October 20, 2004
Feu Mnemosyne, Derrida (Or on how deconstruction has influenced my parenting)
by Liza Sabater
During my years at NYU something extraordinarily mundane happened to me : I was coming out from the Spanish department at 19 University Place, and there was Jacques Derrida, snowy hair covering his head and that perpetual squint in his eye, and all of a sudden he starts talking about the weather.
This was the man that haunted my graduate school years. I started banging my head on walls and desks and library shelves sometime back in 1987 (and yes, I am dating myself), when I attended Friederich Ulfers' class on Nietzsche. I had already heard of Derrida and even had bought Of Grammatology, but had hardly taken a look at it. Then I fell in love with Nietzsche and picked up Spurs : Nietzsche's Styles/Eperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche, Writing and Difference and was blown away by a new way of thinking.
That moment inside that elevator, baffled me. Here was a squinty, shortish guy commenting on the weather, but who happened to be the man who revolutionized critical theory at the end of the 20th century. I hated him. He was so banal, so common, so human.
Life for me during those graduate school years was tough. At one point I was teaching at four different universities while attending classes full-time. I was a meltdown waiting to happen, and it did. At the end of 1996, when I was resigned to start my dissertation with a new director (both my mentors had left the university), I became pregnant with my first child. At that point, and after futzing around for two years, I decided the academic life was not for me, and I hung my scholar tog. Of course, I had not given hope in writing the "great big book". Stupidly I thought that motherhood would allow me the time to write and ponder more deeply on the ontological work I had started while working on my academic research of all things neobaroque.
Boy was I wrong.
I was slapped into reality by the very real, 18 months of colicy cries from The Kid. I got stuck in the miasma of postpartum depression. As a result, I wanted to get rid of everything that had anything to do with my life before The Kid. In a stupid moment and confusion and rage, I unloaded all my books and notebooks, almost 10 years of work, in one flea market afternoon.
Back in the days, the deeper I delved into Derrida's writing, the bigger the tangents in my academic pursuits. Instead of memorizing the rules of linguistic development of the Spanish language or immersing myself in the historical or even literary intrinsicacies of Latin American Literature (as I was supposed to do since I was after all working towards a PhD on the matter), I was immersing myself in Gilles Deleuze, Sarah Kofman, Michel Foucault.
I could not read any of them without reading Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille. Of course, that led me then to Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva; Umberto Eco and sometimes to Jean Baudrillard.
Of course, this list is so skewed to the French that I might have as well been in the French department, but no, I was still toiling in the halls the likes of Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges and Haroldo de Campos had deigned to visit. Still, Derrida cemented my un-American love for all unpatriotic things French.
That Saturday afternoon, when almost all my Derrida books went the way of a flea market, I had no idea that was what was happening. I actually had put the books aside, to hide in a storage room in New Jersey. I did not want to get rid of them so much as to banish them, ostracize them for a while with the hope of coming back to them again, at a "better" time of my life. Somehow the books and notebooks fell into the flea market box and I lost them, forever. That was about 1998. It was not until after 2000, maybe 2001, when I went looking for the one Derrida book that had really had an impact on me that I realized what happened. Instantaneously, I went into mourning. Ironically, it was the book he wrote after the death of his friend Paul De Man that I missed the most.
Memoires for Paul de Man is a book that I thumbed and marked and annotated and read over and over again during my last years at NYU. At the time, I don't think I could really articulate why I would reach for this book every time I had to write about Cervantes' Don Quixote, Gongora's Fabula De Polifemo Y Galatea, Sor Juana's Primero Sueno, but most especially, David Huerta's Incurable.
Memoires is more than just an eulogy or a book of mourning. It's a book about memory, not as a thing of the past but as an engine of the present. Or that is how I remember it --and the pun is unavoidable for I do not have the book anymore. What I remember most about the book was the idea of remembrance as a "putting together" not just of what we are memorializing but of who we are when we memorialize for Mnemosyne, Memory, is Being.
In other words, Memoires, as I remember it, is a book about how we build reality. How I remember Derrida is not as as destroyer of Truth, but as a man trying to make sense of how, from the ashes of memory we burn into a being in the hopes of capturing Truth. What he dealt with was the exquisite failure of this pursuit, of how hope in "the Word", hope in "the Truth", when spoken or narrated, always rests outside of Being-in-the-moment. Feu la cendre, which is about "the word" as the ashes of being, is another book of his that I referred to quite often, especially when writing about Fernando Pessoa; whose idea of poetry as ser-se ("being-self"), takes on a quasi religious stance to living within the markings of words.
I don't write poetry. I've never considered myself a poet. Still, through the poets I studied, I came to Derrida's work and of other "post-modern" philosophers and all left their markings on me. They marked me profoundly and in a way I did not expect at all; for it is because of my ontological studies that I have chosen to stay at home with The Kids and raise them without schooling.
It's weird but the other day I was just thinking, "How could anybody that read Derrida send their kids to school without questioning the validity of schooling?".
It's not that schools are good or bad. It's how they are being used. Schooling in our times is not about learning, it's about teaching kids how to function, unquestioning, in a corporate like setting. Accountability, testing, all those push-button words related to schooling (thank you Kristeva and Eco) all come out of the corporate world. They have nothing to do with learning, with being as becoming (thank you Blanchot, Bataille, Deleuze).
Schools are not about differance, equivocity, multivocity, the freedom of error. Schools are not about respecting the process of Becoming. We've forgotten Mark Twain's advice : "Don't let school get in the way of your education". What we have, especially now with the "No Child Left Behind Act", is a system bent on ushering kids into artificial time tables of subjects, benchmarks in coursework, and even more disturbingly, of getting kids already in the third grade to decide what they will be for the rest of their lives because then they can be channeled into the "right" middle and high schools.
Schooling is about putting the "citizens of tomorrow" into their places within Power. That's what "socialization" is all about (thank you Foucault). The problem with this conceit is that individuals cannot become citizens if they are led to believe they have to be given that role. Citizenship, and thus democracy, happens when individuals take their lives in their hands and live as if the good of their country depended on each and every one of their actions. Why have we millions of young eligible voters "disenfranchised"? Because we have created a system by which two generations of voters have heard for 16 years of their lives that they do not have what it takes to be a full person until they finish their schooling.
Derrida and company have radicalized my practices as a parent. I ask myself, where does learning, as the discovery of becoming, fit in any of this schooling story (thank you Barthes) and, in the end, it is a story in deed. A story sold as Truth for Power (thank you Foucault and Baudrillard).
When I am asked, "How do you know you're kids are going to make it in college", I unabashedly respond that I don't know. First, because my kids are quite young (7 and 4 years old). Second, because I don't know what they will want to do with their lives when their 17, 18, heck, even when they'll be 5 and 8 years old each. I do not have those answers. But what I get from that question (which is asked of me on a monthly basis) is not whether I know or not, but how have I abdicated my power and control over their lives. This is what rattles most people. I am not saying I do not become the control freak I can be, as in choosing what shirt to wear for a gallery opening or debating with them the goodness of candy versus fruit.
What I am aware of with that question is how can I live with the thought that there is no scapegoat, no "system", "the man" or "school" to blame for my kids potential failure as human beings. It saddens me, to say the least, whenever I get this question. Because in the end, people are asking this out of their own fears and anxieties. There is no freedom when you are told you cannot be free unless you follow the rules and be a good sheep. Amazing that this is how we conceive of democracy, freedom and the pursuit of happiness.
Is it easy to live counter the culture (or as they would say in French, au rebours)? Of course not. It's hard as hell. But I have eaten at the same table with fundamentalist Christians who believe people like me will go to hell because we've had abortions and do not believe in God. I have also become friends with crunchy granola neo-hippies whose life's work is to raise the Sheroe in all of us and to fight Power, literally from the inside out. And we've all stood, side by side, in the belief that parenting can be an agent for personal freedom and citizenship. That children should be in the world, doing, being, becoming as the people and citizens they are now. It's amazing to me how, even as far and different our world views can be, when it comes to homeschoolers, we all stand in the belief that even as a private education choice what we are doing is helping our kids build the future of our country now.
At Amazon there are excerpts of Memoires for Paul de Man. I found this :
The gift of Mnemosyne ... is like the wax in which all that we wish to guard in our memory is engraved in relief so that it may leave a mark ... We preserve our memory and our knowledge of them; we can then speak of them, and do them justice, as long as their image ... remains legible.
But what happens when then lover of Mnemosyne has not received the gift of narration? When he doesn't know how to tell a story? When it is precisely because he keeps the memory that he loses the narrative?
I feel like somewhere back in 1996 I had lost the ability to write, to narrate and tell a story. Not just any story, but my story. It's taken me eight years to find my voice again. And it's not a voice. It's more like a poliphony of being. It's taken me eight years, having two kids and witnessing the miracle of my life with them to say, "Mnemosyne, I'm yours to speak".
So I thank you Derrida. With your life's work and my memories of it, you've given me the courage to take the road less traveled as a person, a woman, a writer, a lover, an around-swell gal. Most certainly though, you've affected how I am as a mother. Feu Mnemosyne, Derrida. May your fire forever live in my children's being.
Other Eulogies:
stevenberlinjohnson.com: Derrida Is Dead. Long Live Derrida!
Derrida from Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent
Weblogsky: Jacque Derrida
Jonathan Derbyshire: Mnemosyne
Posted by Liza Sabater in Activism, Aesthetics, Culture, Domesticity, Education, Epiphany, Feminism, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, Homeschooling, Indy Learning, Jacques Derrida, Life, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Neobaroque, Obituary, Philosophy, Politics, Post-structuralism, Umberto Eco, Writing
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» tribute to Derrida from philosophical conversations
I have neglected to mention Derrida's death. This tribute by Mark Taylor will disappear from the New York Times in [More...]
Found inOctober 22, 2004 05:23 AM
