Stuff

"I wish someone had never given you Derrida because you're so damn smart."

A bit of a backhanded complement, but I'll take it. The funny thing is that this quote calls several issues into question. How did I find Derrida? I fell into him. I received a syllabus, I read it, I bought the book. I read the book, Acts of Literature, and knew exactly what it was I wanted to do. I found all the professors who would teach me Derrida. I write papers, use him as my go-to source and theoretical backing. I know that he can be very formulaic and problematic, that his paradoxes are infuriating, that he has a theory of language that the Anglo tradition sees as bad correspondence theory. I know this. I struggle with it as well. But, he is part of the reason I am doing what it is I am doing today. Reading his work opened up the door to the intersections of philosophy and literature which I had always found interesting.

But the other question is this--how many weird coincidences and people enter our lives and cross paths with us that we do not even realise? This dawned on me recently after meeting someone whose live I have crossed several times without even knowing it. Perhaps Levinas is correct; there really is a comedy to existing. Me meeting someone, a book at a book sale--and in that moment you cross another's path. I know it is not revolutionary--events always seem contingent on some other decision made some time ago (if a decision can ever be made). It is just amazing how interconnected your life might be without even knowing it.

I don't mean to be esoteric, but it is just funny--of course is a deeply ironic way.

PS

Sorge is not a source of ethics in Heidegger. If you read B&T and think that, you fell into a very exoteric reading and have missed the great thinker's true line of thought.

I hate when people tell me that crap.

It does not work.