“The Taste of Tears,” DerridaYes, we must read and reread what Jean-Marie Benoist has left us. I will do so again, but for the moment, between confiding and thinking, which are never totally foreign to one another, I am trying to discern what he will have let us glimpse about tears: through tears.
He does not teach us that we must not cry; he reminds us that we must not taste a tear: “The act of tasting the tear is a desire to reannex the other”; one must not “drink the tear and wonder about the strangeness of its taste compared to one’s own.”
Therefore: not to cry over oneself. (But does one ever do this? Does one ever do anything but this? That is the question that quivers in every tear, deploration or imploration itself.)
One should not develop a taste for mourning, and yet mourn we must.
We must, but we must not like it—mourning, that is, mourning itself, if such a thing exists: not to like or love through one’s own tear but only through the other, and every tear is from the other, the friend, the living, as long as we ourselves are living, reminding us, in holding life, to hold on to it.
