The letter below, like the one posted last week, is to my buddy Niall. I confide to him my love of reading philosophy and Jacques Derrida.
Autumn 1989
A fist full of fortune cookies. I just tossed a fist full of fortune cookies into the trash. They came individually wrapped in plastic and they looked fresh. But I tossed them unopened into the trash anyway. I figured that any future they could let me in on wasn't worth the trouble involved in prying the plastic wrapper apart with my fingertips and then spilling the shattered cookie crust onto the kitchen floor. I'll be honest with you though, it didn't feel good tossing them into the trash like that; it felt like spitting in the aisles of a church; it felt like driving a pickup truck off an ocean cliff. I don't know why. I wish I did.
I started a letter to you but I was too drunk to get past the second sentence. I had been drinking with the boys at work. I had had about six bourbons and who knows how many beers. But I made it home to Washington Heights safe and sound (sound enough to careen into the corner deli for a three-quart pick-me-up). The first thing I thought of when I sat myself down was that I owed you a letter. I don't why since I'm still waiting on your recapitulation of the quake drama. But like I said, I only made it to the second sentence (too much bourbon).
I'm starting to read a lot of philosophy again. I had never given up on reading the shit, I just diminished the importance of it in my life. It's a big responsibility. It takes a lot of energy to read; and even after you've done a nice thorough and clean job of underlining and making notations in the margins, there's no guarantee that you're going to remember anything 24 hours hence. It's not like reading a story -- as you know, having read your Plato and Nietzsche and Weber -- everything's conceptual; there's not a whole lot for your brain to sink its teeth into. Your best bet is to try to make it into mantra -- rehearse and talk to yourself of what you know of what you've read, and then keep on reading.
Right now I've got several pokers in the fire. I'm reading this compilation recently published by University of Minnesota Press called REDRAWING THE LINES. It's a bunch of essays talking about deconstruction's relationship to analytic philosophy during the recent (in the last ten years) prioritization of theory in literature departments. I'm about a third of the way through, and it seems good enough, though I did read a really excruciatingly piece on the superiority of Cavell's writings on the later Wittgenstein as a model for the reading and interpretation of literature as opposed to a deconstruction-based model. The motherfucker's 20 or so pages boil down to the idea that reading requires "commonsensicalness," and that since deconstruction is just skepticism made textually fastidious (hence not bald and unrigorous enough) Derrida should be left on the shelf. What a bunch of facile shit, huh? It's crap like that that makes you wonder why philosophy should be read at all; it makes you think that it's all just so much academic jigsaw puzzling chalked up to fear and avoidance of the 9-to-5.
I'm also reading Derrida's introduction to Edmund Husserl's ORIGIN OF GEOMETRY. It was the first thing Derrida published in book form (the introduction plus Derrida's translation of Husserl's little piece of some 30 pages runs 128 pages; so it definitely qualifies as book length). It first appeared in 1962. I bought it because it just came out softbound for the first time, published by University of Nebraska press, a Bison Book (which is a mighty fine book). I read a few pages of it in the Philosophy Library at UC Berkeley not more than two years ago. It was important for me at the time because I was working almost feverishly on my Kant/Frege/Derrida magnum oh. ORIGIN OF GEOMETRY is significant for Husserl because of Frege's criticism of Husserl's first published work, which had to do with the foundations of arithmetic. Anyway, there were other reasons besides the confluence of first works and mentorships that made Derrida's vestal publishing sublime and profound for the purpose of my magnum oh, but I won't confuse and bore by going into them here. Pushing all that muck to the side, Derrida's introduction to the ORIGIN OF GEOMETRY and his SPEECH AND PHENOMENA, which is also about Husserl, are the two best and easiest ways to figure out exactly where he's coming from and exactly what deconstruction is all about. It's all based on a true reading of phenomenology, which, in turn, owes itself to a true reading of Kant. Cut the cloth however you like, for me Derrida is always the right length, someone you know who will always be on the money. And, goddamnit, you can't say that about hardly anyone, short of your conception of the deity. So old brainiac Jacques is pretty special to me.
Even if I'm just pissing in the wind wasting my non-9-to-5 time reading writing philosophicus at least I'll be concentrating hard, and, happy, thinking about the future because I'm so locked up in the present -- a cogitating about the future that's free of constricting simple messages. I don't know, but I guess philosophy . . . at least it'll get me as far as fortune cookies in the trash.
Ta Da!
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