Jacques Derrida: Fear of Writing
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Loading ...Derrida’s oeuvre could be viewed as an exploration of the nature of writing in the broadest sense as différance.
To the extent that writing always includes pictographic, ideographic, and phonetic elements, it is not identical with itself. Writing, then, is always impure and, as such, challenges the notion of identity, and ultimately the notion of the origin as ’simple’. It is neither entirely present nor absent, but is the trace resulting from its own erasure in the drive towards transparency.
Writing is neither essential nor phenomenal, it is not what is produced but what allows for the possibility of production. In meditations on themes from literature, art and psychoanalysis, as well as from the history of philosophy, part of Derrida’s strategy is to make visible the ‘impurity’ of writing (and any identity), often by deploying rhetorical, graphic, and poetic strategies at once. Blurring boundaries between disciplines in his texts, such as in Glas (1974) or The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1980), Derrida shows the inseparable nature between the poetic and/or rhetorical, signifying element of a text, and the content or meaning, the signified element of the text.
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