Re: ah, sweet mystery of life (for Robbie)

Robbie,

There was a time when this was one of Derrida's favorite words. He uses it
quite often throughout his career.

I hate to suggest yet another text, but I will.

You might want to read:

*Aporias*

by Jacques Derrida, Stanford University Press, 1993.

Although Derrida has written often about this word, not only in his readings
of Plato and other Greek philosophers, but in his readings of literature as
well, he says some very interesting things about it in this text as he
examines the relationship of the word to questions of edges, limits,
trespassing, and especially to death and dying, as he reads a section of
Being and Time.

He addresses some intriguing questions:

"But the question of knowing what it means 'to experience the aporia,' indeed
to put into operation the aporia, remains. It is not necessarily a failure
or a simple paralysis, the sterile negativity of the impasse. It is neither
stopping at it nor overcoming it. (When someone suggests to you a solution
for escaping an impasse, you can be almost sure that he is ceasing to
understand, assuming he had understood anything up to that point.)

"Let us ask: what takes place, what comes to pass with the aporia? Is it
possible to undergo or experience the aporia, the aporia as such? Is it then
a question of the aporia as such? Of a scandal arising to suspend a certain
viability? Does one then pass through this aporia? Or is one immobilized
before the threshold, to the point of having to turn around and seek out
another way, the way without method or outlet of a Holzweg or a turning that
could turn the aporia -- all such possibilities of wandering? What takes
place with the aporia? What we are apprehending here concerning what takes
place also touches upon the event as that which arrives at the river's shore,
approaches the shore, or passes the edge -- another way of happening and
coming to pass by surpassing. All of these are possibilities of the 'coming
to pass' when it meets a limit. Perhaps nothing ever comes to pass except on
the line of a transgression, the death [trepas] of some 'trespassing' [in
English in the original].

To see how Derrida attempts to answer these questions of the aporia as they
relate to the threshold of death and the limits of borders and edges, it will
be necessary to read the text.

But as I typed the line, "Or is one immobilized before the threshold," I
thought instantly of our friend from the country -- who is before the Law --
and of that most aporetic of writers.

All the best,

--John

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Received on Sat Mar 8 18:41:29 2003