So, one must take risks. That's what is. I use this word a very grave sense. There would be no otherwise, without But for the risk be worth the trouble, so speak, and for it be really something risky or risking, one must take this risk with all possible assurance . . . What I am calling here assurance or insurance are all the codes, the values, the norms . . .that regulate philosophical discourse: the philosophical institution, the values of coherence, truth, demonstration, and so forth. Jacques Derrida . . . seen hope open like any iris the light. Richard Powers Experience and risk correlate discursively and existentially. The word experience derives from pers, an Indo-European root from which come the Greek peira-to venture or to journey-and the Latin periculum-to experiment or to risk. Risk, turn, derives from the Latin resecare, which refers the dangers faced by ships journeying through the seas - specifically the threat of being ripped and torn apart by rocks. A sibling term is signum, which, too, signifies a ripping or a cutting. A sign is a cutting into stone, a marking of paper, or a piercing of the air with the shock waves of speech. Consequently, Derrida is twice correct when he claims that without risk there would be no experience. First, there would be no experience without the possibility of the incision of signification, without the marks of the graphic and the phonic; the sign, experience, depends upon the differing and deferring tear of differance. Second, there would be no without the courage continue on the face of undecidability-of not always knowing where make the cut-and the face of the possibility of being wounded by the aleatory-those unforeseen events that may leave a person dust and ashes. Life is, indeed, a journey, an ad-venture, the constant coming toward the to come, a moving ahead into the uncertainty of the incessant flux of a thrown existence. One only makes the trip with fear and trembling, hoping come through as unscathed as possible. Unfortunately, life is usually more scathing than not, and, therein, lies the One always risks suffering, bearing the flesh or the spirit the marks of tragic and/or culpable evil-the constant declension of a semiotics of affliction. So one may, indeed, reference in a very grave sense, quite often the very sense of the grave, for death is the impossible possibility that haunts human existence through the specters of violence, oppression, disease, catastrophes, hungry mouths, homeless bodies, broken promises, aborted dreams, and damaged minds. Life is a risk, and, perhaps, Camus is correct when he opines that the question of suicide is the first philosophical question. In other words, is the risk worth it? Derrida would respond that question the affirmative, with two caveats. First, one should take the risks of life concurrently with identifying the meanings and paradigms that offer a secure milieu within which take those risks. These meanings and paradigms are the assurance, the insurance, that serves as the inescapable contextualization for confronting perilous experience. With the aid of rational worldstructures or horizons of foreseeability, one is better able discover or create a reflective equilibrium between and expectations, between cosmos and chaos. Second, one must be willing risk one's horizons of foreseeability, welcome the in-coming of the impossible, that which shatters previous structures and opens one the tout autre.1 As long as one both risks within the constellation of meaning, truth, and coherence and risks those very constellations themselves, the risk ensues undecidability as an affirmation and not a negation. Interestingly enough, Derrida prescribes at this point, mutatis mutandis, an approach that has found expression various philosophicotheological attempts at developing a theodicy, a coherent and comforting explanation for the why and where of evil. …