“We are given over to absolute solitude. No one can speak with us and no one can speak for us; we must take it upon ourselves, each of us must take it upon himself.”
― Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death
“We are given over to absolute solitude.” We will never know why you decided to take leave of this world in September of 2005, for after all, “No one can speak with us and no one can speak for us.” We do know that we so wish you were here with us. We have been looking for you and waiting to see you for the ten years that you have been missing, and it seems now that we have longer still to wait.
We found you at last our long lost friend. We scoured the house looking for signs of you, evidence of a life once lived and we found: a very old cell phone that you gave Nadeem (it looks like a walkie talkie from the 1980s- you would have laughed at the thought of us keeping it for all these years); a business card you gave me at NYU, back when you were moonlighting; and a poster of Lenin that you printed out for me. I still have it hanging near my desk.
Dreyfus, we’d love to chat with you about your philosophy readings, about the Arab uprisings, and U.S. militarism run amok. We’ll talk about how the world is dying and yet everyone is going about their business as if the future still exists; we know you’ll share our apocalyptic visions. I still feel like you’ll show up at our doorstep one day, just like you always did. And who knows, one day you just might. In preparation, we’ll be reading Hegel’s The Science of Logic, a book we know you were immersed in for some time.
We’ll reminisce about your 1999 trip to visit us in Cairo. Such adventures! Remember, how we went everywhere—the pyramids, the City of the Dead, Sultan Hassan and al-Rifa’i, the Sinai. Being bad hosts we didn’t know that the pyramids closed at 5 p.m. And so we had to go horseback riding to see them; it was your first time riding and you had the wrong kind of shoes. Sandals really. Your feet were bloodied by the end, and you joked about how they were your battle scars. And smoking, you loved how you could smoke everywhere in Egypt, even in buses and on elevators.
But mostly we just want you to visit us so we can hang out and shoot the shit, just like we always did. We’ll talk philosophy, politics, watch really bad TV together, and laugh together. And each of us will feel a little less alone in the world.
Love,
Omnia and Nadeem