A discussion of Derrida's treatment of the aesthetic as developed in The Truth in Painting, referring specifically to Kant's Third Critique, is not the place for the manner of facile narrative abandon that comes with a personal reminiscence. Such a story would, I suppose, need to be kept outside of and apart from the subject here. Even though, remaining completely cut off from any other purpose, it might, in Kant's terms, display the beauty he calls that of a “mere formal finality.” It is, however, hard to imagine a narrative that would be “estimated on the ground of … a finality apart from an end,” some story that would come to be in being excised, at one fell swoop, with no blood or trace of its rupture, like his impossibly neatly cut tulip (Critique, 80n; cf. TIP, 82–95).