Lost+response+to+Derrida+and+not-so-dead+people

The article by Derrida (On Life) has multiple levels of text that demands attention. On the one hand the body of the text seems like the primary concern, due in large part to its considerable length and attention to the smallest minutiae of the stories that he converses with. The true theory of this work doesn’t become apparent until one begins to notice the ongoing single footnote. In this marginalized space Derrida confronts both the translator of the text as well as the audiences that read the text in French and subsequent languages. All the while that he is speaking about the lives, immortality, mortality, existence of the characters in various works he is confronting his own embedded self within the documents body. This essay seems to target two phenomenon of writing, one aspect of which is two sided. The first phenomenon is expounded more succinctly by Deutscher in "How to Read Derrida." While targeting Derrida's deconstruction of the distinction between speech and writing we are confronted by how writing becomes a hindrance to translating the ideas of an individual to another. The spoken word is less likely to be misinterpreted due to a number of different factors, the tone and style of conveyance, the possibility of dialogue rather than one-sided interaction, and the internal “life” that Saussure posits (8, 33). Granted Derrida later backpedals (pedals on?) by arguing that speech can be thought of as psychic writing within cognition (10). Derrida's footnote and body text to "On Life" is a direct confrontation with the notion of any individuals ability to provide entirely pure thoughts through communication (in this particular passage it is the written word). The second argument that Derrida makes revolves around how individuals embed themselves within communications/texts and thus attain a certain immortality. At the same time, in a typical inverse/reverse Derridian manner, he maintains that this same immortality becomes a means of personal destruction in the process of reading and translation. This is the two-fold complication (or are we at two-fold squared). Texts themselves can never convey precisely what an author is thinking and translated texts are even more derivative from the original thoughts.

Questions for others and self: What is the difference between life and alife for Richard Doyle