ABSTRACT
Jacques Derrida's demonstrations in 'Cogito and the History of Madness', 'Freud and the Scene of Writing', Speech and Phenomena, and 'Signature Event Context' show this, conclusively, with lethal, mortal, accuracy, and one evaluation of this 'early' work would say that its importance lies precisely in this simultaneous confirmation and displacement of the philosophical thinking of death or of philosophy as a thinking of death. Deconstruction would be less a thinking of language or meaning. But the point, for Derrida, would be to get out of what he might call the turnstile or merry-go-round of these consequences, and this leads towards other consequences, whereby death can thought radically as death, and not as dialectically exchangeable with life in the Socratic-transcendental-dialectical set-up: and according to a familiar paradox of deconstructive thought, death thought more radically than in the tradition by being thought of in a sense less radically, neither RIP nor R. I. P. Derrida is the death of death.
