Delhi, Debate and Derrida

Blogging is a curious enterprise. When I started, I found that it was a cost-effective platform to write about things you think about. Soon, however, it becomes difficult to write without thinking about the 'audience' you're writing for. Now 'knowing the audience' is supposed to be essential for a good writer, but who really cares?

Just back from a debate in Delhi. I was unusually apprehensive about going to Delhi. Perhaps I was scarred as a child when I was sent to a camp near Delhi! I sort of understood what Freud meant by the 'unconscious' trying to force its way into the 'conscious'. I don't even remember the camp now. Forced myself to forget all the details - how much I hated the company, how difficult it was to manage in a strange crowd and how much I longed to return home. And yet, there it was, 'forcing its way' into my conscious... I have always wondered why I was so scarred by that experience. I've never been a person for the crowd or even wanted to be in a crowd so that by itself scares me a bit. And add to that the usual aggression of people from big cities, and you can understand how a ten year old me would have felt!


Here is where I feel debate liberating. It is an aggressive, competitive circuit and somehow I feel at home. Its not that I'm an exceptional debater. Just that I feel those seven minutes I get to speak are my own.. I can push everyone and everything outside my head, including an awareness of myself. I can hear myself speaking but I also know its not all of me. Its like the other, sub-conscious (or unconscious?) me is allowed to rise when I concentrate fully on debating. A strange thing indeed... that I can discover a part of myself by concentrating fully on something else. The self revealed, not through the other, but because of the other.

If this is an aporia then we can't but think of Derrida. The notion that there is no 'point', that there is no single meaning to any concept is fascinating. It is our desire for that point that makes us speak, write etc he says. Its not that there exists singularity which is dissolved when we express something. The gap between the signifier and signified is constant. Perhaps there is no 'me', at no point a single entity but always with a differance. So the true discovery of my self (myself?) can never happen with thought for that immediately involves a signification. So is there 'a being' without thought? Can we contest Descartes' cogito? How then do we know that we truely exist?


A long way from delhi indeed.