Derrida is dead. I have to write about it, I have to wrestle with it. Have to? Yes, you do. The ghost won't let me rest. I can't stop following the ghost's orders. Orders? He didn't really know me! I'm under orders. To live is to wrestle with ghosts. But can I write about Derrida? You can't write a study of him. At least, I can't. I feel that it would be unforgivable to translate the deconstructive - and all good texts are deconstructive - into the discursive. Derrida's spirit cannot tolerate this. Derrida, while he was alive, certainly did not care if someone did. However, since he is looking at me and I cannot see him - what he called the helmet effect - I cannot be indifferent to what he thinks about what I write. I dare not, therefore, write a study of him: I do not know whether anything I say about him will stand up to the gaze of his ghost. For he has never said anything, as a matter of fact. He always asked questions. Or he never even asked questions, he just pointed - not pointed, pointed! - possible interpretations of claims, depending on his interpretive strategies. Should I perhaps deconstruct his texts? Should I read them in Derrida's style, with one of Derrida's interpretative strategies? I would not be able to. Even if I wanted to, I could not succeed in becoming a Derrida-epigone. So I wrestle with the spectre. But I know: in wrestling with the dead, the living can only lose.
The ghost is fire. How are we to understand this? I don't know exactly, but I'll try to interpret it somehow. The ghost is fire. Not the isolated burning bush, but fire in general, the illumination, the flame of the world (by which there is world in general, Dasein ist aber In-der-Welt-sein, the present-tense in turn world-in-itself, but not in the sense of being in it, but in the sense of being inseparable from each other). We are surrounded by flames, our world is world because it is flaming: it is full of ghosts, of spirits. There are ghosts and they burn-torture-haunt us.
...if the Spirit swallows up, absorbs the spirits, ghosts and phantoms, it consumes itself.
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