Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Dedication
- Introduction
- Auto-
- Jacques Derrida: … A life
- Foundations
- In the event
- That's life, death
- Handshake
- The limits of my language
- Derrida's ‘eighteenth century’
- Half-life
- Write, he wrote
- Beginnings and ends
- Salut à Jacques
- Jacques Derrida in America
- Foreign language (Jacques Derrida and me)
- Wormwords
- Index
Jacques Derrida: … A life
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Dedication
- Introduction
- Auto-
- Jacques Derrida: … A life
- Foundations
- In the event
- That's life, death
- Handshake
- The limits of my language
- Derrida's ‘eighteenth century’
- Half-life
- Write, he wrote
- Beginnings and ends
- Salut à Jacques
- Jacques Derrida in America
- Foreign language (Jacques Derrida and me)
- Wormwords
- Index
Summary
Here's my story. The story of my life. Jacques Derrida taught me everything, but he couldn't, and didn't, prepare me for this. I was not ready, I am not ready. Nowhere near ready, still, one year on. I am still speechless. I really have nothing to say. Nothing. Anything I said would already be too much: I need and want to spend my time here saying nothing. Nothing, nothing, maybe seven times nothing. Nothing about Jacques Derrida's life, or his death. As Jacques himself was saying, increasingly towards the end, towards death, death is each time the end of the world, not of this or that world, but of the one and only world, the world itself, leaving only a world after the end of the world, as he says in Béliers, written in homage to Hans-Georg Gadamer, and goes on:
For each time, and each time singularly, each time irreplaceably, each time infinitely, death is no less than the end of the world. Not merely one end among others, the end of someone or something in the world, the end of a life or a living being. Death does not put an end to someone in the world, nor to one world among others, it marks each time, each time in defiance of arithmetic the absolute end of the single and same world, of what each one opens as a single and same world, the end of the one and only world, the end of the totality of what is or what can present itself as the origin of the world for such and such a unique living being, human or not.
Information
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- Not Half No EndMilitantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of Jacques Derrida, pp. 8 - 18Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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