29th
A letter to Jacques Derrida, c. 2003
I’m just sad he died before I got to finish it:
In this email, I am going to write you hatemail. By email, I mean to
reference this transmission of characters. And when I use the word,
“write,” I use it as a nominative verb, particularly insofar as it is
euphemistically appropriate as a signifier for the specific activity,
“typing,” which one performs when creating a letter to be delivered in
the electronic format. By hatemail, I mean to indicate anything which
is other than a message of admiration, appreciation, friendship, lust,
ambivalence, or even indifference.
Since I will be combining numerous words into structures known as
sentences, a discussion of the specific meaning of, “sentence,” is
required. To say a sentence contains a subject and a predicate is
inadequate for our purposes in this particular instance. An example of
a simple subject/predicate sentence could be, “I hate.” However,
without an object, the reader has no means by which to infer the
recipient of the particular emotion being claimed to be felt by the
writer. A common (pronoun) object could be used, and the sentence, “I
hate you,” would result. However, and I say this despite its likely
obviousness to my readers, the delivery of the vehicle by which
messages are conveyed is inevitably subject to possible mishaps, one of
which is misdirection, also known as, “going to the wrong person.”
Though the vehicle, most likely, would not go (though here we have yet
another linguistic quandry, as most vehicles in the modern age would be
expected to “go,”) anywhere in the strictest sense of the verb, we
accept yet another euphemism in this case and conclude that if one
says, “The letter went to the wrong person,” that in fact, said letter
DID arrive in the posession of SOME person. For better or for worse -
and it is not for us to conjecture such a value judgement - the letter
was received by someone other than the intended recipient, the
*object*, also referred to as, “you.”
Better than a common object, at least for our purposes today, is a
proper object, such as the recipient’s name. In this case, “Jacques
Derrida,” fits all parameters required by the occasion: the “emailing”
of “hatemail.”
Therefore, my “email” to “you” will be phrased by strict prescription
of the requirements of the language in which it is to be written, or
English. The most precise form of the letter, as it can be formulated
at this juncture of history within the culture in which we find
ourselves, is this:
I hate Jacques Derrida.
Having composed the so-called “body” of the communication, one must
turn one’s attention to matters of the introduction (properly accepted
as a “salutation” and also colloquially called, “greeting”) and the
conclusion of the communication. Cultural context allows for an easing
of this task, as it is common simply to write, “Dear Sir,” or, “Dear
Jacques Derrida,” in this case, as the “greeting.” For our purposes
today, we will choose the second of the two possible introductions.
This benefits us on a second level: By addressing our introduction to
the recipient by proper name, we can economize on words in the body.
Far be it from a writer to waste words. Therefore, we can shorten our
letter which now, containing the introduction and the body, reads:
Dear Jacques Derrida,
I hate you.
But we have yet to conclude the correspondence. And this entails a far
more lengthy discourse than we can presently afford — afford in terms
of time, money, or material resources. That arduous process will have
to wait for another time to be completed. For now, we will conclude
this chapter, ending with the following:
Dear Jacques Derrida,
I hate you.
