How to Live...

Postmodern deconstruction waged war against metaphysics and metanarratives. Yet this is the opening line of the “Exordium” in Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx: “Someone, you or me, comes forward and says, ‘I would like to learn to live finally.’”11 How ironic. Toward the end of his life Derrida returned to the subject (after his much touted “death of the subject”), returned to the existential “I” after a lifetime of pooh-poohing presence and the perpendicular, and returned to the theological question of “how to live” and how to “learn to live.” His final testamentary remarks tried to reframe deconstruction as an affirmation of life.

In Derrida’s final interview with Jean Birnbaum, he admits his reversal and his renunciation of deconstruction’s scientific and philosophical prerogatives:I am at war with myself, it’s true, you couldn’t possibly know to what extent, beyond what you can guess, and I say contradictory things that are, we might say, in real tension; they are what construct me, make me live, and will make me die. I sometimes see this war as terrifying and difficult to bear, but at the same time I know that that is life!!

References:Lenoard SweetRamona Fotiade, “Life After Deconstruction,” TLS: Times Literary Supplement, 02 December 2005, 26.Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: An Interview with Jean Birbaum, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault (Hoboken, NJ: Melville, 2007), 47.