Derrida’s Jesus

For Ryan Tracy

“And if the assumption of responsibility for one’s discourse leads to the conclusion that all conclusions are genuinely provisional and therefore inconclusive, that all origins are similarly unoriginal, that responsibility itself must cohabit with frivolity, this need not be cause for gloom.”

—Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, preface to Derrida’s Of Grammatology

She stands facing the tomb’s mouth. A void. A BLACK HOLE. The absence to end all absences. Framed within the stone. All she sees is darkness. EMPTINESS. VIOLATION. Gutted by space, robbed of interiority. She turns and runs. She finds the others—Simon Peter, the beloved John—and she begs them to come with her, to see for themselves what has happened. The MONSTROSITY. When they arrive, the men enter to find that there is nobody there. No body. The linens have been cast aside; the head-bandages—the NAPKIN—wrapped together in a place of its own. He is gone. The body is gone. So quickly, so silently it slipped from the edge of the canvas. Offstage. Jesus abandoned the premises. I think about the DEW on the grass. Early morning. Grey SKIES before dawn. I think about a WOMAN who has not slept all night. A woman who has, instead, spent the hours keening with grief. Weeping for that which she has lost. Her mourning is two-fold: all at once for the MAN, the teacher, the companion, the friend—the INCARNATION. And then there is the confusion: why has it all come to THIS? This bitter end? Wasn’t there some other plan? Wasn’t there some fundamental MEANING to it all? In the beginning there was the LOGOS, and the LOGOS was with GOD. Teleology for redemption? A way to enter into the presence of GOD. At last, to be rescued from all this UGLINESS. We believed every word he said. Under the April MOON, she sat by her BED and wept, her face warped by grief—a terrible sensation, as if each RIB were being pried open. Her HEART scooped out with a white-hot ladle. She wanted him. She wanted. She wanted. She wanted. She couldn’t bear it any longer; and so, she packed up her SPICES and her FLOWERS. She got dressed, tied her SANDALS, and headed out down the rocky path through JERUSALEM toward Joseph’s house, toward his garden with the rock-hewn tomb. I imagine this morning pilgrimage. Not one person is on the street as she makes her way to the garden. She feels like a fugitive in this pursuit—as if she is searching for something illicit—a minor necrophilia. Her GRIEF will not be assuaged. If she cannot be near her living teacher, she will be with his BODY. As near the corpse as possible. What he has left behind. What his soul has abandoned. Derrida suggests that we are caught in the LOGIC OF SUPPLEMENTARITY. Every WORD is defined by absence (this is why I am an alcoholic—baby, my drug of choice is MORE) I am Jean-Jacques. I need more of his things, his sheets, his clothes, his objects. How embarrassing. I desire because I lack. I lack. I lack. I lack. I am Jean-Jacques, I swear. I am SAD. I am not CRAZY. Who hasn’t walked the street where the beloved lives, hoping to be closer to him? “I have often walked down this street before…” Who hasn’t spirited away some token of the beloved: a lock of his hair, a mouthful of his cum—some object that one hopes might bring about complete fulfillment, the complete presence? But we learn, all too soon, the truth: objects are not subjects. For example, Jonah’s JOCKSTRAP. I didn’t steal it exactly. He knew I took it. “It’s old,” he said. I thought he wanted me to have it. I snatched the SIGN, as if it were the SIGNIFIED. St. Augustine’s BOAT (how SAD and EMBARRASSING). Jonah may have been packing his things to go out of town. To go to FIRE ISLAND. Or PROVINCETOWN. Or, maybe even then, he was planning to leave me—to make his escape for good, finally and forever. How fast. Slip! Out of my fingers. Out of the tomb. In one moment, he was puttering around the BEDROOM, in the CLOSET, making coffee in the KITCHEN, singing in the SHOWER; and, then he was GONE. I held the jockstrap in my hands. I put it on. I pranced in front of the mirror. I wore it to bed as if it were my jockstrap. I took it off. I inhaled the smell, my nose pressed up against the pouch, searching for his scent like a dog. Hunting for him. Conjuring him. Wanting to breathe him in, to get him inside me—some part of him which he had discarded, some particles of skin or hair or sweat—whatever he had left, whatever he had deemed unworthy of the journey, whatever he had identified as no longer him, no longer essential to the category JONAH, what he betrayed and abandoned in his flight from me. His departure. His escape. What he gave up in order to be more…Jonah. FOR INSTANCE! The stained-glass window at the front of the church I attended as a little boy. It showed an image of Jesus praying in Gethsemane, asking God the FATHER to take away the burden of CRUCIFIXION, the burden of saving humankind. Deep BLUE, PURPLE. A BUSH the color of emerald. A scarlet CLOAK. What an odd image, a meta-image—the SIGNIFIER pleading with the SIGNIFIED: Please. Please do not make me. Do not make me be what you have determined me to be. What you have made immanent in your transcendence. What you have limited me to be. For the Son cannot be the COWARD and the HERO. He cannot be the CRIMINAL, the PERVERT, the LIAR, the THIEF, the LEPER, the LUNATIC. He must be CONSISTENT—TRUE because he is the incarnation of TRUTH. The logos made FLESH. Derrida says: unfortunately, Jesus, you are caught in the logic of supplementarity—always more, yes always more and more and more; an agonized state of being, due to the inherent difference of words—différance as ontological metric, and eternal deferment. Oh, how we slip along the chain of signification, unraveling incessantly! When will there be an end to all this yearning? All this needing and hoping, NEED and HOPE, again, again, again, ouroboros—each feeding the other. I am TIRED. I look OLD. I am always chasing. I am the SHARK, the ALLIGATOR, the BADGER. I am the DOG in pursuit of the RABBIT. When will I catch that which eludes me? Just when I think I have it in my teeth, it slips out of my mouth, and I go wild with hunger. Derrida’s theory unravels the logos, deconstructing a binary. Binaries are so UNPOPULAR these days, so passé, and yet they are necessary for any formal exercise. Formal exercises (Derrida laughs: Ha! Ha! Ha!) like platonic forms—some fundamental, metaphysical truth that is beyond us—outside, past the rim of heaven. Something to which we might return when our souls ascend on the wings of Eros. (And when we return to this ideal form, fixed for all eternity, the sight of such matchless truth will refresh the soul. Hence, the journey of the philosopher leads toward truth.) To which, Derrida says: unfortunately…well, you know. Meaning is made by absence, difference. (Jonah, Jonah, the way your cock tastes, beloved, is not like any other man’s cock. Your cock tastes like metal. But it is not metal. It is different than all the cocks I have tasted. It is different, even, from metal). If I could talk to Derrida, I would ask him this: is it even possible for full presence to exist as logos, because logos—by its very ontology—requires lack—something that it is not, in order to define itself as…logos? (Derrida says: Good grief) For example, the stained-glass window where Jesus, as signifier, lacks the PERVERT, the WHORE, the LEPER, the MADMAN. Where Plato has my soul longing for the ridge of heaven, Derrida tells me that even that will disappoint me. (Never get your hopes up, stupid—it can all be deconstructed!) Even that will inaugurate another cycle of longing and desire. But what if Magdalene, as she approached the tomb—what if she had, in fact, found that for which she had been looking? The corpse. Still, fixed, touchable, holdable, smellable, consumable. Where there once was a subject, there could have been an object—consummated, complete. If God were logocentric, then when she approached the tomb, she would have found the ever-present Logos, the full presence of God. Wrapped in linens, swaddled in his tomb. DEAD! But, no, that’s not right either. Because the BODY OF CHRIST is a sign made by ABSENCE. The INCARNATION cannot be the FAGGOT, the ZOMBIE, the PHILOSOPHER, the MAD SCIENTIST.  But fortunately (or unfortunately?) things that are alive are in motion. Like the breath of God that swept over the disciples on Pentecost. The SPIRIT. The re-spirit-ation. Respiration. Inspiration. The winds of change. The wind exhaled into Adam’s body when Adonai leaned over his creation, the perfect body made from the mud of Eden, and kissed his beloved image. And the earth breathed, sighed, cooed, and began to move about the garden—speaking and naming—This tree is different than that tree! This creature is different from that creature!—forever entangling the signified with the signifier. Announcing the dance of signification, of language. Until the moment when Adam and Eve demanded to know the difference between GOOD and EVIL. (This is a bad idea, not worth it…) Perhaps it was such a wind that blew Jonah out of my life, swept him out of our apartment, down the hall, and out the front door of the building and onto Fort Washington Avenue. Blew with all its might, until he landed in the arms of another man. I remember unlocking the front door—the turn of the key, the sound of something slipping into its slot. I opened the door. I hoped I would see him there, sitting on the couch or reading in bed. Instead there was nothing, nobody. NO BODY. The man was alive, and he was in motion. How I stood, like poor Magdalene, and observed the room (tomb?)—EMPTY. I was certain he was alive, because he was gone. Heraclitus says that no man steps into the same river twice. The waters always flow and shift and change. And in this image, one encounters the paradox of God, that fugitive logos, who is somehow always changing and always staying the same—staying the same by always changing. Like the ocean SHORELINE, which is always rushing and swelling and crashing against the rocky SHORE in a constant dynamic, but yet always the same by being…not the same (Derrida says: you’ve got to be kidding me) Or the SUN—that fiery charioteer, riding across the sky from east to west—the emblem of the earth’s movement through the cosmos: always the same, day after day. Waxing and waning. But always returning to the same rhythms, the same hours—so much so, that we can master the wildness of the sun, THAT BLAZING GOD, with a WATCH. If I should have counted on Jonah for anything, it should have been that he would leave me. I should have counted on the unbearable truth that I couldn’t count on him. Things that are ALIVE are not to be trusted. This includes: TREES and BEES and BATS and BIRDS and BEASTS and BACTERIA and…BOYFRIENDS. BINGO! SHARKS, SPIDERS, ALLIGATORS, POLAR BEARS. The WOLF. The BADGER—he does not give a fuck. Heraclitus’ wild river. The beating wings of my SOUL as I approached JONAH for the first time, touched him for the first time, and felt his MOUTH on my MOUTH. Oooooooh la la. We broke open together, our souls flooded with blood: engorged, the feathers erect, and then—UP, UP, UP INTO HEAVEN! We fucked…Until I stared out upon the outside of heaven. Socrates told me that whatever I would see would be fixed and immovable, constant and consummated, PERFECT. But if that were TRUE, I would have seen a CORPSE. What I saw instead was more like the roiling OCEAN, the LIONESS sinking her teeth into the gazelle. The GRASS growing. The SON leaving the tomb.

—

Patrick Clement James is a poet and essayist from Woodstown, NJ. His work has appeared in journals such as AGNI, The Cincinnati Review, American Chordata, The Mid-American Review, Oversound, and Barrow Street. He has also published extensively as a music critic for Parterre Box. He currently teaches writing at West Chester University of Pennsylvania.