For Better or for Worse (There Again …)

[Rousseau] voudrait dire que le progrès, si ambivalent soit-il, se fait ou bien vers le pire, ou bien vers le meilleur, soit en bien, soit en mal.

….

Mais Rousseau décrit ce qu'il ne voudrait pas dire: que le progrès se fait et vers le pire et vers le meilleur. A la fois. Ce qui annule l'eschatologie et la téléologie, de même que la différence—ou articulation originaire—annule l'archéologie.

—Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie¹

Who or what, in these still dark days of an ongoing melancholia I began by declaring "militant," militantly melancholic,² something that wanted to affirm, with Jacques himself, a certain refusal of the "normal" work of mourning and its "normal" dealings with the death of the other³—a proudly militant melancholia that soon, however, settled into something much less glorious, much less proud, much more melancholic, in fact—who or what, then, might come to open something again that might lay some claim, however modest, to the sometimes very minimal dignity of what often bears the probably misleading name of "thought"? What minute arrival or advent blipping the otherwise flat line of a life not perhaps worthy of the name "life" could perhaps be considered event enough to bear thinking, to bear thinking about, calling for, or bringing about the slightest turn or veer of thought, clinamen perhaps, from which the unrelieved gray of what had now seemed to be the only horizon was at least minimally disturbed or torn by whatever, or whomever, seemed to arrive from somewhere quite different, from an entirely other plane or place? Or perhaps it was nothing, after all, nothing and no one, certainly no appreciable lifting or lightening of the gloom (still less any romantic lightning flash in the night), nothing perhaps except the perhaps itself: perhaps nothing—and so perhaps something, perhaps who, perhaps what, in a kind of etiolated affirmation of something so exiguous that it came even before the who or the what, before even the quod-before-the-quid, something so exiguous in its apparent flicker on the grayed-out screen not even frontally viewed but at the extreme all but unseen edge of lateral sight, perhaps nothing after all, but still apparently enough, just enough, barely, minimally enough to start, to make me start, start again, as here, in spite of everything, in extremis, I appear in fact to have started.

Just this intolerability makes a start, perhaps, and even a tolerable start. Each time the start starts out, volens nolens, willy-nilly, long before I know what kind of start it will have been, will turn out to have been. Even though I know nothing yet about how good or bad the start is, it's good to start, it's better to start than not to start. That there be something rather than nothing. Like writing in Derrida's special sense, "beyond good and evil,"⁴ or rather before good and evil, this side of good and evil, before even good and bad, prior to any axiological determination whatsoever (as he might have said), that there be something rather than nothing, or rather that something happen, perhaps happen, that the gray horizon be surprised, minimally but by definition absolutely, that it start—that the start start and make a start is, unconditionally (for just this is the unconditional itself "beyond" or before sovereignty)—that it start is unconditionally good. Or rather, because this is not God, not the Good, not epikeina tes ousias, that the start start and make a start is unconditionally better.

That's better.

But "better" can't straightforwardly mean a process of "getting better" in the sense of getting better and better, each moment better than the last which was better already than the one before, nor any type of dialectical complication of this schema, however refined. The start, in that it starts, is better, absolutely, but it doesn't get any better than that. One thing I learned from Jacques Derrida would be a radical suspicion (which...