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AN ATTEMPT ON THE IDEA OF THE “SELF” - OR A REMARK ON DERRIDA’S TEXTS
Bogdan Bogdanov

Jacques Derrida was in Sofia. Finding difficult the non-transparence of his works, I was impressed by the transparency of his verbal speech. I compared his enlightening elocution to Paul Ricoeur’s. I even regretted I did not offer a text for the discussion. My motive of not doing it was the perception of the insurmountable discrepancy between the aporetic bent of the notorious philosopher and the instrumental transcendentalism, which I follow.

The respect towards the speaking Derrida made me, though, to scrutinize more precisely the texts that I had read earlier. This research left me with a different impression. The former sense of ultimate otherness grew into an idea of an intrinsic dissimilarity. Especially contributive in this instance was a new text of Derrida – The Other Heading. The elaborated in it capital-capitalized apprehension of Europe alluded to me to define myself as a provincial European, who colours universally his anachronic provinciality. Thus, I found my place within Derrida’s deconstructive paradigm. I realized two things – I had been practicing a kind of constructively coloured deconstruction and each philosophizing explicates itself in a reconstruction.

Derrida obviously disregards the aspect of construction in this reconstruction, because he considers that deconstruction provides the philosophical word the way it is. Therefore, his concern of creating associations at places where they have never existed and of destroying them where they have been available. The deconstructive word replaces, substitutes, shifts, displaces, spaces out, generally – sets under question. Besides, it is someone’s,  it’s not allowed to become shared, to be overlapped by abstract conditions, which, at that, are blended with the living. On the other hand, it is a word, allowing the confèrent gathering of people, but not the opportunity of their group unification. The aim is the gathered ones to get confused, but not going out of this confusion with a vision on a wholesome world, and not falling into a positive association in-between. In discrimination both to the traditional philosophizing and the everyday speech, which are doing this, the deconstructive session aims at a kind of delight with the entanglement in the net of so many signifiers and signified.

In the session, of course, non-confused capable to talk listeners can also participate. The point is that the speaking philosopher sets a dialogue principally with absent ones, alike him. To them, the ones, infected with an intrinsic dialogue, dissimilar to the ones, silently hungry for easy construction that settle their relations to the world, he says “we”. A privileged milieu, deceased or alive, they are outside the public time of those, who rely on a truth of rescue. Freed from the spaces where they have been formed, they are not interested in their own wellbeing. In distinction to the more philosophers of the past, who consider beneficial the interest in the shared wellbeing, serving the sheltering of the mentally feckless, following the steps of Nietzsche, Derrida does not shelter, but, as I mentioned, confuses. Not as Socrates, at that, who delays the formulation of the truth, because it is something important and should not be made short work of.

By and large, deconstructively tuned up, but additionally infected by Derrida, I am asking myself if this thought behaviour is not supported by a worthy of denouncement axiom. I see it thanks to the restrictedness, imposed on me by the anachronic milieu I am formed in. With an effort to apprehend and to use Derrida’s texts, because for me the apprehension leans on coming in handy (a meager disposition, reminding of the spirit of the American pragmatic philosophy), I perceive the dissimilarity between his and mine thought behaviour as defined by the unconscious dissimilar apprehensions of the “self” that directs them.

Seemingly, as it is to me, according to Derrida, “self” is an identity, attacked by nonidentities, which endeavors to incorporate them in itself, but gets only to the aporia registration, or mostly to the succeeding it antinomies engendering. There are, of course, out-of-though spheres, which ostensibly are susceptible to getting the better of them. Derrida’s thinking thought, though, stays true to the idea of the principle nonmatching of identity and non-identity. “Self” is completely identical to the self, and therefore – completely nonidentical in any other respect. In this sense, at any single moment, there is only identity or nonidentity. Thus, the evolving “self” is protected by dissipation in disturbing contradictions, in options of falling into otherness, incapable to delight the thinking one.

The life and the philosophy offer dissimilar explication of this notion. In life, the interior nonidentity is substituted with falling upon us ostensibly exterior othernesses. In Derrida’s texts, the identity, decided to be excessively identical, protects itself from this befall through aporetic attunement. The philosopher denies representing the referents of the temporarily particular “selves” of his gross “self”, and negatively attests his thinking subsistence – by articulation of the unstable particularities in streams of elements, boarding each other by aporetic thresholds, which the uncontrollable transitions and completions block up. Thus, without exteriorizing its exterior other, as the common people usually do, he guards both himself, and the peculiarity of the entities. He guards them with the inevitable startleness against the persistent within them other, with the awaken non-admission of their transformation. He watches for the “bubbling up” of the meanings within so many names, only to stop in the last moment before breaking forth. This though-gesture is well-represented by the metaphor of the timely taken off the fire meal, which otherwise burns and ceases to be a meal.

Seemingly, to me, the core agent of this thought behaviour is the idea that the apprehension of the “self” is possible solely to the extent it transforms into another. Therefore, follows the peculiarity of Derrida’s own “self”; the fact it does not allow to be “contaminated” by above- or below-personal explications. On this basis the writer Derrida does not allow falling-off in his speech, produces “isovo”-speech, not upset in banality or silence. Such is the speech explication of the “self”, constructed in an European mode, engaged more with the attained within the selfness unique ideality, than with the banalities or the unexpectedly obstructed perfections, that question it.

Of course, I go too far. That is why I beat a retreat and admit that the represented above “self” is excessive and in this sense – artificial. Artificial is the suggestion too, that this “self” is explicated as a background in the texts of the French philosopher, while my experience is organized by another “self”. Rather, I do not differ from Derrida. My speech, just like his, is performative, dependent on the concrete situation. In particular this means that I, leaning on my anachronicity and on the habit of a certain Antique texts apprehension, rely on Derrida in the construction of a seemingly to me necessary dissimilar “self”. I am doing it because I reckon that by questioning the axiomatics of the authoritative thought behaviour of the French philosopher, I will become out-situational. My so desired out-situationalness, though, will not be pure, and inevitably will be darkened by the provincial anachronicity of the rebelling against the inevitable Europe intellectual from the Eastern Europe.

Aren’t in a similar way rebellious all the reconstructions in the history of the European philosophy? So, let me take up the so modeled theme, with the positive deconstruction of the situation of the “self” apprehension within the contemporary European circumstances of life.

Naturally, my deconstruction cannot proceed in Derrida’s style. Whatever I do, it will not be possible to have an authentic conversation with the grandees of the European tradition. Because of the inevitable provinciality, and perhaps because of the lack of imagination. I can attain something else, though – to engage in conversation the general in myself, which slightly discriminated me form the others. It is in my power because of the non-social subsistence to which I am accustomed too, as well as because of the professional skills within antique anachronical bents. Thus, I will retreat from the authentic conversation of the heightened identical to himself one with others, also heightened identical ones, conducted by Derrida, and I will start conversation with my interior nonidentical, I will interrogate it as fallen into me exterior. Thus, without the risk of self-deception, I will try to recognize an objectivity of a kind. So, within the frames of this situation, I undertake the theme on the apartness of the “self”.

The contemporary circumstances of life make me accepting my apartness from and selfness as a natural factuality. A real and an ideal mobility, places-apartness-from-myself, objects and people, explicated also in a more complicated form of independence, my selfness holds both individual and general traits. The cultural predisposition points to the specific individual within it, to the dissimilar, and not to the similar. Both, of course, are something complex, a blend of gender and species traits. However, if we at least scrutinize the dissimilar, the similar within the selfness and especially the principle of the apartness form, slip from our field of vision. The past, notably the old religious cultures are concerned with its representation. With the evolvement of the worldly culture after the 18th century, most symbols, operative within this presentation, have fallen away.  Thus, the discussed here contemporary problem has been engendered – the particular human being with difficulty activates the notion that its substance is a compromise between dissimilarities, which have as a border-line a uniqueness of a kind, as well as forms of similarity, in-between which also of an apartness from, on the line of which the human being in question is rendered feebly discernible not only by the rest human beings, but by the most of the animals too.

This notion is of many aspects. I chose one of them – the fact of my human selfness, and I tell to myself: “My temporary selfness is explicated in a constant elucidation of the indistinct exterior world by its transformation into an interior one. In the run of my substantiation, this appropriation is alternated by throwing of the appropriated away. The appropriation enforces my selfness and apartness from, while the throwing away is more often a phase of their denial. Thus, among the multitude of ways by which I apprehend my own “self”, it renders to me also as alternation of stages of real and restricted selfness. It is hard to envisage the two stages simultaneously. I am scrutinizing either the one or the other. In the case, I direct my attention not to the dialectics of the own and the common within my selfness, but only to the aspect of the general. I ask myself what notions and emotions the idea of the reiterating in every human being form of apartness from engenders in me.

This idea can be explicated in different situations. One of them is relegated to the fact that we are similar receptacles of exterior entities. Within us they dent, some even wane. Others acquire energy of yet more efficient subsistence. This impersonal point of view is grievous, but joyful too. It depends on what I assess in it. Whether I apprehend the reiteration as deprivation, or I enjoy the penetrating into me marked by objectivity non-mine? On its turn, it is of importance how I accept my uniqueness. Whether I consider myself as rigidly identical and suffer the punches in this fundamental identity, or I consider my identity as relative, disclosed towards the more stable human, animal and the even broader biological existence? Thus, it depends on whether I can say to myself: “Nothing is more boring than being an adult and all my substance being grounded on the fundamental apprehension of my uniqueness!”

Where does this apprehension obtain energy from and how can I divest it of it? It obtains energy from the faith in the originality of my corporeal species; from the notion that my life runs as the one and only story, and from my social prominence. It is easier the third one to be deconstructed – I refer to roles, that are played by others too. Both they, and the dissimilarity within them pertain to me partially. Considering them as mine, I maintain, strengthen, and even evolve their objective definitiveness. Thus, without succumbing to bitterness that they do not pertain to me to the extent, to which it would appear to me, rather I am to activate the pleasure of the explication of their objectivistic subsistence within me.

More difficult to be deconstructed is my original life story. I can attack it by discriminating the general plots in it, the mythologies of so many social milieus I live in, among them the one of the gross plot, organizing the life of every human and of any substance as a whole. The aim is to apprehend them, to render them to my imagination articulated as efficient symbols. As a consequence of the registration of the non-mine in my personal story, I should enjoy the explicatedness of its objective subsistence within me. The most difficult to be deconstructed is the massive symbol of my body. Its particularity is a stable sign of the transience of the “self”. Therefore, the grief of the awareness of its inevitable destructibility. Knowledge, unusual, unsustained by the contemporary cultural milieu notions, symbols and emotions are needed, so that I can apprehend that the explicated in my body carnality is also a stubbornly reviving longevity. This apprehension would have grown into joy, if my interior view breaks off from the temporal unit I am, and orientates itself to the general living forms, explicated in it.

I would not have been bothered by the fact that with the advancement of the years I am ailing more often and this is the first positive consequence of the emotional mastering of such a viewpoint. The forthcoming old age is not obstructive, it is even of help when it comes to managing with the discrimination of the occurring with me, caused by bad habits and inherited metabolic structures, by the natural decrease of the physical strengths, that befalls all of us. As a modern human, I am aware of imagining it as excessively habitual and non-depending on me. Thus, I direct my interior view not to the concreteness of the forthcoming old age, but to the simplicity of the decline of some human beings and their constant substitution with others.

As Marcus Aurelius says, the human life ends just as an olive falls off when it is ripe, rots, and sinks into the engulfing it earth. I try to shift this consoling comparison in the direction of non-griefness. I am intrigued not by the transience of the biological body, but by the constantly renewing corporeality. On this basis, I apprehend better also the concrete explications of my corporeality. For example the fact with the years it is natural my skin to waste its glow, and that it is no less natural this glow to be renovated within the life of other beings. The aim in the case is the lasting availability of fresh flash to be rendered weightier than its possession.

This theorizing, though, can be employed as a consolation. It depends on which of its aspects which other aspect or what other exterior entity denotes. Anything in the world, as well as within the word, is intended to the other. Passing through the word intentions, though, depends also on me, on the format of my knowledge, discriminations, notions, symbols and emotions, on the differentiated delight, evoked by the perceivability of the common within the apartness from. How is this format of rational formulae, notions, symbols and emotions attainable? By education, but also by work of each “self” – inquiring after certain themes, awareness of their instability and paying attention to the occurring among them transitions. As with the issue of the apartness-from-selfness that raises the question of the corporeality and of the intertwining of more stable and more transient moments within the temporal structure of the “self”. On its turn, the issue of the selfness passes over to the motives of loneliness and death.

It may well be that I tell to myself: “I am sad, because I am by myself”. Is it possible this stipulation to be deconstructed positively? Is it possible for me to feel unwell because remaining by myself, I face my irrelevant formlessness? Is it possible for me to shift only to be included and related to places, objects and people in more efficient wholenesses than my selfness – of human groups aiming to go through an undertaking or having a nice time; of institutions, whole countries, cultures and worlds? The names I give to these totalities do not coincide with their meanings and referents. Therefore, the incessant deliberation, the argumentations on their high repute, signified and meaning, as well as on the additional senses in the run of their usage.

Society, perhaps, is the mostly discussed of all these totalities. What is it in view of the loneliness of the particular human being, induced by it to come face to face with its own formlessness? A repository of models and situations of overcoming its own insufficient apartness from and selfness with a wholeness; a mechanics of temporarily actualization of the selfness. The society provides with the energy of another souls and superanimated scopes, with mirrors of scrutinization of our own vague depth. This occurs through physical advancement, but ideally too – under the circumstances of so many non-lonely lonelinesses of the communication of the particular human being with itself as with other. Exactly about the situation of these lonelinesses, the human social milieu has accumulated so many mediators – objects, appliances, written or visual texts.
If the contemporary European world is more advanced with anything than the traditional worlds, it is with the higher potential of transformation of the indefinite own into other, but also of the other into own, into the possibility of displacement, shift, reinforcement and transcendence of oneself with interiorization of an ever more differentiated within apartnesses exterior. This possibility is conceded to organic and temporary groups of people, but to every particular human being too. It is conceded an undertaking to be gone through and aims to be attained, as well as the time flow to be rendered as usually. Two are the basic consequences of the evolvement of the European modernity into ever more differentiated situations of a discriminative conceptualization of the own and another’s, and among them of the risky views on the world and the human too. The one is exterior – the world gets ever more unified and autoreferent. The other is interior – the particular human being is confused at the face of the growing exterior differentiation and autoreferentness; it does not recognize that it is meant for it and predisposes itself depressively, falls into sense of a fundamental apartness from and loneliness.

To myself I can say the following: “The real human apartness from and loneliness is one, and the sense of loneliness – another. I should not blame the milieu itself for my loneliness, for the failure to manage the growing milieu of situations. Like the soul, the exterior milieu too, is only a possibility. It anticipates my interference with its potentials to turn them into real situations, thus temporarily freeing myself from the load of my nonactuality. In this respect there is no first and second, more important, and less important. Substantial is the relation itself. My involvement into it presupposes erudition, as well as personal endeavor in the construction of corresponding to the discursive social milieu image within myself. I can attain it without having at sight the big world. We all have at our disposal minor worlds, a net of objects, premises and places. Even if it is more evolved than the nonfactual interior world of my soul. The point is, leaning on a real exterior situation or on an ideal imaginary one, to evolve into myself net of ideas, notions, symbols and emotions that envelopes the obstructing exterior lavishness, and to transform it into its corresponding soul speech.” Thus, the positive deconstruction of the sense of loneliness starts with a good distinction of the principle loneliness from the sense of loneliness.

However, let’s not overdo it. Loneliness is also indiscriminate from the selfness, which on its turn, is a shifted explication of the particularity of so many subsistences and entities. The vortex of the constantly changing within the consciousness and the world twining of senses and entities drags to the explicated here twining of the themes loneliness, selfness and apartness still another basic theme – of the nonexistence and its peculiar aspect of the death. Scrutinizing a similar semantic vortex, to make it easier for ourselves, we direct our attention to one or another processing within it. Anyway, though, more real are the vortices themselves. Therefore follows Derrida’s peculiar realism. By piling into his works as many as possible processings, he directs his sight to the sustaining it semantic vortex. This attitude is catching. Absorbed in “Aporias” and in the presented on the conference lecture on the death penalty, I also fell into the twining of the themes on the “self” and the death, this negative determinant of the human selfness.

The apprehension of the death can be a more explicitly rational, and a more implicitly symbolic processing. One of the possible rational modes is the distinctive awareness. I am habituated to them from Plato’s dialogues and Aristotle’s texts. I set out on this road and I tell to myself: “To the extent something is identical to itself, the death embraces two situations – the dying itself and the condition of an already nonexisting selfness. This discrimination surrenders to the practical and the symbolic association of the two situations within the shared word of death and the attached to it notion. The notion can be thought nonsituationally and nonsubjectively, while the situations are inevitably subjective. If I envision the situation of the death-dying more discursively, I will establish that it is fissible too, as far as it is one for the subject of the dying, and another for the one, scrutinizing it or the thinking of it.

I also face the discrimination that it is not without significance if the dying occurs because of the dysfunction of the organism, or because of violence. The death subsistence can be quiet, or even elevating. I have in mind the so often described sense of bliss with the transition of the boundary between the life and the death. On the other hand, with the physiological death too, as well as with the murder, the death is associated with sense of pain and dread. Evoking compassion and fear for oneself, exactly they are at the sight of the contemporary observer. Of course, the death-dying is perceived as a positive act too. This notion is sustained by certain traditional cultures; it is evolved also by contemporary human beings, and even by whole milieus. These two opposite experiences are shaken if I consider the depth cultural axiom, which sustains them. As a negative experience of the other’s death within the contemporary European milieu. It is a mechanism of a symbolic affirmation of the validity of the apartness from and the selfness of the human individual, and therefore – a sort of stipulation on this issue.

Hence, the peculiar role of the postulate that the dying is only something own within Heidegger’s apprehension of the human subsistence. Derrida deconstructs it by reverently adding more distinctions and specifications, but also with undermining the positive apartness from of the human and nonhuman biological subsistence. We can question in a more disclosed mode the postulate itself too. The dying is own to the extent to which the human apartness from is only apartness from. It, though, is insufficiently so. The death somehow associated the dying, the murdering, and the scrutinizing or the finding out the murder-dying-death of the other. A symbol of the transforming otherness-attainment, it compiles them with the awareness of the temporality of each selfness and of its disclosure to complete otherness. The death as a notion too, is an assemblance of a dissipating order, because it is dying, and the dying is a murder – i.e. violence. This is valid even to a greater extent for the death-suicide, loaded with the additional idea of the superefficient relation of a self to the self as to the other.

Thus, it is difficult to scrutinize the death as something sufficiently identical, mostly because the death-dying-murder as a thought of it, points to the shaking of its semantic nest. Through the dying-murder the violence bursts into it, and it is broader than the death. The double valuation intrudes too. An awkward inquiring evolves to what extent the violence is natural, and to what – culturally constituted. Because the murder of a human being by a human being turns out to be a species trait of the human ‘naturalness” – in the binary sense that it is something unnatural, as well as something natural, which discriminates the human being from the rest of the animals. The murder-dying is valuated also as neutral, as a sign of the initial unstableness, disclosure and mobility of the human species. The murder is a symbol of the most human in the human being, of the inevitable transcendence of the species “self”. This transcendence does not exhaust itself with the murder. The violent death is efficient explication of the general situation of violence, transgression and excess of the human being.

In this plan of special power is the attractive violence of the love intercourse, but also its peculiar negative explication – the rape. They are related to the violence-torture, penetration and rapture of the wholeness of the body; on the other hand – with the murder-dying and therefore with the death. Hence, noncoincidentally the death-dying symbolizes all the senses of excess, among them – of the positive experience of exaltation. Within these sensations of boundary transgression and excess, intervene the exaltation or the low spirits of the “violence” of the human group, of the sociality over the particular human being, of what we name power. What is it, but a threat of the particularity and a violence of a transition to another wholeness in view of durable disputable goods.

Hence, the refined vortex of so many relations and meanings in the death penalty, wherein encounter the death, the dying, the murder, the violence, the wellbeing of the particularity of the dying individual and of the debated wellbeing of some community. The death penalty is a concrete violence over the concrete human being or group subject, committed by a human collective, which employs the violence-transgression for the symbolic organization of the complex interior relations in the collective, but in a number of extrahuman relations too. In this sense, as anything else, the death penalty is constantly being transcended. Scrutinized as a social act, it is a sequence of situations of trial and murder. Both evolve roles and theatricality, both process as a public execution with articulated sides of performers and audience. The “theatre” of the death penalty is an attempt at a kind of reflection, of evolvement of the death-dying-murder in a process of well articulated, dependable one from another moments. This attempt of the contemporary worldly milieu at a sufficient definitiveness of the death penalty does not succeed. One way or another, within it remains unexplicated the transcendental transgressive aspect of the dying-murder; the aspect that the old traditional cultures rendered into real in the act of the cult sacrifice.

This affects also the contemporary thinking of the death penalty. Notwithstanding the stable cultural position on the issue of the value of the life and the confidence that the death penalty is namely a penalty, the contemporary scrutinization on the theme is still undermined by the eventuality of any other assessment of the violent death. As an act of excess and transgression, of outlet of the own, the murder and the violence are apprehended also in an evasively two-fold manner, but they are apprehended as wellbeing too. This leads also to various modes of scrutinization on the death penalty. At times, it is problematized with a view to the social pragmatics, the relief of the regimes and the humanization of the relations.

The debate on the issue can be processed in an immanentalistic mode too – the death penalty can be scrutinizes as sufficiently closed and identical to itself object. Jacques Derrida’s public lecture in Sofia was of this kind. In it were avoided the transcendental verdicts that could suspend or shift the talking on the theme in another direction. In fact, Derrida’s attitude was not to demonstrate immanentalistic demeanor, but not to allow the debate to break off. His position was modeled by the actual speaking on the issue, by the applicability, related to the abolition of the death penalty. Thus, it was subdued to the performativity, and not to the typical of the European speaking anachronic thought vortex.

Yet, here I react deconstructively to Derrida’s lecture, I respect the anachronic vortex and I enhance the transcendental direction of scrutinization, within which that not to that extent identical to itself death penalty turned out to be disclosed to other objects and situations. Among them is also the European oscillation between the valuation of the life and the death, as well as the positive apprehension of the death according to Plato’s ingenuine elaboration on Phaedo, and the contemporary postmodern view on the principle instability, disclosedness, and transgressive mobility of the human being.

This naturally raises the question what is the philosophy today. With other subjects too, for example with the apprehension of the freedom, it would have been more appropriately to speak of them in plural. So it is with the philosophy. Today it is more accurate to represent its various explications. One of them scrutinizes the semantic vortices, which the globalizing world faces us with. Exactly it organizes Derrida’s texts. There is another philosophy, though – the one, employing historical typologies, that engenders texts of mixed thought-civilian efficiency. Such was the presented in Sofia Derrida’s lecture on the death penalty. This division is in broad outlines, of course. Derrida’s philosophizing perhaps evolves more models of philosophy that can be classified on the grounds of other characteristics.

The traditional philosophy, of course, does not favor plurality of this kind. Its performative ambition is to lay down the text platform of the gathering of all human beings. It is achieving it by equalizing them. Its general notions are equalizations exactly of this kind. Therefore, Derrida’s opposition against the thinking, leaning on general hierarchically set principles, considered by him as redundant, and even harmful in the contemporary life conditions. But yet, if a support on a principle is needed, it ostensibly is solely the phenomenological stipulation that the worlds and the thinking modes are numerous, because today are endlessly multiplied the outlasting ones, the fancying and the thinking individuals, and the human groups, representing themselves as individuals. It would have been great if we could register them, but they are at times few in number, at times many; on their turn, they are also of various species too. Therefore, today’s imperative is as if the viewpoint of the variabilities and the constantly coming to be individuals and human groups.

The point is that the most substantial aspect of this coming to be is the transition to othernesses of any kind – of the own self, of various “we”, of objective and natural, real and ideal worlds, and at least – to the otherness of the non-subsistence. Thus, following the effective deconstructive operation, which reminds the thinking and operating subjects of individuals and human groups not to trust the traditional ideologies, the subsequent substantial problem is raised – how these subjects work out mechanisms of incorporating themselves in the various kinds of otherness, how they attain situational systems, functionally similar to the ancient rituals and the traditional religious systems, how they pass over from immanentalistic to transcendental apprehensions in a worldly manner, not falling into fundamentalism and misleading religious symbolism.

For the time being, to me it is evident only that the contemporary “self” that protects itself from the falling upon it “we”, has to get accustomed to apprehend itself besides as factuality, as a static structure, also as a procedure of coming to be, within which “we“- and “I”- voices alternate and constantly shift. The contemporary “we” is a melody, twined by the tunes of mixed in a new relation principles. I employ a metaphor here, though my apprehension is not a poetic, but a practical one. The “ethics” of alternation, of the raise and the fall of this melodic line, presupposes I to be attuned constructively-essentialistically, at times to be narcissistically closed totality, and at others – disclosed, dissolving unstableness, sinking into more stable, standing on my way, and permitting me unity other human being, human group, philosophy, feast, country, world and whatsoever else.

Of course, usually I do not manage to unglue from the static selfness, to which I am accustomed to, and which I consider as myself. I do not know whom to blame. I know, though, that getting beyond is possible. The selfness is to an extent ostensible. Its static character is rather wanted and spontaneously attained. I have witnessed its breaking off and transcendence both with other people, and with myself. As it now seems to me, I attain transcendence thanks to Derrida’s word.

The work on this text started as an attempt to correct my diary reflections from the spring of 1978. Unsatisfied by my former inability to stipulate in plain words the concrete that incited me to write (it does not lessen today either), but by my inability to behave routinely, incoherent to the time, the place and the age, within which, as now it seems to me, I am better, I unexpectedly found support in Derrida’s word. It was the jack that helped me to transcend for a moment the present boundary of this trait. I might delude myself, of course. My only wish is, if in time this text disappoints me, I to be seized by a functional shame, and again, by falling into worthy support, to sense the pleasure of the moment transcendence of myself. May it not be only consoling sign of the background success, on which we inevitably rely on – the overcoming of our own mortality.


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 AN ATTEMPT ON THE IDEA OF THE “SELF” - OR A REMARK ON DERRIDA’S TEXTS
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