A Few Words for John

A man leaped from Govett’s Leap in the Blue Mountains to his death on 2nd August 2016,
6 years ago. I had known him a little, more than a little. We had been friends a long time
ago. I had shared with him the love of certain books and some music and conversation.
His death deeply a ected me, no doubt in part because of what I perceive to be my
similarities with him and the strange role he played—and still plays—in my life.

He had worked at the same place I did, Western Sydney University, taught similar things
to what I had taught and lost his job there as I also did. Of course, for me it was easier. I
had a family to fall back on, friends, a partner, and I come from a wealthy background.
Shockingly, he had none of these things. His parents—he was an adopted child—were
both dead; he had no partner, no job, little or no money. He regularly borrowed money
from a friend, which he was careful to pay back before he suicided. Although these
features are important, really none of this is what I want to get at. George Martin, a
sociologist and colleague from Western Sydney University, has argued convincingly that
John Dalton was a victim of the casualization of the academic workforce and the ever-
increasing corporatization of universities.1 No doubt this is true. His suicide has become a
kind of rallying cry for those within academia who wish the challenge the prevailing neo-
liberalization of the Australian University system. But John’s story is more complicated
than that. He was not just being the victim of an increasingly unjust and brutal system,
which exploits people who have the education and values that he did. What happened to
him, and to me through him, is also richer and stranger.

John did not like me. This is saying too little. I think he actually hated me. For the last
twenty years of his life we did not speak. We had broken up over Contretemps, the online
journal associated with the Philosophy Department at Sydney University, that he, Nicolas
Strobbe and I had set up. At one time, however, John also loved me. For a brief moment
he saw me as a kind of mentor. This was in the late 1990’s. I didn’t exactly invite this, but
it came to me through a mutual friend we both had, because I had studied in France with
philosophers who were very important to him at that time: Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe and
especially Jean-Luc Nancy. Friends of mine jokingly at the time used to call him “the
student”, referring to his relationship to me. It was a little bit ridiculous and embarrassing
because at the time we were both students, but also it re ected something that was true.

While we were post-graduate students, I remember he told me once that he wanted to

belong to the second level of philosopher academics, not the level of Derrida, Deleuze or
Foucault, that was unachievable, but the level of Mark C. Taylor, John Caputo or Kevin
Hart, that was his aspiration. (I, on the other hand, secretly wanted to belong to the rst
level, which I now nd very amusing.) He was ambitious. He lived in Stanmore at the time
in the mid-nineties. We were in our twenties. He said it was high time for him to have the
experience of living with a woman and indeed he did so for a few years. He thought that
Georges Bataille’s thinking of eroticism and death was good in theory, but not in practice.
That was not my view. At that time, I moved away from philosophy as a kind of be-all-

1 “John's demise shows that the [casualization of the academic workforce] process produces
victims. It raises a troubling ethical question: what sort of society are we if, after encouraging
gifted people to climb and strive, to obtain awards, degrees and the esteem of their peers, we tell
them that there is nothing for them at the pinnacle of achievement but a treadmill of poverty and
institutional indi erence?” George Morgan “Dangers lurk in the march towards a post-modern
career” Sydney Morning Herald, October 17, 2016, https://www.smh.com.au/opinion/dangers-
lurk-in-the-postmodern-career-that-is-missing-job-security-20161017-gs3u5o.html, accessed
23/11/22.
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 and-end-all of my life and I discovered the body as a site of research: yoga, dance,
martial arts and later sexuality. It helped me to deal with depression and writers block and
the inability to write my Ph.D. thesis. He never took that path. It was to have a great
impact on my life. Even though I remain someone who, as they say, “lives in their head”,
(as he no doubt also did), I have the memory that it could be otherwise. Perhaps he could
have been otherwise. At one time I remember he said something quite dismissive to me
about dancing. Later I understand that he used to go for long bike rides by himself to
improve his tness. And that did help him somewhat. But still bike riding in the way he did
it is a very solitary activity. Getting into the body didn’t connect him with others, with
di erent people outside the philosophical student milieu, which, fortunately, it has done
for me.

I am aware of the injustice of speaking about John when he is no longer there to con rm
or deny what I now say about him. Moreover, some of what I want to say about him is not
very nice. It’s very tempting when someone suicides, particularly in their mid-40’s, to think
of their life as a failure. And indeed I believe John did make some decisions that led him
to becoming very vulnerable and isolated. But I also think many of us didn’t know that
much about him. Had we known more, perhaps we could have helped, had di erent
conversations with him, but would he have listened? I could perhaps have understood
better the hurt and the pain that lay behind his anger and aggression.

There is no assurance that what I have to say now is anything more than a fabrication or a
self-justi cation for the guilt I feel about his death. I don’t wish to presume that I know
John’s story, or even if it is a story, in the sense of a narrative that someone could tell, and
which you could presume makes sense or is totalizable. There is a great deal now no-one
will ever know about him.

“I had to recognise that I was not capable of forming a story (récit) from these
events. I had lost the sense of historical time (histoire), which happen in many
illnesses….

A story? (récit) No, no story, never again.”2

I believe John was not a particularly gifted writer or philosopher. I know it is a shocking
thing to say. He had always had great di culty giving voice to his ideas in ways that
people could respond to and engage with. I think at some level he knew it. And yet,
nonetheless he identi ed as a scholar and strove to be a good one. And he was the
bene ciary, I would argue, of some non-conscious paths of transmission from the
masculinist Western philosophical tradition, like the solitude, especially the solitude, like
being cut o from the body, and the sacri cial and self-sacri cial exigencies, and also a
certain haughtiness mixed with an extreme vulnerability and sensitivity, “brittleness” Chris
Peterson said to me. He saw me for a brief moment as a mentor. I didn’t exactly invite it,
but it came to me – and the transference too. It turned out that I found him impossible to
work with.

At the wake Chris Peterson, Julie Anne Robson and others organised for him, which I
attended in Sydney in Summer Hill, a friend of his spoke. This friend, Timothy Rainer, had
also nished a Ph.D. in philosophy. He recounted how despite how much he had tried to
convince John he should re-train and not keep working as a casual in the Humanities,

M. Blanchot La Folie du Jour (1973), see also J. Derrida “The Law of Genre”
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John wouldn’t listen. Whereas Timothy had re-trained to focus on entrepreneurship and
eventually started his own company, John chose, if it is a choice, to stay with philosophy
and accept a future without nancial stability. I personally can understand John’s
“choice”.

Timothy also added something, which I’d like to share, because I think it’s very
instructive. He said: “I’m saddened by John’s suicide, but I’m reassured that at least it
was his decision.” At that moment I didn’t want to start an argument but I thought to
myself: “How do the hell do you know that it was simply “his” decision? It could have
been all our decisions that John dies.” In certain regards, John was the least among us,
one might say, the most fragile, but also a kind of canary in a coal-mine. Suicide, from the
Latin “suicidum” is etymologically “a slaying of oneself." The Roman Latin provenance of
the word in English seems to recon rm the metaphysical interpretation that what is called
suicide is an act of a self-conscious self-same subject, a sovereign “I”, who decides, who
freely chooses death. Nothing, as Derrida might say, is less certain. So often we seek to
reassure and protect ourselves against the scandal of death by saying that this was what
the person wanted. Even if this were true that it is what he wanted, I think this judgement
also hides something. If the moment of decision is a moment of madness (Kierkegaard), if
Dasein “is” in the way of being-with others (Heidegger), it can never be simply the self,
the self-same human subject, subjectum in Latin, hypokaimenon in Greek, who decides
the undecidable.3 Derrida would even go further and say it is the never what is called a
“self” or “subject”, but always the other, as it were, “in” the self who decides. In other
words, it is always at some level ungrounded and unknown, even unjusti able, beyond
reason. Self-coincidence and self-presence and, by extension, self-certainty in the
moment of decision is a ction or a lie.

In Le Pas Au Delà (the step beyond, not beyond”), Maurice Blanchot writes:

“Thou shalt not kill" obviously means: "do not kill he who will die in any case" and
means: "because of that, do not infringe on dying, do not decide the indecidable,
do not say: this is done, claiming for yourself a right over this 'not yet'; do not
pretend that the last word has been spoken, time co pleted, the Messiah come at
last."4

Blanchot proposes a kind of deconstructive re-reading of the monotheistic prohibition on

murder (and suicide) as a prohibition on deciding the indecidable. Moreover, he links
transgression of this prohibition to the pretence that the last word has been spoken, time
completed and the Messiah has nally come. However much you may su er, there is an
unconditional obligation not to pretend that you can nish (a) life. Rather you must instead
remain faithful to the promise of the future, whatever happens, to the inexhaustible
character of the murmur, to the ‘not yet’ of Dasein’s existential being-towards-death,
Heidegger’s analysis of which Blanchot is obviously invoking.5 However much you or
they may su er, you are not allowed to say: “this is done”. Life must be regarded as
sacred or sacrosanct. Dying must not to be touched.

3Cf. Martin Heidegger’s analysis of the provenance of the modern concept of the subject, of the
human as the hypokaimenon, that which subtends, etc. in the Marburg Lectures.
4 Maurice Blanchot The Step (not) Beyond - Le Pas Au-delà (1973)
5 Martin Heidegger Being and Time
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 At one level this is all pretty strange, because whether or not one infringes on death and
dying, the indecidable remains in any case. It is not vanquished by murder or suicide.
Therefore it is not really the indecidable that needs to be unconditionally defended by the
monotheistic prohibition; it is truth or at least, a certain truth, which must not be covered
over with pretence. Because we are in the mode of being-with others, death, despite
appearances, does not mean that the last word has been spoken, time completed or that
any subject is sovereign over life/death. Living non-violently, which in Levinasian terms is
living ethically, amounts therefore to a commitment to stand for this truth, as it were,
above all others.

As my father grieved for the sudden death of my mother, his wife of 57 years late last
year, he asked me very seriously what purpose is there to keep living when one is
su ering so much. He was 95 years old. He no longer believed his life to be worth living.
In response, I had to nd something to say that he, a resolute non-believer, might not so
easily dismiss. I remembered a paper called “Useless Su ering” (1982) by Emmanuel
Levinas and re-read it. At the end of the paper, Levinas writes:

Properly speaking, the inter-human perspective lies in a non-indi erence of one to

another, in a responsibility of one for the other…The inter-human lies in the
recourse that people have to one another for help…It is in the inter-human
perspective of my responsibility for the other person, without concern for
reciprocity, in my call to help him gratuitously, in the asymmetry of the relation of
the one to the other, that we have tried to analyse the phenomenon of useless
su ering. 6

The useless su ering of the individual is analysed in “the inter-human perspective”, the
relationship of care without concern for reciprocity, which puts it no doubt in relation to
what Derrida calls the gift. The aneconomical relation to the other, i.e., the recourse that
people have to one another for help is, Levinas argues, the ethical response to useless
su ering.

Sharing this with my father did not stop him from wanting to die, which he did. But at the
very least, the thought was not dismissed. He listened and I think understood that his
su ering was experienced as inter-human and not simply solitary, and therefore maybe
not simply useless after all. When a parent dies, it is customary to say among Jews, “I
wish you a long life”, which is quite strange, because why would someone wish you a
long life when your parent has just died? The idea is that the memory of your parent will
be with you for as long as you live, so we wish you to live as long as possible.

At the wake I learned that John did confess to a female friend that he was going to
suicide. He confessed to her presumably because he knew that she would not try to stop
him. She believed everyone has the right to suicide. However, she did ask him if there was
anything that she or any of his other friends could do to help. He smiled and said “no”.

I—“I”—have lost three friends to suicide who were philosophy students. Platonart
Queeros, Colin Hood and John Dalton. I’ve also lost a teacher to suicide, Sarah Kofman.
Then there was also Deleuze, who threw himself out the window when he had
emphysema and Lacoue-Labarthe who smoke and drank himself to death, and even
Derrida and Werner Hamacher who both died of pancreatic cancer, a cancer whose
incidence is doubled if you are a smoker, and they were both heavy smokers. This is a

6 Emmanuel Levinas “Useless Su ering”

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 very personal list. It leads me to ask whether in Western philosophy there are some
suicidal paths of transmission, an unacknowledged mimetic compulsion since at least
Plato’s Socrates, who chose not to save himself, and the great Romantic poet Novalis
passing by Goethe’s Werther. I’m not saying there simply is such a suicidal compulsion in
philosophy or as philosophy, but I would invite you to consider it as a hypothesis. If it
were true, would the ethical response then be to rea rm those parts of the tradition, in a
Nietzschean sense, that would be more directed towards life, health, love, animality and
the machine? I’m not sure.

In his preparations for death, John did not seem to think at all about his corpse or his
funeral. He perhaps felt that no-one would have any need to mourn for him. Careful to
pay back all his nancial debts before disappearing, he didn’t think that his corpse may
also need to be cared for in some way. As Dennis Schmidt has reminded us, Western
philosophy has almost forgotten to think about the corpse and its extreme vulnerability.

John haunts me. I didn’t think about him too much while he was alive. But in his death he
preoccupies me. I’m even tempted to believe that he leaped to his death in order to be
loved. When we were much younger, I remember there was a conversation about an Indie
American lm called Kissed. It was the story of a man who fell in love with a woman who
was a necrophiliac. She only loved male cadavers and enjoyed riding on top of them. In
order to gain her love, the man of course had to kill himself. There’s a very dramatic scene
before he jumps with a rope around his neck. She pleads with him not to jump and tells
him everything, including “I love you” to stop him. And he responds, “No, no, you don’t…
But you will.” And then he leaps.

At John’s funeral and then later at his wake, which his friends and colleagues had
organised for him, it was clear to me that he was loved, that people did love him, but I felt
that he didn’t know it, or maybe he felt he wasn’t loved in the way he wanted to be or that
he felt he was unlovable and could never get his needs met. He had been adopted as a
child. And he had what he once called a ‘deformity’, a hairlip, which he chose not have
removed through plastic surgery. I can’t help but wonder if his leaping was a plea to be
loved.

Somehow in some strange way, I feel he pulls me with him over the cli , as if I’m
becoming John in some way - or already am. I am reminded of a story from Filip Müller
from Auschwitz, how one day he was overcome with sympathetic identi cation with the
victims and wanted to die with them. A group of women came up to him in the gas
chamber and asked him what he was doing there. They said: “Your death won’t give us
our lives back. You must go out of here and let others know of the injustice that has been
done to us.”7

At the wake I saw a picture of John as a little boy with a gift from his father: a plush
animal. He looked so happy. I asked myself how did this little boy who was once so
happy become an adult, who was so sad and su ered so much?

Derrida said once that he thought the great Western philosophical systems were vast
machines to preserve memory.

7 Filip Müller Eyewitness Auschwitz

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