데리다의 시, 「재 . . . 불」

Derrida's Feu la cendre: In the Margin of Language

Feu la cendre, the philosophical prose poem of Jacques Derrida, is an excellent example of Derrida's deconstructive poematics. It demonstrates the multifaceted implications of the cinder, confronting the concepts of a dead past and a dead end. This form avoids the analytical snarls and snares that result when writing depends on the binary opposition of the dialectical Cogito. In fact Derrida actually primes and then baits the dialectic by relying neither on a single typology, nor on synchronic or diachronic time. The cinders in the poem evoke an immediate image, a grey powder, hot or cold, and summon the important cinders appearing in the discourses of other thinkers, notably Nietzsche, Beckett, Jabès, to name only a few, but eventually empty out the previous allusions of the ashes, and delay what the ash there represents. In this way the cinder behaves exactly like Derrida's différance, alluding to the previous signifier of ashes, and simultaneously dispersing them, thus indefinitely delaying the signified of the cinder, while persisting to reach out to Nothing or to the Cinder, which is unlocatable, and unnameable, yet exists everywhere, and at the same time nowhere. Thus Derrida's cinder is again, as Derrida confesses, a dream, or a legend about the Impossible. The implications of cinder in Feu la cendre thicken and extend endlessly until the inundation of allusions of the cinders overwhelms and disrupts any definable context of the cinder. Finally the cinder turns out nothing but the function of bottomless and abysmal intertextuality, or the play of differences which was once regarded as the center. So the cinder there is empty, as a few pages of the poem are blank(blanc). These white pages are open to respond most sensitively to the future or an entirely Other which cannot be programmed nor reached now but eventually will come, thus waiting to be written by another Derrida or another Nietzsche to come.