‘Let us Italicise’

Abstract

This essay examines the abundant emphasising through italics that goes on in Derrida's work and its English translations and argues that the use of italics can be seen to reiterate some of Derrida's major theoretical concepts on the level of literary practice. The paper is divided into three sections, preceded by an introduction that expounds the importance of emphasis in Derrida's writing and on the history of the use of the italic font in general. The first section, ‘Italics-as-Supplement’, offers a general theory of italics as a mode of signification peculiar to print and raises the question of just what the verb ‘italicise’ might entail. The second section, ‘Italics-as-Trace’, focuses on the use of italics in Derrida's prose and the notion of authorial investment that any italic implies. The third section, ‘Italics-as-Spectre’, examines how Derrida uses italics to condition our readings of the texts that he himself cites.

Keywords:

• Derrida
• emphasis
• italics
• italicising
• supplement
• trace
• spectre
• recursivity

Notes

For the French ‘Soulignons-le’, see Derrida, 1967: 288, 394.

I shall therefore underline certain words or word-fragments (what happens when, in a citation, certain word-fragments are underlined? Does it still constitute a case of “citing”, of “using”, or “mentioning”?’ (Derrida, 1988: 40). Again, although Samuel Weber translates souligner as ‘underline’, italicising is what actually occurs in both the French and English texts. Except when marked as ‘my italics’, all italicising in quoted texts in this article comes from Derrida.

I should note that my own use of italics in this essay aspires to a certain recursivity of its own, an aspiration not entirely devoid of irony.

‘L'aveuglement au supplément est la loi’ (1967: 214). The fact that Derrida does not italicise the opening ‘L' in the French text points to a linguistic difference that has helped shape italic usage in the Francophone and Anglophone worlds, respectively. Since in French, unlike English, abstract nouns are preceded by articles, the significance of the italicised ‘the’ (e.g. the law) in English does not quite transfer over into French, where in fact one can emphasise an abstract noun by separating it from its article via italics, as Derrida does here. I point this out as but one example of the idiosyncratic factors that necessarily condition the use of italics in a given language, time, and place. One could doubtless point to a number of similar differences in italic usage between any two languages employing Latin alphabets.

The term is from ‘Marx & Sons’, Derrida's response to the nine other essays in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx. Derrida endorses his coinage as ‘lay[ing] claim not only to property, but also to priority, which is even more likely to provoke a smile’ (1999: 222).

‘everything that can incline – at a certain remove from the Roman in general. To think “religion” is to think the “Roman”. This can be done neither in Rome nor too far from Rome’ (1998: 4).

Although he does not reflect on this himself, Derrida's use of italics in ‘Faith and Knowledge’ further appeals to and problematises the relationship of italics to presence through the fact that his italics can be read as referring to at least three separate physical presents/presences, since Capri is at once where Derrida wrote the ‘Italiques’ section, where he delivered the paper, and where the conference was held.

This of course assumes the framework of an aesthetics of presence, as a Futurist or Technophile might well consider a printed underline to be a vast improvement over a handwritten one, a triumph over the maddening inexactitude of the human hand through the achievement of perfect straightness, pure and unbroken.

Derrida quotes this passage twice during his response to Searle (1990: 104, 105), and in fact the second time he italicises it.

I will be using ‘parasitic’ to designate italics imposed on citations, although it should be acknowledged that all italics are parasitic insofar as none could ever ‘take place’ without a ‘standard’ font to be italicised.

If the italic-as-spectre seems difficult to differentiate from the italic-as-trace, it should be remembered that Derrida himself asserts (1999: 268) that ‘the effort to think the trace is inseparable, and has from the outset been literally … indissociable from an effort to think spectrality’. It might even be misleading to characterise the spectre and the trace as ‘separate’ concepts, and more accurate to describe the spectre as a mode of the trace or a way of thinking how the trace manifests itself. For the purposes of organising this paper, thinking parasitic italics through the concept of the spectre provides a convenient way of differentiating their recursive aspects from those of Derrida's other italics, although this differentiation should be considered neither neat nor tidy in its own right.

‘an appearance of flesh, in a space of invisible visibility … Once ideas or thoughts (Gedanke) are detached from their substratum, one engenders some ghost by giving them a body. Not by returning to the living body from which ideas and thoughts have been torn loose, but by incarnating the latter in another artificial body, a prosthetic body’ (1994: 126).

‘Darmesteter foresees the day when even the last two letters of vingt “twenty” will be pronounced – truly an orthographic monstrosity. Such phonic deformations belong to language but do not stem from its natural functioning. They are due to an external influence. … (p. 54; italics added)’ (1976: 42).

‘The time of that language is the unstable, inaccessible, mythic limit between that already and this not-yet: time of a language being born, just as there was a time for ‘society being born’. Neither before nor after the origin’ (1976: 244).

Thinking the italic-as-spectre might offer one way out of this dilemma, since one defining characteristic of spectres is that ‘there must be more than one of them’ (1994: 13).