For we have all heard of love, and we all engage in loving. Each figure of lyric poetry that translates our individual desire into the sphere of meaning provides a means to defer the potential violence of rivalry over our common desire. Derrida finds behind difference not the commonness of rivalry but the always-decaying myth of central authority. In assering its significance as prior to its assertion, the figure disguises its imperative point as a constative. We can neither abolish difference in an apocalypse of sameness nor seek to ensure its perpetuation by separating its process from that of the ethical.
Human culture is neither a conspiracy of all against a few nor a conspiracy of a few against all.
Through culture we tirelessly operate to keep ourselves alive, even if it be by denouncing it or denying it more than a fragmentary existence. But the truth of culture cannot be formulated in such a way as to avoid the originary paradox that its revelation as truth is inseparable from its falsification. Its value is, on the contrary, that it allows and forces us to think each historical moment in its revelatory uniqueness. Only such thinking can liberate the true humility of democracy from the victimary snobbery of modernism. No Don't ask If you enjoyed this column, subscribe to the galist and you'll receive updates about our on-line journal Anthropoetics and get Chronicles of Love and Resentment every week by email .