ABSTRACT
Like the work of mourning, or the impossibly possible ethics of Derrida's late work, one enters into suspension without end: people never have done with that suspension itself. Within Derrida's thought, suspension is both spatial and temporal, pervasive and elusive. Living On, Derrida's essay on Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem, The Triumph of Life, begins with self-reflexive meditation on its own title, questioning the terms under which the French survive becomes the English living on and underlining the ways that linguistic representation eludes mastery. Suspension undoes finality, turning cessation into repetition Poetry and literature, Derrida argues, Derrida describes literature as an experience of suspension in ways that are strikingly similar to Coleridge's willing suspension of disbelief itself an early phenomenological articulation of literary experience. Contingency is what makes signification a matter of ethics rather than epistemology, what enables the ethical, as Gayatri Spivak has argued, to interrupt or suspend the epistemological.
