"Philosophy consists of offering reassurance to children. That is, if one prefers, of taking them out of childhood, of forgetting about the child, or, inversely, but by the same token, of speaking first and foremost for that little boy within us, of teaching him to speak—to dialogue—by displacing his fear or his desire." — Jacques Derrida, who died today of pancreatic cancer.

I'm going to honor his life -- and his contribution to my thinking and learning -- by screening Dick and Kofman's biographical film, Derrida in my literary criticism course next semester. If you haven't heard of this father of the school of literary Deconstruction, here are some links to his substantial life work.

****
Mortals are they who can experience death as death. The animal cannot do so. But the animal cannot speak either. The essential relation between language and death flashes up before us, but remains still unthought." -- Heidegger

Against, or without, Heidegger, one could point to a thousand signs that show that animals also die. Although the innumerable structural differences that separate one “species” from another should make us vigilant about any discourse on animality or bestiality in general, one can say that animals have a very significant relation to death, to murder and to war (hence to borders), to mourning and to hospitality, and so forth, even if they have neither a relation to death nor to the “name” of death as such, nor, by the same token, to the other as such, to the purity as such of the alterity of the other as such. But neither does man, that is precisely the point! . . . Who will guarantee that the name, that the ability to name death (like that of naming the other, and it is the same) does not participate as much in the dissimulation of the “as such” of death as in its revelation, and that language is not precisely the origin of the nontruth of death, and of the other? -- Derrida

See Matthew Calarco, "On the Borders of Language and Death: Derrida and the Question of the Animal." Angelaki 2003.

You can ping this entry by using .