A version of this appeared in ArtUS Magazine, Spring 2004

Necrospective

It is an image fit to be read. A dashing older man sits, vaguely pensive, his gaze penetrating but benevolent, in what looks like a director's chair made of wood with a canvas back. His shirt is well tailored, his pants are dark. His left hand rests on the arm of the chair, the pinky raised slightly. The other fingers appear to be holding something, perhaps a pair of spectacles. On his knee rests a book, held half open by his other hand. Behind him is a simple table, a single candle alight in a holder encrusted with drips of hardened wax. Beyond that, there is only darkness.

He has turned to face us, his expression subtle. The head is tilted forward, the shoulders slightly hunched. His neck is not visible. His bushy white hair is combed back and slightly to the side. The faintest shadow of a smile plays upon his lips, one side of the mouth curving upwards, giving his person an air of curious irony. The eyes are very dark with brows darker than his hair, one raised a bit, questioning. They are sharp, probing, concentrated and aware, but neither menacing nor inviting. His entire posture speaks of sophistication and intellectual distinction, this man is clearly the deepest of thinkers.

While looking on-line through the various obituaries for the recently deceased Jacques Derrida, who passed away in October of pancreatic cancer, I was impressed with the emphasis so many writers chose to place on the supposed abstruseness of deconstruction. Occultic metaphors ran rampant, "diabolically difficult" being my personal favorite. None failed to mention Derrida's expulsion from school as a Jewish child in French Algeria due to Vichy anti-Semitic laws nor the controversy surrounding the collaborationist journalism of his close friend and colleague Paul de Man, exhumed after his death (also of cancer) in 1983. Derrida was a thinker as reviled as he was praised, deconstruction feared as the embodiment of an academic nihilism, an undermining of assumptions too useful to discard. The specter of the Jew as Black Magician, an impenetrable and incomprehensible Other, bent on unraveling all that surrounds him, has long haunted the cultures of the European West. He is a shade of words, a magician of textuality. It is, after all, the word that is central to the Judaic cult, the first of the three great monotheisms of the Book.

The pictorial tradition of the philosopher as memento mori is a long one. So particularly European, these countless images of saints and ancients in contemplation shadowed by mortality could only be the product of a continent that had finally succumbed to the death cult of Christianity, with its attendant cultures of sacrifice, apocalypse and sin. Clearly this photograph was constructed to be slot into this genre, the open book and candle are classic tropes of memento mori. There is, however, one allegorical trope that is conspicuously absent - the skull.

In his "Memoirs of the Blind", a sort of catalog for a show he had curated from the department of drawings at the Louvre, Derrida reproduces a fragment of a drawing by Bartolomeo Passarotti intriguingly titled "Cain and the Eye of Abel." I don't recall him saying much about it.

It would be unfair to gild Derrida with any sort of metaphysics. He was, after all, a man who for the greater part of his career upended many of the latent transcendentalisms hidden in the bedrock of our most treasured philosophical assumptions. But here within this culture of the remnants of late Christianity, the figure that has been cut for Derrida from the cloth of our archetypes is in fact one of supernatural power. He is a heretic and a magician, the learned but dangerous Chymist-Philosopher. I use the archaic "Chymist" instead of the modern "Alchemist" pointedly. I would like to avoid the post-Enlightenment derision of the Royal Art as a clunky proto-science, or worse, a corny New Age metaphor for self-actualization. The work towards the Philosopher's Stone was taken up by, well, philosophers, thinkers who were eager to distance themselves from the "puffers" and "charcoal burners" whose literalism tainted a pursuit of very close reading. Undoubtably a Chymist of dissolution, of solve , the return of this shade in Derrida fulfills all of the promise of the Black Jew, from the killers of Christ down to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Deconstruction could be nothing less than an all-out assault on the rationality of a Christian logic entrenched in the bunker of Western letters.

For nearly twenty years, Jacques Derrida refused to have his picture taken. If Judaism could be described as a cult devoid of image, deconstruction evidently could not. As of 1979, the caricatures of photography were allowed to join those more endemic to the discourses that he had clearly transcended.

We see a nude figure, androgynous though presumably male, from behind, his legs crossed, one hand upon his hip and leaning casually on a shovel, its handle intersecting with his armpit, its point resting but not penetrating a ground implied by scratchy lines beneath his feet, intimating shadow. The figure is rendered oddly in a sort of cursive, ethereal with the curlicues which define it. It is as if he has been teased out of writing rather than drawing as it is usually understood, a containment of the flourishes and ornamentation accompanying a John Hancock. Cain seems a frivolous shade, content to embellish the singularity of an absent signature. Autography, or rather that which contexualizes it as ornamentation (a frame), faces away and gazes upon the woeful orb emerging from a ground even less defined than that which refuses to part for his shovel. The shovel's work is done, it will be no party to an Oedipal blinding, this son of Adam who had tilled the earth and produced its first crops is now confronted by the strange fruit of his bloody sowing and the resistance of a soil now turned against him by God. The watchful eye of the murdered Good, conscience, can neither look back at the murderer nor at us, but rather up and away, rolling in its earth-socket to stare out of the frame and into the black.

The German pathologist Paul Langerhans (1847-1888), a close reader of the human corpus, was the first to make a careful and detailed description of the microscopic structure of the pancreas. He recorded his observations in highly accurate drawings with the assistance of a light microscope and the latest techniques of tissue staining. The insulin producing structures of the pancreas, the "Isles of Langerhans", were named for him, though their physiological role was not discovered until later. He was also involved in zoological and anthropological studies, publishing papers on the hearts of amphibious animals and the eye of the lamprey as well as studying skull proportions in the population of Palestine. Lampreys are a species of fresh water, eel-shaped jawless fish, easily recognized by their large suction cup mouth with its rows of teeth. They attach themselves to other, larger fish by means of their sucker, scraping open the skin with their rasping tongue and sucking the blood of their host.

Behind the sitter there is blackness. The blackness of ink, textual holes knocked into a white page, the black of a camera's aperture, the pupil of the eye, the black of Solomon's mirror, black as an obsidian knife used to hack away the heart of a sacrificial victim, black as the charcoal that terminates a candle's wick, black as the loam which buries, black as night, this black is a pool of potential from which the squiggles and scrawl of both writing and drawing are to be pulled. The eye of Abel is an inkwell. It seems that "conscience" and "consciousness" are the same word in French. The skull is not absent. We cannot see it because we are within it, enclosed within the cranial cavity is the chair, table, book, candle and sitter, the recording apparatus and audience within a space reverberating with the rattle of thinking. The curdled geography of the Isles of Langerhans and the scribbles of dark entangle the text of a man, another lamprey, parasite to too close a reading, and drag him down into decomposition. Outside, punched into the smooth hard surface of the skull, two sockets gaze black, the eyes of aporia.