immigration and assimilation
The first generation thinks about survival, the ones that follow tell the stories.
…assimilation as a whole was a race toward a horizon that is wasn’t fixed. It was a set of compromises sold to you as a contract. Assimilation was not a problem to be solved but the problem itself.
friendship
Derrida wanted to disrupt our drive to generate meaning through dichotomies — speech versus writing, reasoning versus passion, masculinity versus femininity. These seeming opposites were mutually constitutive. Just because one concept prevailed over the other did not mean that either was stable or self-defined; straightness exists only by continually marginalizing queerness, for instance. His methods required a close examination of what was being lost or suppressed: in doing so, he and his acolytes argued, we would come to recognize that concepts seem natural to us are full of contradictions. Perhaps accepting this messiness would lead us to more conscious and intelligent of way of living.
o philoi, oudeis philos. The line is often translated as “O my friends, there is no friend” — a strange sentiment, affirming yet negative. Some speculate that Aristotle was expressing something simpler, closer to “He who has many friends, has no friend”. But Derrida was drawn to the seeming paradox of the translation he favored. By focusing on the tension inherent in the friend and the enemy, public and private life, the living and the “phantom,” he imagined pointing us toward the possibility of new connections.