Epistles from the Abyss

Israel Centeno

From the ruins of the subject

From the Babel of identities

From a world without a center

Dear Mr. Derrida,

You taught us to distrust.

To suspect the text, tradition, the subject, and meaning itself.

You taught us to deconstruct.

And we did. With enthusiasm. With fury. With academic precision.

But today we write to you from the other side of that process.

We dismantled history.

We deactivated metanarratives.

We distrusted everything and everyone.

We disassembled the subject until it became unrecognizable.

We reduced justice to a structure of power.

And declared God a linguistic invention.

Now we live among symbolic ruins.

We ask you, with the humility of those who have lost their way:

How can a civilization chart a map of hope without a framework?

How do we build a future when all meaning is suspect, all truth is relative, all beauty is contingent, and all value is nothing more than an echo of power?

You taught that every construction can and should be dismantled.

But can man live without constructions?

Without a minimal consensus on good, justice, equity, opportunity?

Can he live in a world where the only dogma is that there are no dogmas?

Where everything moves, but nothing takes root?

Where everything is language, but there are no longer words that unite?

Can a society live without transcendent truths, without God, without soul?

Can it even survive?

You bequeathed a powerful tool.

But we turned it into an absolute method.

Deconstruction—once a possible path toward clarification—became

a factory of skepticism,

a machinery of dissolution.

And today, Mr. Derrida, we live in an age of

foundationless emotion,

identities at war,

liquid morality,

art without reference,

the dispersed self,

rights turned into weapons.

Did you not see this coming?

Or was this the inevitable destiny of your legacy?

We now see how your ideas were taken up by Michel Foucault, who transmuted power into the very grammar of the social. And by Judith Butler, who reduced gender to pure performance and denied the coherence of the body. And by Lyotard, who proclaimed the death of grand narratives. And by Jean-Luc Nancy, who dissolved community into fragments of being-with.

This is the world that remains:

A museum of ruins, curated by activists.

A democracy where language no longer binds.

A civilization where literature is unreadable, philosophy unteachable, art unspeakable.

Can there be beauty in a world without truth?

Can there be ethics in a world without substance?

Can there be meaning in a world where every signifier dissolves?

We ask not as enemies, but as restless heirs:

Where does reconstruction begin?

In silence? In a return to metaphysics? In humility? In mystery?

Or perhaps, in a long gaze into the abyss—and the choice to love anyway.