perhaps

a circumcised self
lies buried deep
in every one.
A divided self.
Resting in-between
the remnants of childhood-beginnings
within a familial frame-one-cannot-chose
and the structure of an adult life
built within a web of networks
one thinks can be controlled.
Reconciling these two aspects of ( one)self
from within the belief that "I" exist
as-something-more-than-the-sum
of these accumulated experiences
requires faith.

Like the indelible memory of a parent's voice
shouting one's name through twilight.
A familiar call-in-the-dark to guide one home.
Some remnant of this experience resides inside
and continues to lead the way,
long after.

We,
who are intangibly more
than the totalizing result of so much stuff,
of the
"familial, social, linguistic, national, political,
psychoanalytical, philosophical and religious networks"
that inscribe us.
We intersect with one another in this experience.
And again in Derrida.

Somewhere inbetween
the then-and-now of any life
the self gets torn: this is where faith resides.
Within this rupture.
Found within the shape of any tear
is what JD calls our 'everything'.
The stuff of everything we are
is there.

It is through an examination of this tear,
that one learns how to write/right oneself
whenever a cut creates imbalance.

Caputo calls this rupture
"the thing itself, scars and all"
while Derrida describes it
as that which makes him 'other',
The paradoxical slice that divides and binds.

It is in the cut of (t)his (con)textual (s)pace,
in his Circumfessions,
that Derrida confesses and proclaims:
there is no such thing as a pure cut.
Instead, what remains is a lasting bond
which ties him to whatever he has breached.
The stitch of time, like the trace of scars
found within the space of a wound,
is the thing that grows
into a little interstitial bridge
A protective skin of faith.

He names this skin
his 'religion without religion'.
And finds it in the scar-of-his-youth.
In that space he no longer has.
In his remainder.

A connective sheath from then-to-now.

It is not surprising that Derrida's Circumfessions
present an autobiographical notion of
circumcision-as-an-idiosyncratic-definition
of 'religion without religion'.
As the cut, the tear from Truth,
"that secret truth...severed from the truth"
that marks one as something greater than the sum.

In his philosophical prose poem, Cinders, Derrida writes,

"If he were sure of the truth of his knowledge,
why would he have this desire to write
and above all to publish a phrase
that makes itself indeterminate in this way?
Why set adrift and 'clandestine' in this way
such a readable proposition?
His proposition that cinders there were,
finally consists, in its extreme fragility
and in the little time at its disposal...
of this non-knowledge
toward which writing and recognition, always a pair,
are precipitated."(Derrida, 1987).

For Derrida,
language contains conditions
that signal a language-beyond-language,
that names a relation,
not to truth itself, but to its possibility.
The possibility of a language to bear traces of something
not exhausted by pragmatics and historicity.
Something that keeps an open space,
into which the truth (or its impossibility) might enter.
Like the coming-in of any Other and also like Heidegger,
Derrida attunes himself to that relationship
between language and truth,
to the vibrations set-in-motion between
the poetry of metaphor
and the logic of literal thought.

For JD, the word 'cinder'
ignites (t)his notion better than the word trace
because it implores the burning-within-language-of-the-human-spirit,
a flame that 'glows and shines',
that illuminates traces of primordial beginnings,
"the cinders of a still lost and unreadable geneology".

Derrida asks:

Is language what remains of our primordial flame?
And if so, at what point do words burst into flame?
At what point do words ignite the notion of a new possibility?

This is what Heidegger describes as 'the mystery of presence'
and what Derrida refers to as 'the emergence of conscience.
A recognition of one's debt to an other.

But rather than speak in terms of sacrifices,
JD acknowledges the great divide of self,
between thinking and speakingorwriting
as the experience of its resonance.

As an ethos.

A dwelling place.

Like a familiar voice
piercing the dark
to beckon one home.