The Colt 45 Chronicle #46

I fiddled about on my undergraduate honors thesis for a couple of years before finally leaving the university the summer of 1988 without completing it. I shouldn't say "fiddled" because I worked quite long and hard on that thesis -- a discourse on Kant, Frege and Derrida that argued for the possibility of the analytic a posteriori (a type of statement Kant ruled out) -- though I would frequently say I was working on it when I was actually off drinking and copulating with one girlfriend or another who was not my wife-to-be.

Right before my betrothed and I left Berkeley in a VW bus bound for a quick Reno stopover in order to tie the knot on our way to the married-student housing offered by New York City's Columbia University Medical School, I inexplicably plucked from the fully-loaded bus a box containing the fruits of two years of research and writing -- countless days spent in branch libraries taking notes from academic journals and then spilling my musings into composition books while I drank coffee in Telegraph Avenue cafes -- and handed it to my father with instructions for him to mail it to me when we arrived in New York.

My father did what I asked of him, but the tomato box containing my honors thesis, my "magnum oh" that ingeniously (or so I imagined) bridged the gap between continental and analytic philosophy in au courant fashion, never made it to New York.

A cutout of the front portion of the box containing my father's return address was mailed back to him. My honors thesis had gone missing. The speculation was that the crack-and-peel label containing the address of our married-student apartment fell off the box. But if that were the case why not ship the whole box back to the return address which was still visible? The lid of the box must have become separated from the box itself.

My father was disconsolate; he felt responsible for the loss of the thesis. To this day he suspects some sort of foul play by the postal service. Just the other day he related to me that when he dropped off the box at the post office and was admonished by the woman working the counter for coming in so close to closing time with a such a heavy box that she was expected to lift.

Whatever it was, whether a label that had lost its adhesive or sabotage by a disgruntled clerk, my fate was sealed. I told myself I could recapitulate the pith of what was contained in all those boxed notes, and I made a half-hearted attempt evenings after work during the summer of 1989. But the jig was up. I used to be able to recite from memory the chapters of my thesis, how the argument moved from the analytic-synthetic distinction Kant makes at the beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781); to Frege's logicist program in his Begriffsschrift (1879) and The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884) and the ontological implications of defining arithmetic as analytic; to Derrida's Of Grammatology (1967) and the possibilities for a new, more ethical pedagogy. Now, I can barely remember the barest of outlines. Hopefully, I still have notes somewhere from that weak summer of '89 attempt to capture what was lost in that missing tomato box.

Autumn 1988 

Gentlemen,

The parcel which I'm looking for is a box, approximately 8"x12"x10", with a lid (it's much like an IBM photocopy-paper box). It has air holes on either side (I believe it was originally a box for shipping tomatoes). It weighs about twenty-five pounds.

CONTENTS

The box contains l) books, 2) photocopies of books, and 3) loose-leaf handwritten pages (see next page for sample of hand writing). A list of the authors and titles of the books is as follows:

Saul Kripke, NAMING AND NECESSITY
Jacques Derrida, WRITING AND DIFFERENCE
Immanuel Kant, GROUNDWORK . . .
Gottlob Frege,FOUNDATIONS OF ARITHMETIC
John Sallis, SPACINGS

The package was sent from Fairfield, CA to New York City (10032). My biggest concern is not with recouping any dollar value for the missing material, but with finding it. You see, the box, which I had my dad send to me, had a year and a half's work in it. Without it I can't write this paper; and without this paper, I can't get my bachelor's degree. (A real, honest-to-goodness, tearjerker.) So I would sincerely appreciate any kind of reply, no matter how brief. 

Thank you,

Remembering Jacques Derrida at the Holiday Inn

I did see Derrida. It was at the Holiday Inn in San Francisco. It was early 1988, a cold morning. I went with my buddy Matt. Before the conference began -- it was a big convention space, the American Philosophical Association was the sponsoring organization -- I was able to size up the great man in close proximity in the hallway outside. He was smallish in stature and well groomed and tailored, not in a foppish or dandy way, but in a formidable manner. He warmly greeted old lady Majorie Grene, a UC Davis professor who had written an early influential book in the U.S. on Existentialism, Introduction to Existentialism (1959), a copy of which I had at Berkeley and I think I have here somewhere.

Derrida was on a panel that morning in the big hall with a very nervous Rodolphe Gasche who almost melted down while speaking. Derrida was extremely kind to him up there in front of all the hostile American philosophers.

Derrida took the podium after Gasche, who had written a pro-Derrida book published in 1986, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection, and in passing the red-faced Gasche who was on his way back to his seat at the table on the dais Derrida clasped him around the shoulders in a totally selfless act of benevolence. I always remembered that. That and Derrida's hostile reception from the majority of the audience who were obviously tenured old professors.

During the question and answer period (Matt took a crack with one about the etymology of genuflection and genius -- moving the seed up to the brain) Derrida responded to a hostile inquiry with what I thought was an incredible revelation for a professional philosopher and intellectual -- "More and more I cannot tell the difference between having read and not having read." Or something along those lines.

My project in my lost honors thesis was to place Derrida as a Kantian; that the Kantian nature of Deconstruction could be understood by looking at -- of all people -- the founder of analytic philosphy, Gottlob Frege. With this argument I would then bridge the divide between continental and analytic philosophy. My end point was to arrive at a new pedagogy, one Derrida points the way to in Of Grammatology (1967), but one that was more explicitly informed by Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (1788), his moral philosophy. Ambitious. Turned out to be too ambitious.