Derrida and Rain: The Necessity of Contextualization

Introduction

The gods were bored; therefore, they created human beings. Adam was bored because he was alone; therefore, Eve was created. Since that moment, boredom entered the world and grew in quantity in exact proportion to the growth of population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille. After that, the population of the world increased and the nations were bored en masse.

—Soren Kierkegaard (286)

We hate boredom. We create; we play in order to postpone boredom. We search for any possible capacity to play. We created language first and went further then, for literature, metaphor, symbol, and other possibilities in language to defer boredom. Interpretability of language, this infinite feasibility of play, may be the most precious gift that we have ever established to escape boredom. We enjoy words and signs as they have pure sovereignty over our knowledge. They are the most available things and, at the same time, they still have the pure susceptibility to offer a new shade and surprise us. They are unachievable, and that is what gives us the possibility of perfect play. So what can be more frightening than this claim that words are completely possible to be known? My essay is focused on a critical analysis of a simple sentence by French philosopher/writer Jacques Derrida: "I know what rain is" (Derrida and Stiegler, Echographies 13). In my essay, I will try to discuss the idea that this is not an accidental approach to philosophy and linguistics; it is not a random sentence in Derrida's philosophy. I will discuss the relation between knowing a subject and knowing the truth of the subject based on "Phaedrus" and "Dissemination," and then I will work on the truth-being twofold in Heidegger's interpretation of Greek metaphysics. Following that, the main contradiction between Heidegger's argument and Derrida's key claim will show up in Heidegger's interpretation of ontological difference. At the end, I will discuss the noticeable consequences of Derrida's approach in his theory of deconstruction.

Who Knows What Rain Is?

Derrida defines the event as an unreducible, undeniable thing that happens. This event is another name for experience in his own words in "Artifactualities," even though he means not just any experience, but the "experience of the other" (Derrida and Stiegler, Echographies 11). Derrida tries to examine this manifest that the there is that is always in contradiction with pure nothingness may belong to the experience of the event instead of the horizon of being, and this is a claim worthy of investigation. He tries in Aporias and Specters of Marx to clarify a concept that is in a close relationship with an event and can be set in a certain structure: the messianic arrival (arrivance) that takes place by who may—or may never—come. And just in this pure disappointment and uncertainty about the coming of the arrivant, there is a relationship to the event. However, it is not just this uncertainty about the possibility of the occurrence of an event that makes it worthy of the name; but the arrivant must be absolutely Other. Thus it will be "an Other that I expect not to be expecting that I am not waiting for, whose expectation is made of a non-expectation, an expectation without what in philosophy is called a horizon of expectation" (Derrida and Stiegler, Echographies 13). What Derrida offers as the event is the disturbance of the boundary between possible and impossible. He writes that "it is necessary to speak here of the im-possible that is not only impossible, that is not only the opposite of the possible, that is also the condition or the chance of the possible. An im-possible that is the experience itself of the possible" (Derrida, "Une certaine possibilité" 101). Considering this, it should be noticed that the event is not impossible logically. Its condition of possibilities is erected on a phenomenological impossibility. The occurrence of the event is incoherent with our horizon of expectation. The impossibility of the event can...