Derrida and I

Jacques Derrida—I like this man. He says something like this: there is nothing meaningful as such. There is 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 terms the "transcendental signified." Who knows if nothing lies beyond the hills? But something does lie there. This seemingly crazy French man was asked in one of his philosophical discourses, "Where does the authority lie?" and the answer he gave was a toddler's answer: "The authority always lies." Any talking baby could have answered it that way. It's like asking him, "Where do the baggy testicles lie?" and 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.

But Derrida's metaphysical philosophy of absence and presence is not originally his own. Funnily enough, he accepts that it was created by himself. Yet it is there, and it is not there. Everything is nothing. Nothing is everything. I bluntly argue with Derrida and say that he has taken it from my father. My father's philosophy of no logos, no eminent presence, is the same. 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 it goes back to time immemorial—no one knows exactly. If one has to know, then one must go back to the origin of the world. There is no question of going backward now when we are living forward. I will pass the same information—"the center is not the center"—without understanding much, to my son, and he will do the same to his son.

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 said. "No, there is no center. There is no right, no left, man," I joked with him. The auto driver curiously said, "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. Let's say it is right, and there is left. Why break your head over something without meaning?" the good driver said. "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 sort of chilled feeling ran inside my heart. I lowered my head and ran toward my room, cursing Derrida. 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.