Reflections on my Derrida Season: a story with a pluperfect beginning and a fairytale finish.

It was reading an article by David Wills called “Post / Card / Match / Book / "Envois" / Derrida” (SubStance, Vol. 13, No. 2, Issue 43. (1984), pp. 19-38) that I found Barbara Johnson’s The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (John’s Hopkins UP, 1981). This book is very useful, with articles, among others, about S/Z, frames of reference (purloined letter, Poe, Lacan, and Derrida) and some of the making of various versions of the concept of difference. With even a quick perusal of books like Johnson’s and articles like Wills’ it becomes clear, as if it were not already painfully clear enough, that I am no philosopher. I have nevertheless come to a few conclusions about determined pieces of thought from “The Time before First” (Dissemination), Positions, “Scribble (Writing Power)”, the Post Card, The Truth in Painting, and Grammatology. My next project will be an attempt to understand something about Glas, which I have been saving as a special and extra unmasterable treat.

So I turn to intertextuality and difference, motivated mostly, apart from by the quandary expressed above (i.e. not a philosopher), by if Derrida would think I cite him cheaply. When I put quotes down here and there sometimes I feel as though I were engaging in a most disgusting and violent act of textual borrowing. I could answer my own concern by stating that it is not text I am borrowing, but inspiration, energy to disrupt my own, hopefully only initial, reading. The problem is that I do it seriously, I mean very earnestly to create questions and not simply to cite words of theory. What I am about to cite hits upon a few of my objections with some of what I read as deconstructionist thought (which in reality, is most likely not Derridean thought at all, and thankfully (or maybe not so thankfully), we are permitted, even encouraged, endless re-readings):

Theoretical pronouncements therefore do not stand here as instruments to be used in mastering literary structures. On the contrary, it is through contact with literature that theoretical tools are useful precisely to the extent that they thereby change and dissolve in the hands of the user. Theory is here often the straight man whose precarious rectitude and hidden risibility, passion, and pathos are precisely what literature has somehow already foreseen. For literature stages the modes of its own misreading, making visible the literary of the heart of theory and rendering the effects of its project of understanding unpredictable. The rhetorical subversion of theory by its own discourse does not, however, prevent it from generating effects; indeed, it is precisely the way theory misses its target that produces incalculable and interesting effects elsewhere (The Critical Difference xi-ii).

Thus, not only theory, but also literature, can be rewritten; both theory and literature beg us to be misread or to recognize them as misreadings. Re-reading. In it is the possibility that we can fix our wrongs, or at least, fill partially, our lack [my saying above: “energy to disrupt my own, hopefully only initial, reading”]. We can update the old [rework Arthurian legends], or bring genres used for centuries together in a new way [mixing of allegory, letters, poetry and songs] and rejoice, in that academic kind of way, in the manner in which theory, that ever witty straight man disappears in the hands of a witty user. This new bringing together, a revival and homage [reading the archive in an inventive way] permits us to see difference, not the differences that separate one text from another, but how a text is different from itself. If we read re-reading as a major component of what is often considered deconstructionist analysis, we might also read a fear of original. This begs the question: what is the motivation for rejecting the idea that there could be an original, a beginning, the idea of the text, the author? Is it that that idea would lead to nothing more than an end to our discussions?

In an analysis of several of Philippe Sollers’ texts, primarily Nombres and le Parc, Derrida writes the following (citing Le Parc) in the Time before First: “Any statements about the pre-beginning, about the fiction of the origin, about the indeterminacy of the seminal imperfect into which the pluperfect of some event without a date, of some immemorial birth, is inserted (‘something had begun…’) cannot themselves escape the rule they set forth. They recite themselves, leading you back for example to the native enclosure of the Park ‘…read the beginning of a sentence: “The exercise-book is open on the table,” make quite sure that it contains nothing that I wanted to give it (nothing that might be compared with the original project), that one word is not enough to save the rest, that this whole complacent, numbing succession of words must be destroyed; tear it up, tear it up, throw it away, make a clean sweep, recreate the space that will gradually extend and expand in every direction.’

Clearly the Sollers citation expresses an extreme anxiety for beginning. The first text, in the case of the Parc, is nothing more than a dull exercise book, a series of grammar drills whose answers, even the questions themselves, must be eradicated, such that we might forgo the complacent, numbing project of beginning. If there is no beginning and end, or, at least, there are no recognizable beginnings or ends, in the end, what happens is nothing:

“No event, then is being recounted; everything happens in the intertext; only one principle is observed: that ‘in the final analysis, what happens is nothing.’ There is always another book beginning to burn at the moment ‘he closes the book—blows out the candle with that breath of his which contained chance: and, crossing his arms, he lies down on the ashes of his ancestors.’

The duality between original text and quotation is thus swept away."

(“Time before First,” Dissemination. Cited from The Derrida Reader: Writing Performances. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1998; 134-5).

The dualities of [original and quotation] and [paraphrase and direct quotation] I will save for another post. I want to end these aimless reflections with something I learned from the Carte Postale. While we might decide that everything happens in the intertext, that the text gets going from a time of had done instead of did, that the text becomes in the passe-partout, and that Lacan is wrong in thinking that letters always arrive at their destinations, all of these ideas are simply decisions, readings that we might just as well re-read. Something important and rather obvious that I found on my second reading of Envois is that Derrida’s distance, in both physical and literary terms, from his female companion is a choice. It is by being apart that they can remain together, remain in communication, and that he can avoid her determination. I ask: when does not arriving become utterly boring? If it is rewriting, innovative reading of the archive that perpetuates the archive, when do we have nothing more than readings, readings, and more readings? Arrivals, even and perhaps particularly so, arrivals of polemic, “traditional” accounts can also fuel research and communication. There must be something in the space between (and I think maybe even big D would have to agree with this) reading for the message and re-reading ownerless texts. What we want to avoid, in any case, is saying nothing.