Gareth

I ramble. I find myself mostly with questions on life and on the readings. If I am allowed to maintain the internal and external distinction of the texts and myself for a little longer.. In a recent blog post a friend of mine, a third year medical student with an undergraduate education and continuing interest in philosophy, surprised me by saying that she was having an identity crisis about her desire/non-desire to have kids. The reason for this was her inability to define the purpose of life as other than to reproduce. This pseudo Darwinian (perhaps more Dawkinsian) view of life flustered me as I tried to think of how to express my perception that this limit, privileging an aspect included in life, was unsatisfactory. Ghosh’s, Calcutta Chromosome, transferred to me while I read about it, in so far as life is reproduction, or replication, or continuation, which was achieved, “in other words”, as life could be defined this way, is it the same thing? Doyle’s “alife” as life and his “explosion” of what life is, would seem no less unlikely and unsatisfying. But what can I deconstruct from, or of, or inside, this sense that life in a computer or in a memetic story in a book does not constitute life? If Deutscher’s reading of Derrida reflects in me correctly, it is also “living on” in me, alive at least in a mutant form as I think of her suggestion that deconstruction is about seeing what is unsaid, in being unsaid is still part of the story. Is my view on life, too focused on what Doyle dismisses as a preoccupation with organic carbon? These readings which mean for me, if arbitrarily, that I take time to ponder on life, and what the nature of life might be bothers me, since in some way I think the complexity of meaning, and the difference could be only internal, reflecting my prejudices and contextuality more than it does any ‘real’ truth or ‘understanding’ that I take from the readings. But, isn’t that internality, and its constitution from the external part of what I take away from Derrida, that my questions, the words they are made up of in my head and as they appear in the books are linked, and more importantly, that (at least to some extent) that the distinction and privilege that I place on my mind (whatever that is) as internal and distinct is part of a relation to the external, and not a sort of Platonic form or Cartesian disembodied Ego?

“Forever unable to saturate a context, what reading will ever master the ‘on’ of living on? For we have not exhausted the ambiguities: each of the meanings we hae listed above can be divided further (e.g., living on can mean a reprieve or an afterlife, ‘life after death’, life after death, more life or more than life….” Derrida (76-77) Derrida speaks of poems and novels including, the triumph of life, and the madness of the day each part of the complex system of meanings that my typed and thought words are part, inelegantly and insufficiently as they are, part of the system of texts without “boundaries or edges” and perhaps in this sense that with the expression of meaning externally, or the simply rude writing of words we are to live on, and that is as valid a reproduction as my friends lacking desire for a child. That this living on here is connected to the madness of the day, which was the same but for a name as “recit”, and is also “L’arret de mort” which could among many translations be the end of death, and many other meanings. I begin to like the word “arret” as he uses it over and over, without the stop, the settling on, and other meanings of the word itself being done. But can meaning ever arret? In French it has all the meanings that play in the article, as it remains untranslated, but the same basic pronunciation and root arrive in English with one fewer ‘R’ and perhaps less common usage. In English the Arete is the sum, the end point of many qualities together, the name life for example for all those qualities that make it up is an arête. Arete appears in English in philosophy from the greek, I assume the same root, and is virtue, that which is, or was to them fixed and complete.