Finalities

Zandria has conceded to me that the Institute is nearing the precipice of closure. Cash flow is tight, and it may be that we jettison staff from next month if new funding doesn't arise.

Digesting this news, it is beginning to dawn on me that the adventure of trying to save the Institute may be coming to an unsuccessful end. A lot is riding on the response from the Carnegie UK Trust - and we put much effort into writing a pretty decent proposal. But it's looking grim otherwise.

Whilst the story is by no means over just yet, still it is difficult not to become elegiac. It's a strange situation. I knew the chances of this succeeding were slim, and everything about the organisation suggested that it was the wrong people, in the wrong circumstances, with the wrong skills, on the wrong side of the solvency divide - even if the idea that my boss. I've spent the last six months fighting a near unwinnable fight and, despite knowing this, I have still been doing my damnest, grasping at any opportunities to make it work. I've fought the rational doubt that proposed early exit on account of the limited chances of success, and I opted to take on the risk because I believe in what we wanted to achieve. I worked completely unpaid for three months, watched as my peers back at my job got promoted, took a drop in pay to continue constructing designs for the project. They're good designs, too. That they may never be realised is something I am not bitter about - the designs are good in themselves, and maybe one day they'll properly be used in anger.

Caught in this suitably introspective mood, I have picked up and am reading "The Work of Mourning" - a collection of translated pieces of writing by Jacques Derrida. Each piece is a monument to a friend who passed away, each of them recognisable names: Roland Barthes, Paul de Man, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas... Derrida writes to articulate his personal experiences of their company, these great monoliths of modern critical theory. The key premise is that friendship is marked from inception by the inevitability that one friend will die before the other, and that one will experience loss of the other. Knowledge, or realisation, of this fact informs the nature of friendship. Where the fact is unthinkable, when the event comes it brings the confoundment of grief and the difficulty of expression. For a writer whose mark of brilliance was his ability to articulate impossible complexity with formidable confidence, it is terribly moving to read how, upon the death of Lyotard, he confesses not to be able to find easy expression in his mourning.

In parallel, I am re-reading a short recit by Blanchot called "L'instant de ma mort" - about his experience at the cusp of death, standing blindfolded before a Nazi firing squad at the end of the second world war and, somehow, surviving, albeit with the psychological scarring of survival. Derrida wrote a long piece on this too, a literary treatment of testimony and death. It's brilliant - I recommend it to all.

Back in October last year, I wrote an entry after the death of Derrida himself. I was a little critical about his smartarse humour and his tendency to apparent sophistry, but in reading this side of him I am finding a fresher compassion for his undoubted genius. It is at moments like these that I grateful for my education, and thankful that, if nothing else, I am, in my alternate spiritual swelling or abjection, lucky enough to have been given the means to find salvation in reading good, if difficult, writing.