When Jacques Derrida died, in October 2004, I was in my fourth year at the Faculty of Philosophy of the ULL. I remember a professor, in a certain Aesthetics subject, writing his name on the board, informing us of the news. We dedicated that entire class to paying homage to the great philosopher born in French Algeria (like Camus), father of deconstruction, such an important concept in our time.
I couldn't say exactly when it occurred to me to coin a neologism, synonymous with deconstructing, making a play on words with his last name and the verb to rebuild. Perhaps it was when I went with my friend Pablo, a construction foreman by trade and a mathematician and musician by vocation, to watch them demolish a block of flats on Avenida de los Menceyes in La Laguna, where the tram now runs. But that verb, derridify, stuck in my head forever, as an alternative to Jacques' deconstruction: crumbling something to later rebuild it, giving it another focus or another form, with the intention of improving it. I even went, in an academic display, to plant myself in Ciro Mesa's office (another professor with whom I got along quite well), to show him my linguistic discovery, asking him how I could spread it. As if pretending that my newly released word would enter the Royal Academy of Language dictionary right away. Student delusions, I suppose. Now I know that language doesn't work like that, that first one must make it one's own, tear it apart and melt it down, internalizing it and shaping it through writing, giving birth to a word whether it exists or not before in the dictionary, without fear of the rules. I only care about euphony, if something sounds good to me, if it is pleasing to the palate and the ear, I write it and that's it, without worrying about whether it appears in some thesaurus. Sometimes, especially in poetry, I even disregard its meaning. The word life has eighteen meanings in the RAE Dictionary, but its true meaning, what is it? Does it have one? Isn't it just a mere absurdity? No philosopher knows, and of course it cannot be proven by simple reduction to the absurd.
But I'm digressing. If as soon as you name it, something exists (I'm Platonic and Borgesian in this), the verb derridify and its derived terms—derrify, derridification, derridification, derrificationism, derridificationism, etc.—do not need to be justified. They are... and that's it. The important thing, moreover, is that the word alludes to a transcendental issue for our survival as a species: the need to slow down. The categorical imperative of unsustainable growth, the moral, legal, ethical and aesthetic obligation to degrow at all costs, to deconstruct the world, derridifying its foundations. Undermine once and for all the ideological illusion that we can increase everything without consequences, for us, for the rest of the species with which we coexist and for the planet itself. Since I did a little work in high school on Malthusianism (reinforced by Asimov's bathroom metaphor), I am increasingly convinced that we will not solve any social problem if we do not first ban the preserve of overpopulation. Moreover, I would even dare to postulate that the value of an individual is inversely proportional to the square of the population mass, although I do not know how to formulate it as an equation. As overpopulation increases, the value (and dignity) of the individual decreases, like the limit of a function tending to zero. According to Worldometer data, on November 15, 2022 we reached the scandalous figure of 8,000,000,000 people on Earth. And in just four and a half months, it has already risen twenty-five million more.
It is unstoppable, unsustainable and leads us directly to extinction. It may seem like a paradox, how are we going to disappear if there are so many of us, but we are consuming the planet's resources at an accelerated rate, irreversibly depleting its sources of wealth and as soon as we hit rock bottom, there will be no way to reverse the situation. And then we will lament and tear our hair out, when there is no remedy, for a change. Ergo declaring, at this point in the film, from the stage of the Islote de la Fermina, Lanzarote as a "touristically saturated island", is nothing more than a redundancy and a tautology. We all know that, there is no need to spell it out. César Manrique and Leandro Perdomo already warned in their chronicles and speeches fifty years ago. Without a doubt, from an institutional point of view, it is perfectly legitimate to wield a slogan for the elections, but what are we really going to do? What political decisions will be made to try to slow down the process, to unclog Lanzarote and the rest of the world? Is it possible to fight against a system that only understands progress as an increase in numbers, quantities, profits and productivity? Is another model of society viable that is not based on fierce competitiveness and massive predation? Will we be able to go against nature biologically one day, not letting ourselves be dragged down by the instinct of reproduction imprinted in our genetics that induces us to multiply endlessly? Or is it that, in the end, as Agent Smith pointed out in Matrix, humans are nothing more than a virus, a plague for this poor world, the cancer that rots the cells of Gaia, and, in truth, by behaving like this, we are only following our natural programming and fulfilling our mission? I have no answers to these questions, but I would like you to think about them and reflect together. Perhaps we are still in time and there is a way out, although I, sincerely, as of today, am unable to see it.
