쇼 앤 텔(Show and Tell), 혹은

Show and Tell, or

If the political wager of deconstruction can be said to revolve around thematizing the hauntological condition of irreducible aporiae enunciated by Abrahamic heritage, Derrida in his later writings challenges those of us in East Asia to reflect on “the dominant religion of [our own] society,” whose time-honored idiom and cultural memory have come into clash with the generalized language of the West, the singular language of the other whose essential parameters and axioms uncannily resemble those of the Abrahamic. The present inquiry probes the condition of double binds lacing together the seemingly incommensurable legacy of East Asia (more specifically, Confucianism in this case) and that of Abrahamic culture by analyzing the train of associations provoked by a cut of CCTV image capturing the scene of a father and a son as they are about to jump off a bridge. What is it that this image gives us to see and think? As Derrida would have recalled apropos of the problem of gift, any attempt to respond to such a question must stave off the dual danger of fetishistic reification on the one hand and cannibalistic sublimation on the other. Yet, if a series of analogies (sociological, theoretical, aesthetical, etc.) that readily present themselves to us in analytic process cannot but all ultimately fail, it is not merely because he nature of the gift proffered by the aforesaid image is essentially undefinable. Rather, the impossibility of any clear-cut resolution vis à vis the object of our inquiry (whether it be in terms of cognitive, ethical, sociopolitical registers) has to do with the insuperable immanence of our ontological condition, our irrecusable share in a world where the question of responsibility can no longer, if ever, find its home in the form of sustainable answers or that of self-satisfying concepts.