Derrida and I

Jacques Derrida—I like this man. He says something like this: there is nothing meaningful as such. No logos, no center, no origin, no presence, no absence, no beginning, no end—and so on. Things exist in a buoyant state. The word "love" is not loved. It doesn't signify anything. It can mean hate, kill, dark, murder, etc. And the word "hate" could mean love—just as Gandhiji treated hate as love. There is no meaning as such. Everyone can deconstruct it. Free play is what I like.

This inquisitive Derrida says, "The center is not the center." Then where is the center? It is beyond—what he calls the "transcendental signified." Who knows if nothing lies beyond the hills? But something does lie there.

This seemingly crazy Frenchman was once asked in a philosophical discourse, "Where does authority lie?" His answer was a toddler's answer: "Authority always lies." Any talking baby could have answered that way. It's like asking him, "Where do baggy testicles lie?" You wouldn't be surprised to get the answer, "They always lie there." Not on your head, not on your cheeks—and you wouldn't like it if they lay there. So they always lie there. Warm and fit. Philosophy, at last, made comfortable.

But Derrida's metaphysical philosophy of absence and presence is not originally his own. Funnily enough, he admits that he created it himself. Yet it is there, and it is not there. Everything is nothing. Nothing is everything. I bluntly argue with Derrida and say he actually took it from my father. My father's philosophy of no logos, no eminent presence—same thing. The concept of no meaning, the transcendental, etc., was already there. My father's religious canons taught me, and my father got it from his father, my grandfather, and my grandfather got it from my great-grandparents, and so on back to time immemorial—no one knows exactly. If you want to know, you must go back to the origin of the world. But there's no question of going backward when we are living forward. So I will pass the same information—"the center is not the center"—without understanding much of it, to my son. And he will do the same to his son. That's what I call a tradition.

I like Derrida's free play, and I like free playing with words. Last time, I played with a girl after reading Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." "Big boobs," is what I said when she was crouching under a chair. She free-played the meaning and didn't talk to me for two days—just because of those two words. That almost killed me. Women always perform chemical analysis on what they hear. If you say "beautiful" to them, they think about "ugly." If you say "my god," they think they are goats. They are stupidly sensitive. They are the real Derridas. That is why I talk very little with women. They misunderstand and disrupt every golden droplet of a word and treat it as ironic.

Derrida's deconstructions have led me into many problems. A few days ago, I told an auto driver that the right is left and the left is right. "So where shall we go? To the center?" the driver asked. "No, there is no center. There is no right, no left, man," I joked. The auto driver looked at me curiously. "Are you kind of out of your senses?" "No, I'm saying, if there is no right, there is no left." That auto driver was blunt-headed. He shook his head, quite puzzled. "Even I am puzzled," I said to him at last. "Let's live simply," the good driver said. "Let's say it is right, and there is left. Why break your head over something without meaning?" "If you find the meaning, there is no meaning in it," I said. The good driver laughed and said, "What's that again? I think you need some medication very soon."

Hearing his remarks, a chilled feeling ran inside my heart. I lowered my head and ran toward my room, cursing Derrida under my breath. I was in a kind of aporia—unable to decide whether I was really mad or sane. I realized after two days of thinking that there was no reality in anything; it was all just construction. That auto driver would never be able to say whether I was sane or insane, because of the free play of meaning that I had taught him during our brief encounter. Or maybe he just went home, told his wife about the crazy passenger, and forgot me entirely. That meaning, too, is free to play.