The French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was no stranger to controversy. To use the street parlance of our times, he got up in more than a few grills in his day. Sacred cow after established truth after conventional wisdom went down under his nimble, playful pen and razor sharp mind. I'll never forget the rather disgraceful outpouring of vitriol that accompanied his death; so many clamored to take a shot at ole Jacques, with more than a few people making him out to be the great de(con)structive bogeyman of our time. I think this long standing caricariture of Derrida is deeply wrong; over time, getting over my own simplistic and uninformed views of the man, I've come to know a truly original and courageous thinker who's advanced and expanded the human mind. A deep thorn in the hegemonic modern mindset, Derrida was a highly creative and fertile thinker that rubbed against the (modern) world around him with a consistent evolutionary friction.
But how did Derrida himself feel about all this trouble, all this controversy, all this philosophical tension he was involved in? In this video below, Derrida relays his experience of being racked by fear (while sleeping) after writing a piece where he was challenging other thinkers or established cultural truths etc.. A friend sent me this video the other day because I'd recently begun to experience something similar. Particularly when I was writing my journals from the recent ISE, I started to experience this gripping anxiety and terror at night, sometimes tossing and turning for hours. When I wrote fellow Beams writer Bergen to tell him about this experience, he replied- "This is some of your best writing. You should use [the fear] as a meter and only write what makes your puny ego squirm! Then you'd know it's true". Doh!! I'm pretty sure that's not what I wanted to hear, but that sounds pretty wise. Perhaps this is just an unavoidable part of the journey of growth and evolution, part of what happens when "advancing into new territory", as Derrida puts it. Perhaps there'll always be fear tremors deep inside when we admit the inadmissible.
