At times I feel like I've done something wrong in my writing. When I'm falling asleep sometimes I will get the childish feeling that I am naked in front of a group of people. This fills me with the feeling that I should stop everything at once and burn my papers. But when I wake I no longer feel that way. I feel like writing is something that must be done regardless of the way I feel at a certain time. Since the self-doubt is weaker, I let my behavior win out and I continue to write. This is a quote from Jacques Derrida on his own work: Imagine a child who does something horrible... and is haunted by dreams of being naked in front of a crowd. In any case, in this half sleep before I fall completely asleep I have the impression that I've done something criminal or disgraceful and I shouldn't have done it. Someone is telling me "But you're mad to have done that." And this is something I truly believe in my half sleep. The implied command in this is "Stop everything! Take it back! Burn your papers!" But once I wake up, it's over. What this means or how I interpret this is that when I'm awake, conscious, working, in a certain way I am more unconscious than in my half sleep. When I'm in that half sleep there's a kind of vigilance (pathology) that tells me the truth. First of all, it tells me that what I'm doing is very serious. But when I'm awake and working this vigilance is actually asleep. It's not the stronger one of the two. And so I do what must be done.
I feel I knew this feeling, this feeling of ignoring the truth so that my current behavior can continue on. The feeling that this is the way things are meant to be (outside of my mind). I knew what it meant to have one feeling win out, but the question is what is going on at that point in time. People who seek truth out of every crevasse would wonder about such things as well. What is inside us that decides whether something should be changed or something is too important to be replaced? I hope that by pairing Derrida's statement with one by Friedrich Nietzsche I can start to answer profound questions like that.
"So we remain necessarily strangers to ourselves, we do not understand ourselves, we have to keep ourselves confused. For us this law holds for all eternity: "Each man is furthest from himself." Where we ourselves are concerned, we are not "knowledgeable people.""
One thing someone not familiar with Nietzsche might miss in this passage is his idea that in order to have a self one must necessarily be somewhat unaware of it. He would argue that the self is created without our needing to be aware of it. So what is it that keeps thing hidden? What is it that perpetually rips seekers of truth from their path and allows them to continue to live based on previous behavior? More importantly or nobly what is it that gets us to get out there and change who we are?
Personally speaking my need for experiences which gratify my desire for what is new and foreign and somehow liberating. I yearn to be immersed in an experience which will teach me something, anything new. That is why life is so great. This may be the reason Nietzsche says there is a certain mystery to existence and Derrida blatantly ignores certain states of mind.
Derrida appears to accept the idea that whatever is happening at the present moment in his consciousness should be followed and believed. That is how the moment of his dream of childish embarrassment sticks out like a sore thumb and what he calls the seriousness of his act of writing is so violently convincing. One might guess that if Derrida's perception of reality were constantly changing he would be unable to figure out which was the right one for him to feel. A reality of extremes in a reality of now. A reality which is impossible to fit together, each moment isolated from
Derrida's "problem" (to tie it back in) is that he has doubts as to the essential value of his work. He has two opposing mind-states battling for control over (in this case) the act of writing. The problem is that he does not think twice about it, he simply accepts the consciousness he's been given. The fact of the matter is that regarding the act of writing, Derrida has not thought about it. The act of writing, for him, is one which needs no second guessing. Where is this blindness, and why is living easy with eyes closed? Why is creation easy with eyes closed? How can creation be so easy? (I think really creative people live in that space, and that they don't thing too highly of themselves because they know how easy it can be).
Sea of signifiers ----->endless amount of words for derrida to play with-----> never being bored
