Discourse, Death, Delight
On that very day (Oct. 9, 2004), this author was buried in A Discourse on Love, by Roland Barthes, Derrida's predecessor in Paris and master. I later sent out 50 love-grams to various women who have ignored him, quoting Barthes' infamous "I-Love-You" and "I Am Mad."
That night, with the Derrida news and Barthes' sensual words glowing in his skull, this author sees The Motorcycle Diaries, about Che Guevara's "found" diaries of a trip taken long before the Cuban Revolution, sure he will hate Walter Salle's translation of those golden words into film. No! Not only does he love the film, he sees that Che, Jacques and Roland (Barthes) are one man.
Enough of journalistic sensation. Let's go back and take up the "facts" one by one:
1. It was Jacques Chirac, president of France, who saluted Derrida on his passing. This is roughly akin to George W. Bush warbling in a press conference the virtues of the late Stephen Jay Gould, who knocked off Darwin in his huge, magnificent The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. It wouldn't, in brief, happen. Derrida, like Barthes in his later years, persuaded too few of us that no word is "objective" or inflexible in its meaning: The viewer of a film, in brief, becomes the film. It is what you see or think you see that turns the film into meaning. Sure you can debate this meaning with your friends-I fought like a madman with my friends over Salle's production of the Diaries (they wanted more redness: It is already crimson, I said-but then I have experienced too many left-wing police states). Hey, Derrida is impossible to understand, you will also say. Well, suck on these words until I tell you what a golden thing they mean:
This event I called a rupture...the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse...a system in which the central signified...is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and play of signification infinitely.
2. I knew Roland Barthes about as well as an American whose French is limited can know a French intellectual whose English is almost as bad. I met him in Paris in 1978 on the way home from Documenta 6 in Germany, just as he was about to publish A Discourse on Love, a breakthrough book that alienated him from his rigid Structuralist past and surely delighted the younger Derrida. Before I quote to you the exact words he quoted to me (from the manuscript of his book, later published here in English in 1979 by Hill & Wang), let me tell you about a knock on the floor.
"Excuse moi," he said, walking over to the rug in the center of the room, pulled it up, descended down a waiting ladder, and rose up five minutes later, replacing the rug. "Ma Mère," he said ("My mother").
The last book he wrote, Camera Lucida, now presumed to be a classic analysis of photography, is in fact a long love poem to his mère. Not long after she died, Barthes himself died, run over on the street by a truck. About love, he was radiantly indecisive-but wildly passionate:
je t'aime/I-love-you
The figure refers not to the declaration of love, to the avowal. But to the repeated utterance of the love cry... Once the first avowal has been made, "I love you" has no meaning whatever; it merely repeats in an enigmatic mode-so blank does it appear-the old message... The situations in which I say I-love-you cannot be classified: I-love-you is irrepressible and unforeseeable... I-love-you belongs neither to the realm of linguistics nor in that of semiology...in the proferring of I-love-you, desire is neither repressed (as in what is uttered) nor recognized (where we did not expect it: as in the uttering itself), but simply: released, as an orgasm. Orgasm is not spoken, but it speaks and it says I-love-you? This formula responds to no ritual; the situations in which I say I-love-you cannot be classified.
I am Crazy.
It frequently occurs to the amorous subject that he is or is going mad... I am mad to be in love. I am not mad to be able to say so; I double my image: insane in my own eyes (I know my delirium), simply unreasonable in the eyes of someone else, to whom I quite sanely describe my madness: conscious of this madness, sustaining a discourse upon it... Love drives me nearly mad, but I not communicate with the supernatural, there is nothing of the sacred within me; my madness, a mere irrationality, is dim, even invisible; besides it is entirely recuperated by the culture: it frightens no one.
3. It was madness-or what Che's friend and fellow medical student, Alberto Granado, called "improvisation"-that drove him to insist on a long nine-month trip from the bottom of Latin America to the top, from Argentina to Venezuela. (Cuba came later: It is barely mentioned in either the film or the Diaries, first rediscovered in 1993, long after Che's fabled death at the hands-perhaps-of the CIA, and not published here until the late 90s.) The ride indulged deeply in both sex and resistance to political oppression. During these months, Che becomes more and more horrified by the suffering he sees. In one of the film's most dramatic moments, he leaps into a turbulent river to swim across to an island filled with bleeding, disfigured, half-starving lepers.
Near the end of the film, director Salles allows him only to say he is appalled by the "injustice" he found, after returning to his middle-class home. In signified fact, Che tells us in the Diaries much more: He wants to go beyond the study of mere medicine-though later he becomes an M.D.-and attack the real evil that structures society:
I will be on the side of the people... I will take to the barricades and the trenches...stain my weapons with blood, and, mad with rage, will cut the throat of any vanquished foe I encounter.
The rest of the "story" is almost too well-known, if not romanticized (witness the endless t-shirts on every campus featuring Che's death mask). He meets Fidel much later. In the mid-50s they invade and conquer Batista's Cuba. But Che cannot bear the life of a bureaucrat, even as Minister of Defense. He travels to Europe, decides Soviet Communism is anathema for a free man, returns to Latin America on his own, ignoring Fidel, and is finally captured by "Bolivia," which executes him, surely with our manic, misguided help, not aware that Che was perhaps the only potential rival to Fidel on the left.
What links these three men: their minds, their friends, their lives? Immediately I confess to you I didn't know when I began writing. Instinct alone drove me to take them all on at once. Long ago when I began practicing this craft under intense deadlines to earn my living, I often learned all I needed to do was begin. In the end, only then, would I know the inner truth of the subjects assigned me. In this case, I imposed Derrida, Barthes and Guevara on myself. And now, only now, I see, as I leaf through Derrida's infamous Writing and Difference (U. Chicago Press, 1980), where I remember vividly his quoting Artaud: "In my view no one has the right to call himself author, that is, creator."
Under the pressure of these very lines you are reading, I see the link:
Each of these men had the instinct for discourse, or what Che's friend Alberto called "improvisation." They loved embracing new thoughts, new conclusions, suggested by what they read, saw or experienced. Some expressed it theoretically (Derrida, who just left us, apparently). Some did so poetically or rhetorically (Barthes). Some acted, rashly but nobly (Che).
And in the end of course it is Derrida, master theorist, who teaches your author, as well as you, the grand unifying truth: sensual proximity, via love, violence or solitude with the world, with life itself-this is how, in the end, we learn anything remotely signifying "truth." As each of our trio learned, in the end:
The Face-to-Face eludes every category. For within it, the face is given simultaneous as expression and as speech...for "thought is language"...an element analogous to sound and light... Its signification is therefore irreducible... It does not incarnate, envelop or signal anything than self, soul, subjectivity, etc. Thought is speech, and is therefore immediately...face.