Race to Race

(Angela Mao, 70's Taiwanese Kung Fu Star)

So many moons ago someone whom I used to read taught me lots about history and race. Through the opened car doors I would insist: "But we are not exiles!" By the time the doors slammed shut there was no telling who or what was the fetish. Furtively, I dedicated Tel Quel to "history"'s distaste. The rest is, on the other hand, between his yellowness and mine.

Later as we stopped reading each other, I find myself in a place where the debate has taken up even more steam. When almost every English department's class forces one to take on the position of a defense of "post-structuralism," of "Derrida" -- not even only out of allegiance or faith -- there is fatigue. There is frustration. Most of all, there is the disbelief that a scholarship, which takes pride in an "expertise" in reading, can so grossly misreads. But as Sam wonderfully pointed out, misreading is part of the risk. And risk is there all over Of Grammatology: the crucial task of ethical responsibility.

Perhaps there is no such thing as expertise, then, just as there is none of "defense." Yet one tried and will go on trying, if so as to be less tongue-tied over writing. Yes, the tongue is always in the word, written or not: any attempt to recover one over the other throws us back into, precisely "history."

In April this year, the group of us gathered for 'Forty years of 'Structure, Sign and Play'" have made that risk one unborn anniversary. After the frustration and fatigue, I have not forgotten how the very situation of the human sciences that Derrida wrote about is a repetition -- "in the strongest sense of the word." Today, reading is not immune to the centrality of a center. Today, some frail attempt towards history still wishes to run ahead for we know that our race to race cannot be separated from history. However, perhaps there will come a chance when things slow down. For silence, for Echo's non-response, for another race of the human that is beyond the law of this earth.

Till then, when I can finally look over my shoulder and find him somewhere behind, I will believe in the unbelievable. Namely, that the exile has to return late, not early.