The astronaut at the end of the future

Abstract

This paper deconstructively reinterprets sections of Victor Heringer's collected poetry. It seeks to highlight different conceptions of the life/death dichotomy (cf. Derrida, 2019) in order to question how life and the future are constituted, based on the observation of the dead, the end of cycles, and the loneliness of the living being (which can be understood as a dead future, given the construction of identity in life as opposed to death). What we seek to highlight in our reading of Heringer are the contradictions present in the poems selected in a posthumous anthology whose survival already becomes the very attempt at reading in this essay, whose legacy is the desire to make it possible, based on the ideas elaborated here, for any and all other connections to be made, both in the reading of the poems and in the propositions we will make in our text. Reading, inheriting, and seeking to think about the future based on the very notion of what one is taught to read and think also depends on the death of the text as, at least, a possibility that is already closed and self-absorbed (given that reading can begin when the poem has already ended), which deconstruction, here, seeks to stage as its beginning, not its end, of the cry for the Other.