Jacques Derrida is Derri-dead. (Thanks to BC-er David Fiore for the pointer.) But what does that mean?

Dead in the strict meaning of "without life" would seem to be a simple enough construct, but in actual fact the notion is so ramified, so resplendently qualified, as to render the word nearly meaningless. Is Derrida, in fact, truly Derri-dead, in this age where someone who ostensibly no longer exists in a current moment can still act upon the world through his detritus (e.g. images, video, writings)? (See my coblogger Buckethead's post on Christopher Reeve for a happily coincidental example of this very phenomenon. Reeve will live again and again, in a wheelchair and not, as himself and as not-himself, indefinitely. And yet you can't just call him up to chat.) The notion of physical death, (thanatos), though in a very important sense concrete, is countered-- indeed one could argue has always been countered-- by the accidental or intentional memorials to one's existence which independently of (partially unbounded by) personal chronology signal the fact of that existence without having to prove its currency.

As Derrida wrote in another context,

historicity itself is tied to the possibility of writing; to the possibility of writing in general, beyond those particular forms of writing in the name of which we have long spoken of peoples without writing and without history. Before being the object of a history — of an historical science — writing opens the field of history — of historical becoming.

Is writing in itself a narcissistic bid for immortality, a process of tethering oneself to history, to attempt to endow oneself (or, at least, one's publicly imagined self) with historiocity? Indeed, Derrida wrote. Writing is inescapably an immediatist art, as each new reader encounters the author in their own now rather in the author's then. Therefore, beyond Derrida's own carefully nuanced probings of the deepest meanings of language (a construct that, though endowed irrefutuably with concrete meaning, threatens to dissolve into the purest solipsism under close scrutiny), can we detect a secret, naughty bid to build an edifice for himself out of the very medium he spent his life deconstructing? Or am I just shining you on?

Also posted to the Ministry of Minor Perfidy. Visit the Ministry. Your compliance is appreciated; indeed, it is compulsory.