Last night, French philosopher Jacques Derrida died of pancreatic cancer. He was 74.

In some ways, this news wasn't unexpected. Derrida's diagnosis had been public as early as January 2003, and I knew early this year that he had cancelled his annual spring seminar at UC Irvine (I was still in Los Angeles at the time). Even more, I can remember discussions about Derrida's eventual -- inevitable -- death, especially with colleagues after reading two short texts on death, arguably on the writer's death, Apories and Donner la mort. But still it came as a surprise to me this morning, as I read the news.

I've often wondered what the work I do now owes to my experience of this particular thinker. It is quite uncommon (although not unheard of) to encounter writing about games and play in the Derridean sense, even if Derrida's own penchant for playfulness, for "breaking the rules" of philosophy, of playing the philosopher's game (as it were) remain well known. Whereas Huizinga's play is a bounded space -- Derrida's play is a process, a movement elsewhere, a movement outside and into some other sphere, a sphere unknown and unrecognizable to the system that engenders the play. In play, there is also the projection of a problem, a problem that becomes the real subject of analysis, a problem that takes the place of the product or situation that incites play in the first place.

My own academic training was oddly tied to Derrida's thinking. I studied with three well-known Derrideans: Peggy Kamuf, Jonathan Culler, and Sam Weber. And as I've written about before, my first public paper on the notion of the digital was presented at a conference with Derrida as the respondent. The entirety of my experience with Derrida's work remains very much bound to this personal meeting, and even moreso to the margins of that meeting, the conference dinner I wrote about in the EBR piece linked above. How funny, yet appropriate, that this slippage out of academics should remain the most salient experience I have of the man's work. For me, Derrida personalized philosophy, made me think of it as an activity in which I was unavoidably implicated. Perhaps this is why my experience of Derrida's work is in large part the experience of my own personal memory: that dinner at the Hollywood thai restaurant; long, alcohol-aided ponderings with friends who remain desperately close, even if we speak seldom; running over Acts of Literature with a Mazda Miata after a particularly colorful reading; coming to terms with my objections to deconstruction as I wrote my dissertation, crumpled in a chair at my in-laws.

This time is no different. The news of Derrida's death reached me the day after I did a photo session for a forthcoming piece in an academic publication, about my own work, and about my own ontogeny as a humanist academic and a professional technologist. Just this week I struggled to explain to the journalist why I don't see my current work in games as a departure from my previous work in literature and philosophy. It is, for me, a completely sensible progression, even if a playful one, one that plays at the problem of what it means to be a humanist or (in the conjunctive sense) a technologist.

Perhaps this is where Derrida's influence remains strongest for me: in this space, right here on this page, which is neither journal nor popular magazine, neither corporate nor academic in readership, neither research paper nor elegy, but yet still all of those, at least in part, one playing at another, and on again, searching for a new place.

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