Index and the Body of Philosophy On Derrida's ‘Performances Without Presence’

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Notes

¹ Edited and translated by David B. Allison as Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs (1973).

² Cf. Derrida (1967: 31): ‘le signe est cette chose mal nommée, la seule, qui échappe à la question institutrice de la philosophie: “Qu'est-ce que…?”’

³ Cf. Derrida (2004: 38–9): ‘in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-à-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy…. To deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn the hierarchy at a given moment.’

⁴ The materiality of the signifier is a debatable point, the very ‘identity’ of a given signifier being a type of ideality: signifier undergoes slight physical variations in its non-identical repetitions, but remains equally legible.

⁵ The process of dissemination is a consequence of the structural givens of every sign system: signs do not have a ‘natural’ context or a ‘native country’, therefore the ‘true meaning’ of any semiotic entity is not obtainable through its genealogy, but only through the unstable and ‘untrue’ definition by differing from the others. ‘Dissemination… can never become an originary, central, or ultimate signified, the place proper to truth. On the contrary, dissemination represents the affirmation of this non-origin, the remarkable empty locus of a hundred blanks no meaning can be ascribed to, in which mark supplements and substitution games are multiplied ad infinitum’ (Derrida 1981: 268).

⁶ For an extensive treatise, see Derrida (1987b).

⁷ Dialogue – or ‘choreographic text with polysexual signatures’ (Derrida 1995: 107) – seems to be the least problematic formal feature of Derrida's work, traceable back to Plato, but it actually follows Blanchot's disorientating polylogues in the form of ‘n+1’ – a formula simultaneously different from and related to Derrida's ‘plus d'une langue’ (1987a: 38), a radically reductive yet possible condensation of his entire opus and deconstruction.

⁸ Following Bataille; cf. ‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve’, in Derrida (2003: 317–50).

⁹ Of course, there is no exteriority as such, and the question of the very limitability of text remains one of Derrida's lasting contributions to contemporary theory. The most famous, wildly misunderstood and fiercely attacked sentence, ‘Il n'y a pas de hors-texte’ (Derrida 1967: 227), testifies precisely to a different order of being in the realm of signsystems; the fact that Derrida regretted not formulating it more cautiously as ‘There is nothing outside context’ or ‘There is nothing but context’ proves that he wasn't intent upon proclaiming the ‘relativity’ of meaning which makes the notorious ‘freeplay of the signifier’ possible. It's misleading to think of a textual entity in terms of singularity and presence, and many Derrida's works warn against application of extratextual ontology to the field of text.

¹⁰ Cf., for instance, ‘Pas’ (Derrida 1986: 19–116).

¹¹ For Derrida's ‘confrontation’ with Searle, see Limited Inc (1988).

¹² Cf. Derrida (1986: 189): ‘présence sans présence’, ‘avoir-lieu sans lieu’, ‘le sans et le pas sans pas’.

¹³ Blanchot's writings on text, subject and death exerted a deep and lasting influence on Derrida, especially regarding the question of discrepancy between presence and text. For a brief introduction, see, for instance, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ (Blanchot 1999a) and ‘The Narrative Voice (the “he”, the neuter)’ (1999b).