SubStance

You first. One always goes before the other.

Now how, exactly, am I gonna go first now?... Sorry, you got me my friend, it was "you" who went first. Oh my friend, there are no obits.

At least none that do not begin with the other.

Yes, Yes, the difficulty of beginning, about which JD will have taught us so much. How does one begin to mourn, to remember, to confront the other's passing?

Begin? Not to mention find the middle, the passage. For to begin such a mourning would mean to affirm that indeed it unfolds as a passage.

We can remember and repeat that later on. When we forget: that any such confrontation is an encounter with a flow that must be navigated. And that a saying such as this, which can be repeated, can help with the navigation of such a passage.

There is death, what else is there to say?

"I" always has something to say. Of that there can be no doubt. Look at all those obituaries, where various subjects of enunciation clustered. Telling us what it meant that "Derrida est mort." If I remember—and obituaries aren't the best of funeral orations—one obituary claimed that it meant that an "obtuse theorist" had died. "Obtuse" is an interesting example of itself, I think. As is "passage."

I hear you: all the discourse, some of it moving, some of it infuriating, some of it just plain silly, but all of it signed, all of it from an ostensible "I." Who cares what some dude named Roger Scruton, inexplicably queried by the Guardian, thinks about JD? (FYI, as for Derrida's work, "it's nonsense" says the inscrutable one.) Christine Odone, Deputy Editor of the New Statesman, sums up JD's legacy like this: "Words are not what you think they are." Was the guy at the carpark not available for comment? [End Page 72]

All these opinions—this seems intensely odd to me. Seriously, what did this man teach us if not irreducible lessons on the impossible, singular nature of death—each time unique, the end....in his name, add this nameless impossibility to the discourse on mourning, not one more proper name, sharing a judgment ... plus jamais ...

Yes, Forget the obits. There is, of course, so much more—it could keep us going all day. We could read the passages on passing, remember them, work through the legacy they leave for us to think.

I just consulted the leaves of the OED on "passage." Forgive me, but it is a very old action. An epic action, this passage. Think Johnny Depp, in a canoe. Yes, first on the list is "The action of passing and its cognate senses." Now, put some of Derrida's texts into the canoe for Johnny, his books of the dead. The passages of a dead man. Action! Or what passes for it.

At the risk of provocation, then, I suppose what I'd like to mark, remember, and mourn around JD is less his engagement with the work of mourning, but rather the forceful plenitude of what one might call his orchestral work—the polylogues for "n" voices:

Polylogues, pollywogs. I get the drift. It unfolds in a passage. Orchestral—yes, it needs a crowd. And, as is only proper, I will speak to you in French about the crowd of n members here gathered:

Comme chacun de nous était plusieurs, ça faisait déjà
beaucoup de monde.

The crowd is calling for other texts. What shall be our epideitics before which the crowd shall assemble? I hear some kind of refrain but can't make it out.

How can we put it—they are not about mourning as absence ...

Of course, a number of yeses...