Michael Bolerjack

The Other Witness

With the deconstruction of the world underway, and with it now the deconsecration of the oldest

Christian denomination, the Roman Catholic Church, is there any alternative to the debacle? I think

there is, and it can be found in language, in the very set of “decon” words that contains the other two.

That word is decontamination. The era in which we are living is witnessing a machine-like generation of

corruption, the complete contamination of everything. In part, this is being accomplished by the totality

of the text, which has been taking place since about 1965. This totalization without a totalizer, as one

might say, is the closure of the world in textuality. Deconstruction is occurring by means of it and cannot

be separated from it. The deconsecration of the Church is taking place through changes in its liturgies,

its texts. Likewise, these things were prophesied in texts, as well, two thousand years ago or more. If

there is to be a decontamination in seems it would also have to take place in the text. The nature of

textuality as closure signals a containment. Only within containment can the decontamination take

place. What seemed the liability of the closure becomes its asset. As deconstruction says, it protects

against what it causes. In metaphysical terms God is the container and the world the contained, being

the infinite outside the totality. God is the limit. In terms of the post-metaphysical time we live in,

textuality is the container, and the world itself has been transformed into it, everything in it being

signifiers. In Derrida’s Glas we have an emblem of a container within his oeuvre which contains all the

flith. Outside it is his scholarship, inside it is theft, blasphemy, inordinate sexuality and the theory of how

the deconstruction takes place. By placing the entire contaminated into one binding Derrida shows that

it may be contained. However, all the rest of the work meets up with it in various ways, until 1989 and

thereafter, the time of Derrida’s conversion. As Derrida says in his Circumfessions, it may not be written

here, but something takes place outside of this particular text, something like conversion. Almost

immediately, Derrida makes his turn to religion in his writings. Justice, hospitality, democracy issue

forth. This leads eventually before his death to considerations of the beast and sovereignty in his last

seminars. An event takes place in Derrida’s life in July 1989, as he faces his possible death and the

approaching death of his mother. The event, which by definition cannot take place in the text as such,

leads to the decontamination of his work. Whereas, with Glas, though the filth was contained as a

model of containment, yet influenced the rest of the work, in the Circumfessions, from outside the

textual containment, that is from that place we call God, something happens that leads to the

decontamination of the corpus as a whole. I believe that in the complicity of the deconstruction and

deconsecration there can still be the intervening decontamination, affecting the outcome through texts,

by the introduction of truth into the labile situation and bringing about a crystallization of the contents

in the textual container. One such truth is that Derrida in his ever-oblique manner was bearing down on

the antichrist in Rome throughout his religious writings, exposing the coming deconsecration, while at

the same time transforming the deconstructive machine which he helped create. In this double

movement, the French philosopher stayed true to his premises while achieving a far different conclusion

than he appeared to set out for in the 1960s.

Up

As in Joyce’s Ulysses

The Absolute Purity

New Jerusalem The Bride City Peace 1000 Year Kingdom

Thesis

History of the World: War Ltd.

Good Evil

Antithesis

The moral-immoral struggle from Genesis to Revelation

32 ft ps ps (Joyce’s Wake)

The both- and- neither- nor-

Synthesis

End of history War Without End

Both / Good And / Evil

Neither / Good Nor / Evil

1000 years of the abyss, Satan trapped by keys into textual abyss of the complete contamination

Circles