An Open Letter to Professor Mary Collar — May You Rest in Peace

Dear Mary,

I am writing to you too late.

I know you passed years ago and I never could reconcile how to express my emotions about it. You have lived in the back of my mind my whole adult life. Cruel and biting words you once said to me while we sipped beers at a bar half intoxicated set a standard for corrective actions that I have tried to embrace as my mantra for life. Even so, this letter is late.

Late in my career. Late in my understanding. Late with an appreciation I did not have the maturity to express when it mattered.

After four years of a rich and demanding study in literature, I took your Literary Criticism course as my capstone. That was where you introduced deconstruction. It offended me.

It felt inconclusive. Evasive. Like hippie nonsense left over from an era of political and social unraveling. I wanted arguments that landed, theories that resolved, interpretations that could be defended without apology.

I hated Derrida.

I thought Jacques Derrida himself was a kook. And I will admit this plainly: when you repeated différance with a French accent, emphasizing accent marks that cannot even be heard, I thought it was a joke. A performance. Academic theater layered on top of what already felt like intellectual malpractice.

I did not hear rigor. I heard indulgence.

What bothered me most was not that deconstruction refused to conclude. It was that it seemed to deny any human need for conclusion.

The Greeks would not have agreed with this.

Tragedy demands an ending, not because it resolves suffering, but because meaning requires a stopping point. I believed then that refusing to conclude was not humility, but abdication. That humans could not function without some obligation to land somewhere, even imperfectly.

I believed then that humans required answers, that narratives depended on meaning, and that ambiguity was a luxury reserved for people insulated from consequences.

I failed that class convinced I had been trapped in Derrida’s cyclone, lifted off the ground, torn apart piece by piece, until nothing coherent remained.

I was wrong.

Not because Derrida eventually became likable to me. He did not. Even now, I do not find him comforting or agreeable. What changed was not my taste. What changed was my exposure to power.

Years later, working inside regulatory systems, I began to notice how language hardened into authority without ever being examined. I witnessed simple, plain language phrases substitute for method. I saw discretion treated as self-legitimating. I saw silence do as much work as rules.

And then, I realized I was seeing the différance.

Not in theory. Not in language games. In real life practice.

Meaning was not missing. It was being deferred. Responsibility was not denied. It was being displaced. Authority did not vanish. It hid in the dark.

Only then did your course and Derrida’s insane, ramblings prose return to me with clarity.

Not that meaning dissolves, but that power depends on where meaning is postponed, who gets to postpone it, and how long that postponement can survive without being named.

Recently, I found myself writing what I can only describe as a manifesto. It was technical, formal, and deliberately sober. It did not offer interpretation. It refused false closure. It took institutional language at face value and followed it until it collapsed under its own assumptions.

I did not say, “Here is the correct meaning.” I said, “Your meaning cannot hold unless you show the work. Take me to the base.”

You were not teaching us to dismantle texts for sport. You were teaching us how to notice where certainty is smuggled in without inspection. You were teaching restraint. You were teaching accountability.

I needed years, and consequences, to see that.

If this letter is an admission, it is also a thank-you. Not for making me like Derrida. That will never happen. But thank-you for giving me a tool I did not know how to use until I finally needed it.

Please know that your place in my mind is permanent, and it has been renewed.

May you rest in peace.