The beginning, hopefully

I hope I catch Derrida's drift

I hope, constantly. I hope my bus turns up on time; I hope I meet my work deadline; I hope the price of gas doesn’t rise any higher. It’s the footnote to every worst-case scenario I concoct in my overtired brain. Well, I say. Hopefully not.

Yesterday afternoon I sat outside in the sun watching Derrida on my laptop while I crocheted a blanket for my soon-to-be-born nephew. It’s a 2002 documentary film about the philosopher I’ve spent the past four years reading, grappling with, trying to understand. Jacques Derrida, I’ve been thinking lately, is ultimately hopeful. Filled with questions of hospitality and forgiveness, unpredictability and acceptance, Derrida’s willingness to question and destabilise everything we take for granted as natural leads me to feel a deep sense of hope. As Nicholas Royle says in his summary of Derrida’s work (which I often find myself clinging to like a life raft): ‘The world could be so entirely different. Everything can be rethought’.

Kirby Dick throws Derrida a curveball towards the end of the documentary.

‘If you had a choice,’ Dick asks, ‘Which philosopher would you have liked to have been your mother?’

The question makes Derrida laugh: ‘That’s his style?’, he asks Amy Ziering Kofman, incredulously. He thinks, for more than a moment.

‘It’s impossible for me to have any philosopher as a mother, that’s the problem,’ Derrida ultimately concludes. ‘Because the figure of the philosopher is, for me, always a masculine figure.’

Philosophy, Derrida suggests, has historically been linked to the paternal figure. His mother would be a deconstructive philosopher: an inheritor, his granddaughter as mother. ‘And consequently, would be a woman who thinks. Not a philosopher.’

Watching the clip with a crochet hook in one hand and a strand of yarn in the other, the comment felt strangely pointed at me. After deciding later that evening to start this newsletter, I almost cynically titled it, ‘A woman who thinks’. Derrida’s comment put me on edge, particularly when, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak puts it, ‘Woman is nowhere’ in his work. I understand, though, in some sense the ways in which I might not be so threatened by such a position. I want to be deconstructive. I want to question meanings, to break down established norms, with the hope of rebuilding into something better, something unexpected. A future-to-come, unseen and unanticipated. Perhaps philosophy is phallocentric. Perhaps I want to be a woman who thinks. The term ‘thinking’ feels more broad, less grandiose than ‘philosophy’, and in turn more accessible, a better term for the kind of flexible and open work I want to do. There’s a problem there, in that someone might argue that some kind of internalised misogyny leads me to want to take a less grandiose position or title. I’d disagree. I think the absence of firm labels, the embrace of uncertainty, the openness to let my writing or mind flow where it will is precisely the kind of deconstructive gesture that Derrida’s talking about. I don’t think the term is exclusionary - at least I hope it isn’t.

I want to write for myself more frequently, and particularly about something which seems to underpin my work and life. I began my PhD research nearly three years ago, researching melancholia and spectrality in Welsh writing in English. As I’ve read and written, though, my writing as become constantly more hopeful, seeing gaps, loss and absence as space for new meaning to grow. Last year, Anna and I chose resources of hope as a theme for nawr magazine’s ninth issue, engaging with Raymond Williams’s edited collection and thinking about how we might use hope as a defence against an ever-bleaker world. This week, I finished Olivia Laing’s Funny Weather, a collection that, even though it doesn’t use Williams’s term, regards art as one of those resources of hope. It feels like hope keeps coming back to me, flagging me down, catching my eye. Flowers in the gaps between pavement slabs.

I want to use this space to write freely, about what I’m thinking, reading, and doing, but underpin these ideas with the sense of hope that has been sneaking into my work over the last few years. I want to share those ideas and hear what people have to say back. I want to stick with this project. Hopefully.