Jacques Derrida was the Joker (A Prose Poem)

Once the joker of the Philosophy Scene.
He philosophised with a smile on his face.
A modern-day Protagoras to our little Platos.
He knew the Tradition’s big joke.
And that big joke was the Tradition.
Yet to him it wasn’t a joke to take all as a joke.
Say, to joke about the transcendent Light of Reason.
The light which lit up the metaphysician.
That sanctified the systems in which many travelled…
Or so Derrida’s simple tale has it.

Derrida played with the Tradition.
He used a language that played with the sign.
But he acknowledged that play.
And all within the Greek-Jew’s syntax and semantics.
Yes, not even Derrida could transcend the symbol-systems
That dreamt of Reason’s reign.
He’d have had no language to aim his deconstructing arrows.
His own concepts remained purpled by the Tradition.
Remained part of the Tradition.
He knew that the supplementation of system with system
Would never erase Das System itself from the Tradition.

The Derridean technique?

To untie, quietly, the tight strings of each system.
To turn its concepts against its concepts.
To turn a single concept against itself.
And to break logical law with logical law.

Yes, Derrida knew the Tradition well.
He knew it well enough 
Not to try and overcome it, à la Nietzsche.
Not to politicise it, à la Marx.
Not to stamp it meaningless, à la Carnap.
Not to say ignore it, à la Heidegger.
Not to naturalise it with physic’s sharp light, à la Quine.
And not to free flies from the fly-bottle, à la Wittgenstein.

Thus, in a language sometimes fuzzy,
Sometimes flaccid,
Derrida spoke to the fuzzy and the flaccid.
And spoke to them about the fuzzy and the flaccid.

The Greek sophist, with whom Derrida was compared,
Was only an anti-dogmatic -
Even if a paid anti-dogmatic.
(Plato, the aristocrat, didn’t need payment.)
Plato liked his things immutable.
The Sophist bent Plato’s ruse and muse.
He showed the Athenian public
That what’s true on Thursday,
Is not true on Friday.
And that p and not-p have equal weight.
Derrida too cast out the lust for system.
The lust for a categorial prison
In which the Object-Subject could be kept bounded and safe.
He saw the primacy given to the Same.
He saw the degradation of the Other — Levinas’s Other.

All the above — magnificently displayed.
Derrida offered us a p to chew on.
Then ten not-p’s to wash it down…
And all before breakfast.
He fondled, but didn’t abuse,
The laws of thought.
Laws on which all systems, it was said, depend.
He even tried to argue that A didn’t equal A.
That identity is an illusion of metaphysics.
His was a nice little fiddle with the law of identity.
But a bogus one, logically speaking.
He showed that truth and logic had been used as weapons
By the platonic Powers That Be
A weapon against the Un-Same.

His comedic tone was displayed with hyperbolic frill.
His philosophic prose showed that philosophy is literature;
And that literature is philosophy.
He didn’t need a tight fit
Between singular term and its awaiting reference;
Or the feigned reciprocity
Of transcendental signified and signifier.
We get, instead, a giddy lattice-work of citation.
And citations about citations about citations…

Oh to be free of Continental pretence!
To be free of Derridean play!