Touching on Derrida

Philosophy is a great source to turn to, whenever you need some fresh ideas. From 2003 to 2007 it was my major subject in college, I was studying part time while working as a Teacher of English to Students of Other Languages ( TESOL ). I was doing the subject through Oscail, which is the Irish equivalent of Open University up in DCU at the time. While there, I was very fortunate to come into contact with Cyril McDonnell, author of Heidegger's Way Through Phenomenology to the Question of the Meaning of Being, Konigshausen & Neumann, 2015.

Cyril's guidance was pivotal in my introduction to major thinkers, such as Kant, Hume and later Husserl and Heidegger. His book on Heidegger's phenomenological approach, as distinct from Husserl's is simply superlative, and I would strongly recommend it to anyone who wishes to try to understand the major ideas driving continental thinking for the last hundred or so years. My own approach to reading Beckett's Comment c'est/How It Is is entirely indebted to the phenomenological tradition.  

Which brings me to Derrida. While writing Merrion Square I was rereading Derrida's final book before he died On Touching - Jean Luc Nancy, Stanford University Press, 2005. This is a really interesting study in which Derrida goes over the thinking of a number of ideas put forward by Jean-Luc Nancy and Maine de Biran on the subject of touch.

At the same time, I was physically exploring the Formal Gardens of the Royal Hospital of Kilmainham which were first laid out in the 18th century. I lived in Versailles for a number of years, and discovering the gardens in Kilmainham, which are the only ones of their kind in Ireland, in other words following French enlightenment design, all kind of played in my head with Derrida's reappraisal of French enlightenment thinkers such as Descartes and Maine de Biran. The following poems taken from Merrion Square are the result. See link below.

 https://liveencounters.net/le-poetry-writing-2018/12-dec-pw-vol-one-2018/peter-oneill-touching-on-derrida/