Derrida, "La mort propre"

I only picked the news up this morning, as I read the obituaries in the Independent, but Jacques Derrida died on Friday. His death was overshadowed somewhat by the death of Christopher Reeve a couple of days later, but the significance of his passing persists.

My academic experience of studying Derrida is rooted in my postgraduate days. A full course module of my MA was dedicated to Derrida and literature, and it was certainly one of the courses I was most looking forward to when I selected it. The course itself proved the most difficult I have yet encountered, and was made even more problematic by the fact that it was taught as a philosophy course rather than a literary theory course. Being a literary student, I was far more interested in his discourse, whilst the philosophy students sought to play with the phenomenological aspects of his oeuvre, the deference to Heidegger in particular.

For the course assessment, I wrote on Derrida comparatively, counterweighting his heady sophistry with the cool narrative "recits" of Maurice Blanchot. It ended up being a paper entitled "Persistent Deferral", and in it I made a pained argument that Derrida's literary acrobatics amounted to a perception of a state of deferral, giving the sensation of being at a precipice's edge. My tutor aruged back that it was more than this, and that it went beyond the teeter and involved a leap - a leap with indeterminate consequences. In the end, my essay scored 68, which was disappointingly short of a 1st and made me feel I had failed the argument.

Nonetheless, my intention here is to acknowledge a man who was to me, for a while, a difficult topic. His death reminds me that he was also a being as well.