Spurious asks the following question: "What did it mean to read and write while Derrida was alive? Alongside him (he was always there, on the other side of Channel or on the other side of the world. He was in Moscow, Shanghai, Sao Paulo ... and sometimes in Britain, too, passing through one colloquim or another)? There was always another book by him waiting to be read.."
Yes, the existence of a Derrida represented - however illusory this representation was - the possibility of an interlocutor or a reader, a co-participant. Someone in whom the concerns of one's own work might meet with recognition, tacit understanding. We are not speaking of 'Derrida' as some cultic figure, whom might oneday deign to approve one's work, but of a possibility of thinking which, in him, was concretly alive and did not have to be conjured out of one's own imagination. Take, for example, John Berger, whose writing I do not always of course concur with but whose place of enunciation I find utterly reassuring and sympathetic. I recognise the place from which he speaks. It is an outpost, the outpost of a native land which is increasingly being trespassed on, colonised, eliminated by the cultural logic of late capitalism. The denizens of this frail land are mostly among the Dead. When one read Derrida (at times, not always), when one reads Berger one feels the turf of this land under ones feet. It is of interest that both Derrida and Berger were/ are preoccupied with the Dead. This is not 'morbid' and is not of course some mere reflection of their years. Berger speaks, for example, of Glenn Gould's piano playing as being like one of the 'already dead, come back to earth to play its music'. The Dead, outside the world, feel it all the more gratefully and sharply. Yet in another sense they are indifferent to it, i.e., they are indifferent to its transitory rewards, pragmatic imperatives, immediate cash-back offers. Thus, the concern of writers like Derrida and Berger with the Dead, and, before them, writers like Rilke, Celan, Kafka, Proust, is about attaining this combination of gratitude and disinterest, intense receptivity and benign detachment.
"Death is the side of life that is turned away from us and not illuminated. we must try to aceive the greatest possible consciousness of our existence, which is at home in these unlimited realms, and inexhaustibly nourished by both." (Rilke)
"Death is not beyond our strength; it is the measuring line at the vessel's brim: we are full whenever we reach it - and being full (for us) means being heavy.. We should love life so generously, so without calculation and selection, that we involuntarily come to include, and to love, death too (life's averted half)." (ibid.)