Many Exits

Marc J. LaFountain

Early July, 1986. A young man is asked, by NEH, to comment on Derridas, The Ends of Man (1968). A circle of chairs inhabited by unsuspecting, ernestly ceremonious, and slightly pretentious seminar dwellers. Their leader looks on, astonished. The young man, seated in his chair, face covered by a very large black X fashioned of electrical tape, is jux taposed to an empty chaair. Affixed to the back of that chair, also with a large black X of electrical tape is a chalkboard eraser.

i, who am here,
have been rendered not here
by he who is here

(actually, I saw him and Rousseau going into
the bathroom together; Derrida was destabilizing
a text of Hustler)

i am not present
he is not absent
we are differant

but it is not surprising.
i was erased
when i was born -
birth is differance,
natal substance.
it was never clear either what
it was
or would be, and even now, when i am,
i am not

so let me introduce ourselves:
i am disseminations fools,
a schizoanalytic, or,
in non-binarity,
multiple undecideds.
what else?

this so,
i am under the mark of the trace.
i marc,
this mark,
calls marc into question -
the looming end

yet it is not simple ends
of which we speak,
for end is beginning
supplements strewn

such is the marc of the
second mark,
the erasure that calls the erasure
of the end to question -
the second doubles the first,
haunting its doubt

but it is not too late to say:
i didnt mean it after all,
you have not ended;
rather, disseminations child,
you have just begun

erased erasure,
invaginated presence,
where excess mutilates the violent hinge,
and Nietzsches jammed through Hegel -
the great betrayal -
desire never growing

Derrida pushed through Bataille,
dragged screaming, dissimulating,
through the solar anus,
transgressed, and invited so,
as such -
a shitstain in the lugubrious game,

Breton is still enraged

dancing not in the house of Being
(Heidegger couldnt dance anyway,
wallflowers only wait) -
nor forgetting,
nor dancing outside the dwelling

but rather biting into the house.
biting through

razors sliding through in vain,
nipples bitten through by
seething teeth,
flowers ripped from earth for bouquets,
a clam, flesh opened to light,
writing in fresh lemon juice,
eaten alive on the 4th of July -
independence day -
the grammatological opening

and here we sit as philosophers -
our teeth caught in it
never free from the repetitive
cannibalistic aesthetic -
there is no outside to go in,
nowhere to dwell

the end is through,
not over, always near,
never far

yet protestations to the contrary,
not an issue of frivolity/seriousness,
or destruction/saving -
perhaps the blithe expenditure of
bourgeous excess?
the delirium of plenitude?

or, china for starving desert people
choosing sand over food,
oppressed miskitos drinking pesticide
water,
suppressed minorities, effects not
overcoming?

and Derrida, deriding the homeland,
displacing appropriation,
flying high
in learing jet
over toxic time,
polluted ether buoying its wings

voices unheard, unspoken,
no longer privileged

the decline of civilization
the declension of the present
the return of useless passion

and we? drooling, sheltered from
tumbling tears by
Nietzsches umbrella,
wait for postcards

but thats all right -
its just a fiction, even the non-fiction

for you see,
the virgin birth has been
delayed,
strangled by a raging hymen,
the return of the other repressed

it is a fiction ?!

yes, Derrida even said so.
you see, he read Husserl
sideways -
its all a fiction -
even Husserl said so - in the ideas:

fiction is the life of
phenomenology,
as of all the eidetic sciences,
of which we are

there is no self-present voice
not to be heard.

yet meanings somehow cling,though not forever

we are plural,
though not perfect.
and humanisms breath, now slow,
is quite erratic,
and almost gone -

dada, will you be home tonight?
and mama, where are you?