#inexistent

[dynamightsfave]

someone: so, what’s your type?

me: it mostly consists of sarcastic little bitches that are funny with their dark humor, sometimes they’re awkward as hell, sometimes their flirty little shits. sometimes they have terrible traumas, sometimes they don’t, sometimes they have anger issues, sometimes they're super calm. sometimes they’re not sarcastic at all, and instead they’re so sweet. but what they all have in common is that they are fictional, do not exist in real life (even though i really wish they did) and i have no chance with them.

[cure-your-delusions]

[greenandbluebubblegum]

Me when my friends propose a plan: I love you but I am not in the mood.

[selcouthangel]

you don't understand, I'm still really mad at my inexistent boyfriend..because he broke up with me and was dating my feien-enemy in my dreams..i woke up upset, and it's been like 4 hours and I'm really bothered.

[versesofaplumcheic]

Vincenzo Agnetti

[helpless-daydream]

Whenever I see you, whenever you walk past me, whenever you cross my mind, my heart skips a beat; but you have no idea I exist.

[sterwood]

In homage to Derrida, I will say and write from now on inexistance with an 'a'. Inexistance. As he said différance. And, after all, very close to what he wanted to say when he invented, a very long time ago, the word différance. The word différance is basically the operation through which Jacques Derrida attempted to put inexistence down. To put it down as you put something down in writing. He tried to put down the inexistent in the différance as an act of writing, as a sliding. In imitation of Derrida, I will also attempt to put down inexistence, by imposing the sliding from Ie' to 'a', which signifies, in its worldly manner of inexisting that its being is nonetheless irreducible. We are naught, let us be. This is the imperative of inexistance. There is no way out of that.

Badiou - “Homage to Jacques Derrida” in Adieu Derrida ed. Costas Douzinas.

This is actually a really touching form of tribute in a way - though would be a form of tribute that Derrida would likely find distasteful. This is Badiou through and through.

Derrida would find this to be a kind of violence, likely, taking the fludity of his terms and literary gestures and incorporating them into the ‘same’ of Badiou’s language. Badiou is basically here saying “let me take your form of speech and incorporate it into my own, let me make it mine”. At the same time, though, this corresponds to Badiou’s biggest critique of Derrida in this essay: though Derrida’s desire for the vanishing point - desire to ‘tread lightly’ so as to not obscure the inexistant at a minimal degree of appearance in a world - was beautiful and useful, it also prevented him from taking sides when the fervor of the moment demanded a splitting of the One into a Two. By this, he means that Derrida was silent (’he treaded softly’) during the revolutionary years of the late 60s and early 70s. Derrida was unwilling to draw lines in the sand and take action based on a side formed through the scission of the dialectic.

Here Badiou is taking sides in this gesture of potential violence. He is saying “in the time following Derrida’s death, in a time when his locutions are seen as needless contortions of language and useless rambling, I am taking the stance that Derrida’s legacy is worth protecting. I will do this in the most intimate way possible: I will fold him into my language, to give his ideas a minimal appearance in the world of my writings, so as to make Derrida into the vanishing point he desired. This is my fidelity to Derrida.”

[sterwood]

Derrida is the opposite of the hunter. The hunter hopes that the animal will stop so he can shoot it. He hopes that he can put an end to the vanishing of the animal. Derrida, hopes that the vanishing will not cease to vanish, that the 'thing' (the vanishing point) will be shown in its evidence without any interruption of its vanishing, in its incessant disappearing. The textual stake of Derrida's desire is that all appearance is sustained by a (dis)appearance, only the vanishing of which can be localised in the forest of sense.

But localising the vanishing point - to say nothing of seizing it, which would be its death -- is, in fact, impossible. This is because the vanishing point is what, within a place (lieu), is outside that place (hors-lieu). It is the outside within. Because the vanishing point exists only in its act beyond the place, it is not possible to localise it exactly. To show the vanishing one has to penetrate deep into the forest that localises it. During the walk, you learn that you cannot show the vanishing; at most you can show, from a fair distance, the localisation of the vanishing, a thicket or clearing. This already is very risky.

[…]

Deconstruction, in reality, consists in restraining the discursive operations in such a way that the space of the vanishing is localisable as on a map, by saying: 'The treasure is there or, the source is there. What is going away is there but tread softly, very softly ... If not, the treasure will be purloined, the source will no longer flow. I have a map, but it is vague, vague enough to avoid stepping on the treasure ... One step on the treasure and it is no longer worth anything. Even chance is risky ... tread softly.’

Badiou - “Homage to Jacques Derrida” in Adieu Derrida ed. Costas Douzinas

This is probably the best description of deconstruction I’ve ever seen. It also solidified my commitment to the idea that Derrida is, in a way, still very important to our contemporary moment (though not in the guise of a ‘linguistic turn’ as I argued earlier).