Derrida Paper

for reference to yesterday's post, the Derrida paper I wrote for pat day's lit crit class (once I figure out how to host attachments, I'll put it there, but for now... at least it takes up space.

Facing the Infinite Abyss

It’s 4:00 in the morning and I’m writing a paper. I have been in A-level of Mudd library for 20 hours, not including breaks for meals and cigarettes, yet I can still barely remember what the world is like outside my carrel. I have to hand it up in five hours — five measly hours to hone my little argument, so that it can be a drop in the sea of criticism. I am a critic.

This paper is not merely the culmination of my work in this particular course throughout the semester, or the pinnacle of my college career, but the singular action that all other actions of my life have led to. Everything up to this point, everything I’ve ever been, everything I’ve ever done, everything that has ever happened to me, has been such that at this moment, I would be writing this paper. I can’t remember what there was before — at this moment, being is encompassed in A-level, existence in my paper. It has taken over the vastness of the universe and become all that there is. Writing this paper is the only thing that I will ever do.
However, I am somehow vaguely aware that the deadline is imminent. I work steadily until 8:30 a.m., at which an invisible force wills me to stop. I give it one more read-through, print it out, and gather my things. I hurriedly leave the library for Rice, and presently I reach my professor’s office. I take this document, these pieces of paper that I have poured over for weeks, this text that is all that I ever was or ever will be, and I slip it under the door. I’m done; it’s over. And yet… life goes on. I walk outside and am reborn, having glimpsed into the infinite abyss of the process of reading.

Is this the best that can be done in the face of the infinite? Jacques Derrida, post-structuralist and the father of deconstructionism, posits his methodology for the way we ought to read, and for the way to garner meaning from text, as a project embedded in the infinity of the text. “There is too much, more than one can say.” (Derrida, Structure 12) The process of deconstruction — of reading, taking the book apart, writing, re-reading, and deconstructing again — is never-ending. But this isn’t how I’ve been taught to read, or have understood reading, because this is not how I understand the state of my existence. There is only so much time in the day to do the reading, to write the paper, to revise it, to take the courses, to be in college, to be alive. How are we, as finite beings, to interact with Derrida’s infinite project if we know that at some point it will be over and we’ll have to turn in the paper?

The process by which I can begin to engage with this question starts with processing and entering into the realm of Derrida’s methodology concerning the infinite text. Derrida’s conclusion of infinite reading begins after the project of structuralism reveals its own absence of a ‘center.’ The center has always been thought to be unique, because while it governs and dictates the form of the structure (thus being at it’s center) it exists outside it, and cannot be governed by the structure. (Derrida Structure 3) Additionally, in the evolution of a structuralist way of interpreting text, the center has always been thought to be “the determination of Being as presence in all senses of the word.” (4) In my understanding of Derrida’s procedure, this harks back to the question of finding truth in literature that has plagued humanity since Plato’s day. The center is where the truth of literature lies. Since there is no center, everything said about text, or structures in general, is participating in discourse: “a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified is never absolutely present outside a system of difference.” (4) Without a central signifier to dictate the rest of the structure, other significations are offered up as the crux by which a structure can be maintained, as substitutions for the center. (13) As such, many significations can be substituted, or supplemented, as the center for any structure, making them mobile in their construction of meaning.

At this point, the project of deconstruction — of questioning and tearing down structures by reading — becomes all the more vast because of the increase of structures, before the examination of the pretense of the possibility of the totality of text is even introduced. This is where all hope of finite deconstruction is lost. In Derrida’s project, totalization— the idea of the total, complete analysis; that there is a point at which there wouldn’t be any more to say — does not happen precisely because the absence of the a grounding point (the center) in the construction of language (as it is a structure) causes the nature of it as a finite thing to “exclude totalization” (12) thereby making it irrelevant if a text does in fact, have a finite empirical value in terms of words in it, because each word in every text is an unplottable signifier with an infinite proliferation of meaning. So, even if the production of texts were to cease right now, the process of deconstructing just one would still be an infinite task. The text is infinite.
If deconstruction is a process of infinite reading, and the point of deconstruction is to bring forth the possibility of meaning, it follows that deconstruction leads to the infinite proliferation of meaning. In the short story, ‘The Library of Babel’ by Borges, such an infinitely textual world is conceived, although the leap from this state to one of infinite meaning seems to fall short, because all of the people in this world are still trying to pin it down to one meaning, so to speak. (Except for the ones who claim “the books signify nothing in themselves,” and oppose the possibility of finding meaning in them at all.) The idea of totality is introduced as well: numerically, if there are only so many figures of which a book may consist in a closed form, and there are no two identical books, it follows that there are only so many combinations that can exist: thus arriving at a vast, yet finite number. However, the Narrator follows the route of Derrida’s infinitude in claiming that the vast library is infinite, though the books in it are finite: the library is actually a cyclical structure, and this discovery might be made by an “eternal traveler.”

How would our process of reading be different if there were no due dates? When would the paper, in its capacity as a reading of a text, be finished? There does not seem to be an answer for this question from Derrida, which is the point: one would never be finished. Derrida talks about this in his assertion that, “the idea of the book, which always refers to a natural totality, is profoundly alien to the sense of writing.” (Grammatology 605) Writing is not meant to happen in a closed form, as in books or essays. Writing is naturally meant to be an encounter with “the divine inscription” (Grammatology 604), which will encounter the presence of the inevitably absent origin, and result in the break with any need for truth in order to revel in the “joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault.” (Structure 15). This play must then be inherently infinite, which then calls the act of writing itself into this never-ending process, before looking at it as a form of textual response is even part of the equation, stretching the parameters of the process even more. Any textual engagement, either in creation of new texts or response to existing ones, enters into the dimension of the infinite.

But how are we, as admittedly and in fact finite beings to comprehend the scope of this project? Derrida does not completely ignore this factor of time insofar as the past nature of the action of reading and comprehension up to now is important in the way in which his new methodology of reading has developed. He examines how we have thought about the relations between signs and signification, being and presence, meaning and truth, throughout the collective past of humanity in the whole first part of Structure, Sign and Play, which I touched on earlier. Every historical step of the ideological structure of reading is accounted for in order to explain where we are in the process now. In Of Grammatology, the gradual movement from language to writing is examined in terms of its inevitability, rather than in terms of historical contingency. “Their movement was absolutely necessary, with a necessity which cannot be judged by any other tribunal.” (593) So while the movement of these concepts has happened, thereby affecting our understanding of them, they have not moved one way or the other because of our influence on them. No matter what we think about the sign, it will continue to move toward meaninglessness. It is the evolution of thought without the necessary condition of cause and effect. This is how the idea of the future presents itself in Derrida’s project, in that the evolution continues. There is a way that things were, which is different than how they are now, which is different than how they will be. “It is therefore as if what we call language could have been in its origin and in its end only a moment…an aspect, a species of writing…[T]his death of the book undoubtedly announces… nothing but a death of speech…and a new mutation in the history of writing.” (Grammatology 594) We are on the verge of a new moment, catching mere “glimpses” of the thing to come for our understanding of interpretation, reading, and writing. The coming moment when there will be no more due dates, and the infinite project will begin, in terms of the way that we interact with literature and texts. The moment when we will get to the place where we don’t know where we are going.

But what do I do right now? It seems absurd to attempt to answer this question if I want to be in the place where I don’t know where I’m going. I cannot even conceive of what the coming of the new moment would bring. What would the new writing look like without pages and books binding it? It seems as though nobody else does either, and that we are all at an impasse. Derrida’s writings were published 50 years ago, and there has been no systematic educational revolution to abolish the notion of being “done” with a book — there is still the progression, the reading list, due dates, semesters. His own essays are read, pondered, talked about, commented on, and eventually cleared away to make room for something new to read. What else can we do other than keep going with what we’ve been doing?

My only hope, as I attempt to grapple with these inconceivable formations of infinity in the context of reading, is to attempt to remain in play, though I still want to be able to live in the world. I am not sure if this is possible. I will try to play, to allow malleability, to let myself feel overwhelmed by a text, to get swept up by it and be in it while it deconstructs, and let myself be deconstructed. To that affect, I will keep thinking about this new reading, even though we have “finished the tour de France and are moving on to the Americans,” in class, and I will try to keep writing this paper, even though right now it’s done.