The author's subject: "So, too, I think, death remains the imperative horizon today, the background limit against which we project a certain understanding of our own society." Portentious lingo there, no? And in English, not German or French.
I'll spare you the journey. What does the philosophical meditation on death get us?
"While we are a long way away from any workable everyday ethics here [no shit, my marinalia], there is nonetheless a real interest in opening up the possibility of locating a common space for what we all share in our separations from which we are further separated, our ownmost possibility of otherness."
Okay, so I have left out the bridge. It is this: because we cannot experience our own deaths, only the effect of the deaths of others, the idea of death becomes a location of our idea of "otherness" (in ourselves), and ethics depends on our ability to acknowledge the other. (Actually, for the writer of the essay, death becomes THE priviledged location of recognizing "otherness.") Now that is all perfectly vacuous and pretty platitudinous (unless you want to use it to hammer on religious fundamentalists, who seem to be immune to the reality of death). Reduce it to this: If we all acknowledged the mortality of others, we would be moved to "dialogue" and create better societies. But do YOU really believe that it's that simple to get people to stop killing each other or one class or economy from trying to dominate another? Should we call a deconstructionist consciousness raising session about death at the U.N.?
Here is the Derrida that sets the writer off on his concluding flight:
"For if death is indeed the possibility of the impossibility and therefore the possibility of appearing as such of the impossibility of appearing as such either, then man, or man as Dasein [i.e., limited, finite historical being], never has a relation to death as such, but only to perishing, to demising, and to the death of the other, who is not the other. The death of the other thus becomes again 'first,' always first . . . [the deconstructionist flip-flop] The death of the other, this death of the other in "me," is fundamentally the only death that is named in the syntagm 'my death.'"
Voila, the great pseudo-philosopher has once more deconstructed the putative "autonomy of the subject" (which you yourself never believed in anyway) by pointing out how we are connected to others through the experience of death. But do I really need the vacuous circumlocutions of the deconstructionist to understand that? I can think it quite a bit more clearly in terms of my own experience of the death of my mother, or the death of the homeless and family-less photographer friend who got cancer and whom I visited in the hospital for three months before he died. A good poem might bring it home to me as an experience. So let's all hear it for not hiding the experience of death from ourselves.
But I have no clue what Derrida's lingo gets us or how the writer of the essay thinks that he has got some priviledged insight into ethics from it. In my honest opinion, there is a lot more to understanding others than just their deaths as the abstract index of their "otherness." Perhaps it might be good to imagine their LIVES (but that is more complex, no?). And how the hell did this insight about death become the privilege of "philosophers" or literary theorists? Because they can wrap it up in cirumlocution? To the Derrida above I am tempted to give Dennis Redmond's response to the review of Badiou: "zzzzzzz...." Maybe Foucault was right when he said of Derrida (this may be aprocryphal) that "he is the kind of philosopher who gives bullshit a bad name."
As for the writer of the essay, he talks of "opening spaces" (that he will leave empty) and "possibility" (which will forever remain indefinite -- i.e., we need take no action, since action connotes "ends," and ends suggest purpose, which is totalizing because "teleological," and all purpose is subject to error, so our job as deconstructionists is only to awaken people to the vague and empty possibility of the multiplicity of many open-ended ends). But if you think that social change requires political action, I dare you to find any analysis on which to base a program -- even a tentative one. So let's scratch the bullshit about "the background limit against which we project a certain understanding of our own society." The social analysis isn't going to be forthcoming because the writer isn't interested in it.
zzzzzzzz...
Peter Kosenko
============================================================= Peter Kosenko Email: mailto:kosenko at netwood.net URL: http://www.netwood.net/~kosenko ============================================================= "Man is a rational animal. He can think up a reason for anything he wants to believe."--Benjamin Franklin