals are more important than symbols.

            Dolls from North America spark a degree of interest but only for a moment. Arje is a living doll they can interact with.

            The belief is that a perversion of gender play leads to a perversion of gender.

            After the lecture, Andrew gave us back our essays. They had comments but he did not write our marks on our papers. Stapled to the front of my essay was a full page of typewritten critical notes and inside, between the lines, were a lot of handwritten criticisms for the first three pages of my paper. He wrote that he wasn’t sure what my argument was and that my writing style takes on such a monotonous rhythm that it is distracting to read. He said there is no evident thesis, but I find that confusing since I sent him my thesis and it seems to me that if there wasn’t a thesis, wouldn’t it have been his job to point that out to me before I wrote the paper? It was a bit depressing to read and it seemed fairly certain that I was going to find a lower mark than I’d expected when I got home and online to check. Judging from his comments I figured that the best he must have given me was a B.

            On my way home I stopped at Parkdale Community Legal Services to show them my rent increase and to make sure the new amount was legal. There were lots of Tibetans in the waiting area. While I waited, I read Ronin Ro’s “Tales To Astonish”, which is a history of the comic book revolution from the golden age to the modern age. The main characters are Jack Kirby. The story of Kirby’s period of fighting in the infantry in France during World War 2 are pretty brutal but interesting. That in itself might make a pretty good movie.

            When I got home I went onto Blackboard and discovered that after all of the critical comments, Andrew had nonetheless given me 83%, which is a solid A- minus.

            That night I watched the first two thirds of the film adaptation of Daniel Clowes’s “Ghost World”. Thora Birch was especially good, along with Steve Buscemi, who really looks like a character that might have been drawn by Daniel Clowes.