Christmas 'to come'
In which I'm probably doing profound conceptual violence to something or other
My Dad sends me books from time to time, and they linger in the corners of my vision like a ghost in a movie we’re only supposed to notice on rewatch. One of the advantages of owning many books I haven’t read, especially books a bit outside my usual line, is that every so often I find my teeth out for something I can’t name, until I pick up a book I don’t realize has been haunting me, and find myself still reading an hour later. It’s a bit like those children with mineral deficiencies, who might not know why they have a sudden and irresistible compulsion to eat dirt from a particular corner of the back yard, but know it’s what they need.
So I recently read An Event, Perhaps, Peter Salmon’s biography of Jacques Derrida. I’ve never read Derrida, and I still haven’t (outside of the paragraphs Salmon quotes); I’m stuck with my interpretation of Salmon’s interpretation. An Event, Perhaps focuses on the development of Derrida’s thought and concepts, but it anchors his thought in his personal history. I’ve encountered many of the names in this book, including Derrida’s, mostly as stand-ins or linguistic anchors for systems of concepts or for moves in argument, so it was striking to see these names anchored to history, to see Marxist intellectuals who don’t support student protests in Paris in the ‘60s because they are student protests, and as such didn’t rise ‘properly’ from the working class; to see systems of ethics and ontology rising out of suffering in Nazi prison camps; to watch friendships and betrayals spur not only personal sorrow but deep interrogations of trust and gift and hospitality. To learn that Althusser strangled his wife, to learn that Paul de Man wrote antisemitic articles for a Nazi collaborationist newspaper. To learn that Jacques Derrida was not named Jacques Derrida! His birth name was Jackie; his parents were big fans of Charlie Chaplin, and named him after Jackie Coogan, the star of Chaplin’s The Kid.
A friend and I were chatting about why we were not taught this sort of thing. Maybe there’s a pervasive institutional bias against positioning ideas in history because it’s in the institution’s interest to keep ideas safe, bloodless, disconnected from historical conditions, a ‘life of the mind’ unmoored from any life or action of bodies in the streets. Maybe our teachers (or the thinkers themselves) were worried about biographies undermining ideas, of arguments being dismissed because “of course that person would think X, they’ve had experiences Y and Z that bias them in that direction.” Maybe (this was my friend’s argument) they’re worried we’d say, “Well, Derrida was twenty-four years late on his dissertation.”
There were so many ideas in this book I want to investigate more deeply—because they’re useful, because they name something I’ve never had a name for in a way that feels downright poetical, because the coinages are just plain funny. For example, there’s hauntology, a tremendous word, referring (if I’ve got it right) to the question of the realness of ‘spectral’ things that are real, in that they are absolutely a part of our everyday experience of life—like the characters in a work of fiction, or (in a way that feels extraordinarily relevant to the Craft Sequence) money.
And then there’s the point that some things exist ‘a venir’, “to come”—in promise only, not because they haven’t happened yet (the way a human has not yet landed on Mars, or the way we have not yet distributed our resources so that everyone has enough to eat), but because their ‘happening,’ their arrival in our everyday existence, would entail the resolution of some irresolvable conceptual tension. Valar morghulis, death comes to us all—but even though I know I am going to die (even if that death occurs billions of years from now when accelerating expansion splits the universe and all the nanospore wave-clouds warming themselves around the accretion disks of the last supermassive black hole finally wave a radio good-bye), I will not experience being dead. Even if we posit afterlives, they won’t be this life—so we won’t be experience them as we are, now. What will it be like to experience the moment of death? If we’re experiencing, surely we won’t yet be dead? So it will not have arrived, for us: still to come. Many other concepts have this same messianic slipperiness—when we try to hold onto them, to pin them into a conceivable narrative, they slip into the future. Democracy, seeking both equality and individual liberty is ‘to come’, “with the feel / that it ain’t exactly real /or it’s real, but it ain’t exactly there,” as the man says. So too, justice, the arrival of which would make law impossible, unnecessary. So too, mercy.
I reached for this book out of a vague sense that I needed something like it, not because it was Christmastime—even though I generally go all-out on holiday reading. And again I might be reading it wrong. But still, here I am, in this holiday I keep with my family even though we are not what most folks mean when they say observant, this holiday that celebrates a historical event that is, simultaneously, an event to come—an event, perhaps. A season of the past and of the world ‘to come,’ that seems to offer greater room for love and care in the present moment than does our typical sense of the present moment—even though the present is the only moment in which things happen. (Or is it?) A season when specters haunt the rich (and when elves haunt shelves). A season where we ask whether these things are shadows of what will be, or of what may be only? (By Scrooge’s grave, “the kind hand trembled.”) A season when Death asks us to sift the world for one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. A season in which the train may stop, but the line goes on. I hear useful echoes--the voices, themselves, maybe, of spirits.
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The last couple months have overflowed—with parenting, about which more later, and with revisions, ditto, and… not much else, I’m afraid. (The trouble with loving your work is that it’s easy to disappear into it.) I’m excited to share my new books with you when they’re in fighting trim. More on that in the new year, I hope.
It’s awards season, of course. My major publications this year, if you’re trying to catch up (in addition to this newsletter of course):
Last Exit (novel)
To Make Unending (short story, at Sunday Morning Transport)
And in the new year, please look forward to:
Dead Country (Book 1 of the Craft Wars, coming in March)
Along with a number of projects of varying size that I am not yet at liberty to discuss. Coming soon, really, as opposed to “to come”!
Take care of yourselves, friends. Talk soon.
This is I think the first essay I've read connecting Derrida to Christmas in a way that makes me think of our family Christmas movie, Magoo's Christmas Carol. Congratulations, and Happy New Year :)
I’ve been reading up on hauntology too. Guess it’s just a very seasonally appropriate concept to dig into?