SCRIPTURE, SCRIPTION, SCRIPT

Trace and differance, the two principal designations of what Derrida calls arche-writing and what I shall here variously call scripture, scription, and script, do not lend themselves to a systematic account. All the more reason to admire Rodolphe Gasché’s rigorously systematic description of them, which I shall use here as an initial orientation.¹

According to Gasché, trace and differance are but two of the five infrastructures or graphematic structures of deconstruction, the three others being supplementarity, iterability, and the “re-mark.” Whatever else it might be—and its structure is highly complex—the trace expresses “an originary nonpresence and alterity” at the heartSo perfect to Pierre had long seemed the illuminated scroll of his life thus far, that only one hiatus was discoverable by him in that sweetly-writ manuscript. A sister had been omitted from the textof all systems of expression (191). Pure ideality of meaning, pure self-presence as such, both require and enable infinite repeatability. “I can repeat, as often as I like,” Husserl is fond of saying in his descriptions of Wiedererinnerung. Yet infinite repeatability of a self-identical unit of meaning depends in a bedeviling way on several series of differences. “Indeed, for an ideal entity to repeat itself, it must be able to intimate itself in contrast to an Other from which it is different” (192). Theaetetus is not Socrates is not Theodorus is not even snubnosedness, and the typos or eikōn of the nose that will enable us to remember any one of them as one of them will rely in an ultimately unaccountable way on an infinite series of differences. “In short, the arche-trace must be understoodIn their precise tracings-out and subtile causations, the strongest and fieriest emotions of life defy all analytical insightas the fold of an irreducible ‘bending-back,’ as a minimal (self-)difference within (self-)identity” (192).

Such a “fold” or “bending-back” may remind us of the classic criticism of the engram by Coleridge, Erwin Straus, and Merleau-Ponty. In order for the engram to do its work it must efface itself, like a footprint vanishing from the snow; it must eradicate itself (in order to preserve the surface) yet reintroduce itself at the will of the tracker or “reader” of the prints. Moreover, the problem of the virginal surface of snowscape or pineal gland or writing pad is not merely one of the gradual accumulation of marks, not merely a problem of crowding or excessive corrugation; the engrammatological dilemma is there with the very first mark or imprint, already there with the supposition that there can be a “very first” pristine mark. The bending-back of which Gasché writes is actually a doubling that does not follow the iconographic model of image and original. In support of what Plato’s Cratylus has taught us, Gasché writes:

Because a mark acquires the ideal identity necessary to its iteration as the mark of something other than itself only to the extent that it is constituted by what it is not, the totalizing semic mark must also inscribe or insert within itself the differential structure of the mark, that which makes the mark possible. The mark must thus be marked, or re-marked, by its own mark (march, margin). Since in its irreducible duplication it must include a reference to what it is not, inserting something heterogeneous to itself in itself—namely, what demarcates it as a mark—the mark also names the space of inscription of the marks, what holds them together and separates them, what makes them resemble and differ from one another. . . . The re-mark is thus more than the totality of the marks and more than the totalizing concept of the mark; in addition it is what makes that totality possible. . . . The trait by which the mark becomes doubled, however, is an undecidable trait, one that constitutes a limit to the (conceptualizing or representing) reflection of the limits or margins of the mark. . . . (219—20)

This last point is perhaps the most difficultThe metaphysical writers confess, that the most impressive, sudden, and overwhelming event, as well as the minutest, is but the product of an infinite series of infinitely involved and untraceable foregoing occurrencesof all, and Gasché attempts to clarify it by the following:

The re-mark is an essential limit to all coinciding reflection or mirroring, a doubling of the mark that makes all self-reflective adequation impossible. For structural reasons, there is always more than totality; the extra valence added by the delegate of the asemic space of diacritical differentiation of the totality of semes always—infinitely—remains to be accounted for. (221)

However impenetrable such “asemic space” may seem, the doubling of the mark, less a doubling than a kind of fission or ceaseless internal division and differentiating, is actually something that has confronted us from the outset. The doubling in question is not a replication of simples but a duplex relationshipThis romantic filial lovebetween the simple (what Plato calls the eidos) and its simulacra, the icon and the idol (eikōn, eidōlon). Better, it is the duplicitous relation of the simulacra to the self-showing or perfect presence of the idea. The duplicitous simulacrum embodies what Gasché (226) calls a “subtle excess of truth and ontology,” an excess in the sense of an exceeding or transgressing of bounds. Thus the straightforward logico-metaphysical opposition of truth and untruth founders. What we are asked to entertain here is “a simulacrum without an ultimate referent. . . .” The originary duplicity of the simulacrum “initiates but also displaces the metaphysical opposition of original and copy, and the copy of a copy, into a completely different field” (227).

The “field” in question is of course not a field at all but a declivity, a slippery slope, a verge. We set foot on it whenever weseemed to entertain some insane hopes of wedding this unattainable beingtry for example to distinguish as Aristotle does an activity (such as reminiscing) from a pure pathos (such as involuntary remembering); or whenever with Aristotle we designate the waxy surface as the “original image” of memory; or when we try to understand the sensus communis as a sensing that one senses; or when the word being doubles in that curious phrase, “the being of beings,” here meaning the mysterious presence of what is past in our memories, the being of beings in time; or when we gaze on the zōgraphēma, which is in some bizarre sense a “living portrait” of a living being, both an object in its own right andIt is an excellent likeness, my childan icon of an Other; remembering that the word zoion itself, without the supplement of the graphēma, operates according to the selfsame duplicity (living being/likeness); or when we recall Aristotle’s suggestion that the mind can scan or glean (theōrem) doubly; or when we bring to mind the happenstance that Aristotle’s account of the portrait itself doubles as a portrait of the phantasms of the mind, an image of images that are themselves duplex; or, more negatively, when we consider that the explanation in terms of phantasmata only redoubles the enigma of memory, inasmuch as both the object and its portrait are absent from memory before it remembers; or when we recall that the motion followed by recollection is pursuit (akolouthei) of time’s own motion, but that such pursuit is not perfect in the case of reminiscence, inasmuch as false directions are always possible, and that for every physis or upsurgent self-showing there is a paraphysis or “obfuscation,” for every genuine homoiōsis also a paromoion, a mere likeness of likeness; or the curious doubling of body and soul in memory, in that remembering seems to be both syllogistic inference and a profoundly incarnate pathos; or, finally, the curious doubling in the Aristotelian pathology of the elderly—nature’s natural dwarfs—who in their very wasting away are both sclerotic and metabolic.

No doubt we would encounter Plato—the apostle of eidos and apostate of eidola—just as often on the verge. Plato’s typos and karaktēr are themselves as duplicitous as virga, “the verge,” inasmuch as they suggest that in which, by which, and of which a stamping occurs—matrix, marker, and modeled image in one; remembering that infinite duplication and iteration are what the entire typographic process is about; whereby both the wax slab and aviary images involve an iteration of likenesses rather than an introduction of beings themselves; so that it may be either comforting or disconcerting to note that the iconography of memory lies at the heart of the fundamental aporia of Platonic participation (of form and form, as of being and form); which is to say, the aporia of the being of beings; this odd doubling leading to the duplicity of sophist and philosopher, of self-showing in an Other, presencing as a kind of absence and nonbeing; or to the duplicity of the megalithic artist who imitates the goddess perfectly and shows her to be a gigantic midget; whence Heidegger’s insight that mimēsis is precisely what neither artist nor craftsman achieves, even if the craftsman is the divine father of all; given what he has to work with—a duplicitous receptaclea reverential and devoted son seemed lover enough for this widow Bloomand mother of all becoming. Letters too, ta grammata, are not without their own duplicities. In Theaetetus and Sophist they appear as perdurant elements in the flood of speech, as the alogical atoms of logos. For Hobbes and Locke as well, letters have a perdurant, atomic character: the sounds that produce names and perspicuous words are from the outset marks or notes of memory, as though the sounds doubled as letters before being sounded, and as though (as Quintilian would have affirmed) speaking were a kind of reading. However, by reminding ourselves of the importance of letters in accounts of knowledge and memory, accounts that are essentially engrammatological, we approach—more directly now—Derrida’s Of Grammatology and Dissemination.

The most general theses of grammatology illuminate the destiny of what I have been calling typography, iconography, and engrammatology. If the phonetization of writing dissimulates its own history, that dissimulation facilitates the search for a medium so transparent that it appears to preserve the full presence of what is absent or past; however, if the history of metaphysics ascribes to the logos of living language the origin of truth, repressing writing and expelling it from the sanctuary of truth, then the fate of typographic and iconographic memory will be the fate of truth as such; if the very scientificity of science is bound up with the logocentrism of our tradition, then the experience of what I am calling the verge will not leave untouched the spheres of knowledge and science. Further, if the dissimulation of the process of phonetization is failing in our time; if phonematic or glossematic language finally reveals itself—in its very emphasis on the tongue, voice, hearing, sound, breath, living dialogue, genuine communication, speech acts, and so on—as “the guise or disguise of a premier writing” (G, 16—17/7), then script cannot be a simple supplement, and the supplemental relationship of writing to memory and reminiscence is drawn into a kind of turbulence. Finally, if it is the full presence of living speech that grants to the living word its privileged place in the history of metaphysics, then the enigma of memory—the presence of the past—will perhaps serve as the crucible or mortar of that tradition. If typographic inscription in the mind seems the only way to account for the iconographic presence of the past, memory seems to be the scene both of crisis and of supreme fulfillment for logocentrism. Crisis, inasmuch as the incised mark alone, rather than the stream of words flowing from the mouth, guarantees a hold on meaning; fulfillment, inasmuch as the engrammatological reading or scanning of the incised marks appears to restore both the virginity of the matrix and the full presence of what was absent.

I cannot offer here an account of the enigmatic phenomenon of the s’entendre-parler, hearing and understanding oneself while speaking, which is so central to Derrida’s argument in both Voice and Phenomenon and Of Grammatology.² However, let me pose the obvious question to that analysis: Does not the very crisis of logocentrism in the prevailing models for memory and reminiscence, which do not repress writing but appeal blatantly to it, indicate a flaw in the Derridean depiction of the s’entendre-parler? If the principal enigma of memory is resolved always and everywhere in our tradition by an appeal to marks, signs, notations, and text, is not scription rather than speech the privileged place of presence?

Like most obvious questions, the one I have just posed stops short, fails to remember. For the success of engrammatology always necessitated the reading of memorious marks, signs, notations, and text, which of themselves were marks of oblivion, mere hypomnemics. And the secret of this success was wellkept. How did the reading, the retrieval, function? How did it work? Did it not work by translating the incised icons back into the cutting edge of presence itself? And is there anything in the foregoing account that suggests that it is something other than presence, interiority, absolute proximity to being, and self-affection that accounts for the miracle of memory?

When Derrida presents that text from Aristotle’s Of Interpretation (I, 16a, 3ff.) that cried for attention in chapter i but never got it, a text made crucially relevant by Heidegger’s discussion of it in “The Way to Language,” there can be no doubt about the relevance of grammatology for engrammatology. Aristotle identifies the sounds emitted by the voice (ta en tēi phōnēi) as symbols of the affections of the psyche (tōn en tēi psykhēi pathēmatōn symbola), and written words (ta graphomena) as symbols of those sounds. If memory and reminiscence involve the presence of such pathēmata in the mind, as they do, it will not be irrelevant to engrammatology that “the voice, producing the first symbols, has a rapport of essential and immediate proximity with the soul” (G, 21—22/11). As premier productressthe low melodies of her far interior voice hovered in sweet echoes in the roomof signifiers, the voice cannot be one signifier among others. “Between being and the soul, things and the affections, there would be a relation of translation or natural signification; between the soul and the logos, a rapport of conventional symbolization” (G, 22/11). Even if the voice is not itself pure transparency, and even if speech differs from one nation to the next, voice and speech are as intimate with phenomena as any signification can be. Aristotle writes:

Spoken words are symbols of affections in the soul, written words are the symbols of spoken words. And just as written letters [grammata] are not the same for all peoples, neither are spoken sounds [phōnai]. Yet the affections in the soul, of which these are preeminently the signs [sēmeia prōtōs: Derrida translates: sont immediatement les signes], are the same for all men, as are the things [pragmata] of which those affections are the likenesses [homoiōmata].

Iconography proper pertains to the things themselves, the pragmata, as they are captured typographically in the impressions or affections of the soul, the pathēmata. The latter constitute the universal language, the original text, the script and scripture of human experience. One must therefore stress more than Derrida does that neither spoken nor written words conform perfectly to such likeness. Engrammatology—can it ever be equal to the task of iconography? More important, Derrida seems to restrict the attribution of preeminent signification to the spoken word, whereas in Aristotle’s text the tauta probably refers to both spoken and written sēmeia, both speech and writing. Heidegger certainly reads the phrase that way: he translates hōn mentoi tauta sēmeia prōtōs as “Woven indes diese (Laute und Schrift) erstlich ein Zeigen sind . . ,” “Yet that of which these [sounds and writing] are in the first instance a showing. . . .”³ Not only the relegation of both writing and speech to a secondary status should be stressed here, but also Heidegger’s translation of sēmeia as das Zeigende, the showing. Because I stressed the importance of self-showing in my reading of Aristotle’s Of Memory and Reminiscence, I am perhaps justified in stressing here the inadequacy of both writing and speech to such showing: no system of signs seems equal to the self-showing of either the things themselves in sensuous apprehension or of the affections (pathēmata) in the soul’s interior life. Nevertheless, two points argue against my reservations: first, in the opening lines of the passage Aristotle unequivocally subordinates writing to speech, the latter symbolizing the pathēmata, the former symbolizing speech, and thus perduring at a second (or third) remove from the things themselves; second, Heidegger himself never doubts the priority of speech in Aristotle’s “classic construction,” and his whole undertaking in “The Way to Language” is to put in question the lingua of language, our glossary and glossolalia, our Mund-art, the way we dialecticians mouth the words of language. In short, one must doubtless be cautious when affirming “the absolute proximity of the voice and being,” remembering that our tradition is not so much phonocentric as sigocentric (from sigein, to maintain silence); the philosophic voice has always been the voice that keeps silent, as Socrates tells us in Sophist (at 263e; cf. Theaetetus, 189e—190a): “Thinking [dianoia] and discourse [logos] are the same, except that what we call thinking is the dialogue [dialogos] within the soul which the soul has with itself [pros autēn] and which comes to be without sound [aneu phōnēs]” The Western tradition is aneuphonic rather than phonocentric. And yet Derrida is right to suggest that writing has always seemed noisier to the tradition than speech: the scratch of the verge is generallyHe will not be called to; he will not be stirred. Sometimes the intent ear of Isabel in the next room, overhears the alternate silence, and then the long lonely scratch of his pen. It is, as if she heard the busy claw of some midnight mole in the groundmore disruptive of interiority than the warbling throat. Interiority is the issue, an interiority that obviously has to do with remembrance as interiorization (Er-Innerung, Innerlich-machen); the issue is not some sort of contest between speech and writing, in which the proximity of voice and being would be matched against Sacred Scripture or Descartes scribbling at the hearth. “Script” or “scription,” écriture in Derrida’s sense, is exteriority as such, whether in written or spoken form: “The exteriority of the signifier is the exteriority of writing [écriture] in general, and we shall try to show . . . that there is no linguistic sign prior to writing” (G, 26/14). If matters should seem otherwise, Derrida argues, it is because of a certain “metaphorical mediation” by which script insinuates itself into the heart of being as the very voice of God: “. . . scripture [écriture] of the truth of the soul, opposed by Phaedrus (278a) to bad script [mauvaise écriture] (to scription [écriture] in the ‘proper’ and current sense, ‘sensuous’ writing, ‘in space’) . . . “:

. . . everything that functions as a metaphor in these discourses confirms the privilege of logos and founds the “proper” sense thus given to writing: a sign signifying a signifier itself signifying an eternal truth, eternally thought and spoken in the proximity of a present logos. The paradox to which one must pay heed is thus the following: natural and universal scripture, intelligible and nontemporal scription, is thus named by metaphor. Sensuous script, which is finite, etc., is designated as writing in the proper sense; it is thus thought to be on the side of culture, technicity, and artifice: a human procedure, the ruse of a creature incarnated by accident, or of a finite creature. (G, 26—27/14-15)

“Natural” writing here shares none of the Natürlichkeit before which Hegel shudders in awe and horror; “natural” here has nothing to do with nature I never knew a mortal mother. The farthest stretch of my life’s memory can not recall a single feature of such a face but everything to do with the demiurge and father, the lord of the logos. The father’s is the universal, intelligible scripture, which is nontemporal, atemporal. His is the realm of the pure signified, wholly present in the time of a breath or the blink of an eye, which leaves no trace (G, 31/18). Yet how could such “natural” scripture serve the typography, iconography, and engrammatology of memory and reminiscence? If the pure signified leaves no trace, can it ever have been the object of memory? Or, to ask it the other way around, starting from our (finite) experiences in this (finite) world: What has the deconstruction of pure ideality into trace and differance to do with our remembering and forgetting of persons, things, and events in the world? How does Derrida’s thought of the trace affect the traces of typography, iconography, and engrammatology?

A first reply arises during Derrida’s genealogical account of the “usurpation” (in the eyes of Rousseau and Saussure) of speech by writing. It is in fact the durability and duration of the mnemic trace, inscription as “the durable institution of a sign” (G, 65/44), that makes it so seductive for the typographic tradition; the excellence of the typos and its impressed mark resides precisely in its simulation of eternity or permanent presence. Yet if this is so, the typographic tradition gives the lie to phonocentrism and makes a nonsense of the imputed “contamination” of living language by script. “To explain the usurpation [of speech by writing] by means of the strength of duration [durée] in script and by virtue of the hardness [dureté] of substance in script—is this not to contradict outrageously what is otherwise affirmed concerning the oral tradition of language, which is said to be ‘independent of writing, and fixed in an altogether different manner’?” (G, 60/41). The hardness of the mnemic trace is of course a sometime thing: not a thinker in the West who has not stressed the difficulties in getting the verge just right—the verge as both the cutting edge of the stylus and the waxen matrice. Hardness in and of itself implies lethargy and oblivion: Benjy. Which would suggest why memory is the crucible—or perhaps the Achilles heel, and even the jugular—of the metaphysics of presence. If writing is the evil, transgression, violence, sacrilege, and incestthey were wont to call each other brother and sistercommitted against the mother tongue, or what Thoreau identifies as the father tongue, then memory and reminiscence will have been the scene of such wickedness. In the midst of wistfulness and nostalgia, reports of treachery and death. If script haunts language “as its premier and most intimate possibility” even after it has been banished beyond the frontiers of interiority (G, 64/44), so does memory haunt knowledge and every ontotheological security as their inexplicable shadow.

A second reply to our question arises during Derrida’s most explicit account of the trace, in “The Outside Is the Inside,” as being somehow prior to typography. “Before even being given over to incision or engraving, to the sketch or the letter, to a signifier generally referring back to a signifier signified by it, the concept of graphie implies the agency of the instituted trace, as the possibility common to all systems of signification” (G, 68/46). Both typography and iconography presuppose the graphie as such—if one can retain the phrase “as such,” which itself relies on the typos and eikōn of graphematics, which of course one cannot. For the deconstruction of graphematics discloses “the absence of an other, transcendental present,” an absence that “presents itself” as “an irreducible absence within the presence of the trace” (G, 68/47). The graphic trace thus marks a relation to “the other” of being. “One must think the trace prior to the being [avant I’étant]” (G, 69/47). And: “The field of being, before being determined as a field of presence, is structured by the diverse possibilities—genetic and structural—of the trace” (G, 69/47). Thus the field of scriptive being, like the field of existence as Merleau-Ponty writes of it, is for Derrida a certain “hollow” (creux)doth not the Scripture intimate, that He holdeth all of us in the hollow of His Hand?—a Hollow, truly! in being, a hollowing-out (se creuser) of being. For Merleau-Ponty, the hollow of being is temporality as such; the hollowing action is temporalization. In Derrida’s quasi-transcendental account of the trace as arche-writing and archesynthesis, three items are pervasive: in addition to (1) “language as écriture” and (2) “the structure of the relation to the other,” one must also consider (3) “the movement of temporalization” (G, 69; 88/47; 60). Temporalization and temporising, both in the hollow of différance as differentiation and deferral, are no doubt central to any inquiry into memory.⁴ I shall therefore turn to the question of temporalization after making two more replies to the question concerning the relevance of grammatology for engrammatology.

The third reply deepens and perhaps even supersedes the account of the graphie. For the very possibility of the trace, as relation to an otherness, refers us to play rather than to the work of graphematics. “One could call play [jeu] the absence of the transcendental signified, as the infinite expansiveness [illimitation] of play; that is to say, as that which causes ontotheology and the metaphysics of presence to tremble” (G, 73/50). If script, scripture, and scription constitute “the play in language,” such play resonates in the debate between Thot and King Thamus in Phaedrus, to which we shall return in the final part of the chapter; as the “play of the world [jeu du monde],” such play would also have to be discussed in terms of the Heraclitean Aion, Nietzschean “world-play, the ruling,” the Heideggerian play of being, in which humanity is the stakes, and Eugen Fink’s “play as cosmic symbol” (G, 73-74/326 n. 14). Here it can only be a matter of seeing that the duplicities that disturb the smooth functioning of iconography arise precisely from such oscillation or play. The oscillation within verisimilitude, which is always equally dissimulation, disturbs both the icon and the graphie that would serve it. “Before being or not being ‘noted,’ ‘represented,’ or ‘figured’ in a ‘graphie’ [now placed in scare-quotes], the linguistic sign implies an originary writing” (G, 77/52). If oral languagein a voice that seems to come from under your great grandfather s tombalready belongs to such scription, the pure presence it dreams of approximating is lost forever. The project of a perfect restoration of the past in active remembrance, through the combined efforts of typography, iconography, and engrammatology, thereby founders. Again, it is not a matter of “rehabilitating” script during or after the epoch of phonocentrism, or even of reversing the order of dependence in the linguistics of speech and writing; rather, it is a matter of recognizing that there never was a pure presence uncontaminated by the exteriority and instability of a system of signs, no icon that was ever preserved intact, no cutting edge that ever wholly mastered the matrix. No doubt, the “new concept” of arche-writing continues to “communicate with” the “vulgar” sense of script. Writing, in the quotidian sense, “could only impose itself historically by the dissimulation of arche-writing [objective genitive, in the first place, subjective genitive if one takes seriously, as one must, arche-writing as the complicity of origins (G, 140/92)], by the desire for a speech that repels its other, its double, and labors to reduce its difference” (G, 83/56). And that difference “cannot be thought without the trace” (G, 83/56).

This third reply conducts us to the “field of transcendental experience”If man must wrestle, perhaps it is well that it should be on the nakedest possible plainon which the hardest grammatological battles are fought (see G, 89-90/60-61; 95-96/65-66). Why the possibility of the trace leads Derrida to that field is clear, if we recall that after Kant every question of condition-of-possibility is a transcendental question. What the transcendental passage (parcours: G, 90/61) can be, as passage to an ultratranscendental text, a passage that leaves a certain trace in its wake (sillage), without which the ultra-transcendental text would be virtually identical to a text on the hitherside of such a passage, I cannot say. Except that if the necessity of such a passage is also the necessity of an erasure (“. . . the value of the transcendental archie ought to let its necessity be felt before allowing itself to be erased”), then the text of deconstruction cannot and does not appeal to any of the traditional processes of typography, iconography, and engrammatology. “The trace is not only the disappearance of the origin; here—in the discourse in which we are engaged and according to the passage [parcours] we are following—it means that the origin has not even disappeared; that it was only ever constituted in the return of a nonorigin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of origin” (G, 90/61). Trace is thus thought, not as a constituted difference or system of differences, but as the very movementas of ambiguous fairies dancing on the heath of differentiation, as “pure movement”:

The (pure) trace is differance. It does not depend on any sensible plenitude, whether audible or visible, phonic or graphic. On the contrary, it is the condition of these things. Although it does not exist, although it is never a present-being outside all plenitude, its possibility is de jure anterior to everything we call a sign (signified/signifier, content/expression, etc.), concept, or operation, whether motor or sensible. (G, 92/62)

In this outer stratosphere of deconstructive abstraction, where we rejoin Rodolphe Gasché’s meditation, the trace appears to be untouched and untouchable—form of forms, entelechy of entelechies, the very “formation of forms.” Yet precisely here (G, 92/63) Derrida reminds us that the pure movement of differance, with an a, is also “the being-imprinted of the imprint,” l’être-imprimé de l’empreinte. While I cannot pursue the consequences of such an imprint for Derrida’s analysis of the acoustic image, or comment on his insistence on a kind of “phenomenological reduction” by which the distinction between “appearing sound” and “the appearance of the sound” will be saved, this reintroduction of the imprint transposes a kind of typography to that transcendental field of experience. The reintroduction of the imprint has the effect of relocating the entire discussion of textuality and of tying typography to an explicit engrammatology. I have elsewhere criticized the following passage as having introduced an arche-limbo into grammatology,⁵ and yet it now seems that I must dedicate—si l’on peut dédicacer l’archi-limbo d’entre deux pages, en vol, United—considerable space to it here:

. . . one should recognize that it is in the specific zone of this imprint and this trace, in the temporalization of something lived [d’un vécu] which is neither in the world nor in an “other world,” which is no more sonorous than it is luminous, no more in time than in space, that differences appear among the elements, or rather, produce these elements, cause them to surge forth as such, and thus constitute texts, chains and systems of traces. These chains and these systems can sketch themselves out [se dessiner] only in the web of this trace or imprint. The unheard difference between the appearing and the to-appear (between the “world” and the “lived”) is the condition of all the other differences, all the other traces, and it is already a trace. This last concept too is absolutely and de jure “anterior” to every physiological problematic concerning the nature of the engram or metaphysical problematic concerning the meaning of absolute presence, which the trace thus sets about decoding. In effect, the trace is the absolute origin of meaning in general. Which amounts to saying once again that there is no absolute origin of meaning in general. (G, 95/65)

Here trace and imprint are named side by side. Yet not in order to submit the thought of the trace to typography in any traditional sense. Once again temporalization of the lived is designated as the essential site of the transcendental trace; once again, after Kant and Heidegger, the importance of temporalization for a quasi-transcendental inquiry can hardly surprise us. The limbo of such quasi-transcendence, demarcated solely by a series of neither/nors and no more thises than thats, beyond the bounds of sonority and visibility, time and space, beyond the world and even “the elements,” beyond the stoikheia of the ancients, beyond the stuff of the world and the letters of the alphabet, is to be the (impossible) site of the to-appear (l’apparaître) of all these things; better, the site of the difference between their participial appearing (l’apparaissant) and infinitival toappear; as though Derrida were thinking here the Heideggerian ontological difference between the participial Seiendes and infinitival Sein, a difference Derrida explicitly relegates to an order that is posterior to the order of the trace of differance; and almost as though he were committing what Merleau-Ponty calls “the experience error,” borrowing from the experience of space, time, text, and world the elements behind the elements by which one would then construct and explain experience in transcendental terms. Yet if the unheard, unheard-of difference is already a trace, grammatology would pass through this transcendental domain without leaving permanent traces. Derrida here tries for the first time explicitly to distance himself from the physiology of the engram—so vigorously criticized by Sartre and Straus. If the trace is called an imprint, it is not in order to establish through engrammatology the readable presence of a past. If the trace itself sets out to decipher or decode the sense of absolute presence, it is not in order to release the decoded meaning from the storage depot of a programmed memory to an engrammatological scanner. Rather, deconstruction opens onto the problem of passivity and “the absolute past.” To which we shall turn after a fourth and final reply to the question of the relationship between grammatology and engrammatology.

The fourth reply instigates a plunge from the outer stratosphere of transcendence to what is perhaps the most elemental and elementary level, the level indicated by the reference we have just heard to the “physiological” engram. One of Derrida’s most important themes and theses in Of Grammatology is the opposition of “good” and “bad” writing, and the relation of each of these to human corporeality. “Good” writing, the scripture of spirit and heart, is united to the voice and breath; hearing and understanding itself at once, its signifying is apparently transparent, effacing itself before “the things themselves.” “Bad writing” is tied to the extraneous and extrinsic, to excrescence and viscosity, to technique and artificiality, and is “exiled in the exteriority of the body” (G, 30/17). To be on the verge requires—as we heard Merleau-Ponty say of the painter, quoting Valéry—that we take our bodies with us when we remember. Or that our bodies remember to take us with them.

That the verge of memory and the hollow of human embodiment are intimate with one another has become manifest by this time, especially through waxen glands and fleshy hollows, and with the same doubling and duplicity that we saw in classic typography, iconography, and engrammatology. For example, in Philebus’ search for a salubrious mixture, a mediation between body and soul, pleasure and memory; thus putting into question the dream of a simply psychic, purely interior, totally disembodied space for memory; or in Cratylus’ “prison” of the soul, the body, which is as much hospice as jail, however, and the soul’s sole indicator or signifier (sēma/sōma); the same duplicity emerges willy-nilly when Augustine defines the space of the soul as a space of nonspace (remota interiore loco, non loco); the capacious nonspace of perfect presence (Praesens autem nullum habet spatium); or in that strange duplicity by which our notiones, including the verba concepta that enable us to glean a being as being of the past, are notationes; so that Quintilian could take the ancient icon of memory to be the mnemotechnic original—urging his students to be guided by the tracks on the wax tablet until they become like tracks in the mind, and remembering like reading; or in the duplicity of phantasia in Descartes’ Regulae, “imagination” being typography, “as though on wax,” and yet putatively uncontaminated by bodily admixture; as also when Descartes tries to segregate soul from body by enumerating the corporeal differences of blood from bone (forgetting the ceraceous marrow of Homeric typography) and eye from hand (forgetting what he himself is doing—presuming that he is here writing); or the way in which convolutions or “folds” in the brain’s surface are the very traces of memory, whereas the same marks on the pineal gland are denigrated as ruts, marks of bestiality; or the way in which for Descartes the innermost power of the soul and the most external and extrinsic sheet of paper can both be said to possess “memory”; or the way in which homunculus, the little man inside man, is required to be both inside the mind and outside among the world’s objects; or the very duplicity by which the surface of the gland functions as an inner surface, imitating the figures of the figures of the figures of objects in the outer world; or the ultimate duplicity of the mimetic machine, the human being, the creature that is itself no more than an effect of memory; which would of course mean that it is equally an effect of oblivion, this frenetic soulless machine that has forgotten what it is, believes it is an animal or an angel.

No doubt Derrida would urge us to be cautious about taking “bad writing” as the “elemental” level, the level that would found or explain all the others—trace, differance, play, and so on. Indeed, there are moments in Of Grammatology when human embodiment is specifically relegated to an order of lesser transcendental dignity, an order posterior to the trace and derivative of it. If script sullies the soul byI say, my pretty one! Dear! Dear! young man! Oh, love, you are in a vast hurry, ain’t you? Can’t you stop a bit, now, my dear: do—there’s a sweet fellowallowing something extrinsic to irrupt within, if it is a kind of “sin,” defined as “inversion of the natural relations between soul and body in passion,” then it is by no means a “simple analogy” we are confronting here. Rather:

. . . écriture, the letter, and sensuous inscription have always in the Western tradition been considered to be the body and the matter that are exterior to spirit, the breath, the word, and the logos. And the problem of soul and body is doubtless derived from the problem of writing to which it seems—inversely—to lend its metaphors. (G, 52/35)

The “order of implication,” as Derrida likes to say, is quite clear: the problem of écriture takes its “metaphors” from the body-soul distinction; but this is an “inversion” of the proper order, inasmuch as the problem of scripture, scription, script comes first. No doubt the entire issue of metaphor would have to be reawakened here—the issue of that unwritten history in which divine scripture and human script are opposed—in order to make sense of Derrida’s own claim. Is writing in the immediate, current, “proper” sense merely thought [G, 27/15: elle est alors pensée] to be on the side of civilization, technology, and artifice? Is it merely thought to be “a human procedure, the ruse of a being incarnated by accident”? Derrida qualifies his analysis in the following way: “Thus it is not a matter of inverting the proper sense and the figural sense; it is rather one of determining the ‘proper’ sense of écriture as metaphoricity itself” (G, 27/15). Human embodiment is embodiment of the voice that hears and understands itself speaking, as of the face, eyehis eyes fixed upon the girl’s wonderfully beautiful earand hand that enter into a sort of “contract” or “transaction” in reading and writing (G, 125-27/84-86; 407-9/ 288-90).

While one can sympathize with Derrida’s desire to neutralize the “propriety” of the corps propre, the lived body, one’s “own” body, by scare-quotes (G, 407/288); and while one also wishes to avoid if at all possible the mechanist, technological, or teleological vocabularies that would make of the human body a metaphysical substance and substrate (G, 126/85); it is inevitable and indeed a welcome inevitability that one return to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of a corporeal habitation in the world (G, 126/85), of an “inscription in speech and inscription as habitation, always already situated” (G, 410/290). Whereas human embodiment and metaphoricity may occupy the very same niche in grammatology’s order of implication, the tension between them does not diminish. Even in our own time of endless preoccupation with metaphor in literary criticism, linguistics, structural anthropology, and psychoanalysis, who is equal to the thought that metaphoricity is the fate of that creature incarnated by accident? If the very oxymoron of “creature accidentally incarnate” can be written without a flinch or a jolt, what hope have we for “metaphoricity”?

It is therefore hardly surprising that the quasi-transcendental dignity or priority of metaphoricity over embodiment cannot be sustained in Of Grammatology itself: Derrida’s own genealogy of Saussure’s terror in the face of “the tyranny of the letter” necessitates his observation that such a tyranny “is at bottom [en son fond] the mastery of the body over the soul” (G, 57/38). The wickedness of bad writing, the source of its repression in the epoch of metaphysics, is the wickednessbetraying pander to the monstrousest viceof embodiment. Innocence itself, in the form of Pope Innocent III, cited by Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morals (ZGM II, 7; 5, 303), catalogues the scurrilous improprieties of the body: “. . . impure procreation, nauseating nourishment in the womb, squalidness of the matter from which the human being develops, horrid stench, excrescencein ambiguous pursuit of strange young womenof spit, urine, and filth.” Not to mention ink, even by way of analogy orQuit thy analogies; sweet in the orator’s mouth, bitter in the thinker’s bellyof metaphor.

THE ABSOLUTE PAST

These four replies ought to convince us of the relevance of Derridean deconstruction and grammatology for what I have called the mnemic tradition of typography, iconography, and engrammatology. However, are there no critical consequences of the latter for the former? Does the Derridean “trace” altogether escape the seductive grooves and notches of the mnemic tradition? The very quasi-transcendentality, queasy transcendentality, of grammatology once again gives us pause, as does the (altogether “natural”) focus on temporalization. Both themes, transcendentality and time, hand in hand, arise from nowhere else than the metaphysics of presence. Here there can be no question of “escape,” as Derrida himself repeatedly reminds us. Memory reminds andHis face was wonderful to me. Something strangely like it, and yet again unlike it, I had seen before, but where, I could not tell. But one day, looking into the smooth water behind the house, there I saw the likeness—something strangely like, and yet unlike, the likeness of his faceremains.

Even though he defines the trace as pure movement or kinēsis without existence in the field of present-being, Derrida does not shy from speaking of the “originary” or arche-synthesis that is realized by it. “Without a retention in the minimal unity of temporal experience, without a trace retaining the other as an other in the same, no difference would do its work and no meaning would appear” (G, 92/62). “Retention,” “minimal unity of temporal experience,” “its work,” and “meaning” suggest that the agenda of the trace—its programme, as Derrida says—is a familiar one Pierre Glendinning, thou art not the only child of thy father; in the eye of the sun, the hand that traces this is thy sister’s; yes, Pierre, Isabel calls thee her brother—her brother! after Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and Bergson.⁶ And after two millennia of typography, iconography, and engrammatology, which are all about the work of retention, minimal unity, an other in the same, and (remembered, recollected, recuperated) meaning. Retention of minimal unity: a hold on the one: is this what grammatology hinges on? By what sort of hinge, what sort of retention, and of what sort of past? A past absolved from presence and the present, a past that never was present, as Merleau-Ponty says—what can that be? How can one ever have remembered it, even if only to point toward its withdrawal? Such questions will no doubt recur when we remember the thinker of the absolute and the thinker(s) of withdrawal. “Absolute”? “Past”?

“Absolute past” is of the time and tension of the hinge, la brisure (G, 96-108/65—73). Yet if the portal of Derridean grammatology hinges on it, and it does, then the door is lifted from the jamb, the entire frame of entry and exit undone. All that is left for us to say is that thought on the hinge—which is both difference and articulation, fragment and jointure, breach and pocket, wound and fold—moves on the thought of time and time’s spacing. “Origin of the experiences of space and time,” begins Derrida (G, 96/65), as though forgetting that the (non)origin of origin has just now been envisaged; “this writing of the difference, this weave of the trace permits the difference of space and time to articulate itself, to appear [apparaître] as such in the unity of experience,” as though forgetting that the participle-infinitive distinction (Seiendes-Sein) is, as I have already noted, the eminent ontological distinction, wholly ensconced in the question of being as the presence of the present; “(of a ‘same’ [‘même’] lived on the basis of a ‘same’ body proper),” as though the “same” underlay difference in the way that substance underlies accidents and as though the lived body, one’s own body, le corps propre, could be such an origin. As though forgetting his own objections to Merleau-Ponty.

Yet the thought of the hinge is one of articulation rather than substance, articulation “before” substance, tracings without wax. “Such articulation thus allows a graphic chain (whether ‘visual’ or ‘tactile’ and ‘spatial’) to adapt itself, possibly in a linear fashion, to a chain that is spoken (‘phonic,’ ‘temporal’).” Whether in Saussurean linguistics a graphic chain can be said to adapt itself to a spoken word, or vice versa, need not detain us here. The more important point is that the “psychic imprint,” which is the “lived appearing” (apparaître vecu) of language as such, points to a temporalizing synthesis in which, as we have seen, the imprint is irreducible. That the Saussurean psychic imprint (in the form of acoustic and verbal images or concepts) cannot readily be distinguished from the physiological, and that the model for both is the traditional mnemic model of typography, iconography, and engrammatology, is indicated Most miraculous of all to Pierre was the vague impression, that somewhere he had seen traits of the likeness of that face before by the following passage from Saussure’s Course, which Derrida does not cite:

It is by the functioning of the receptive and coordinative faculties that imprints [empreintes] are formed in the speaking subjects, imprints that turn out to be sensed as the same in all [or: are notably the same in all; qui arrivent à être sensiblement les memes chez tous]. How must one represent this social product so that language might appear perfectly disengaged from the rest? If we were able to embrace the sum of verbal images that are stored up [emmagasinées: a word that appears throughout Bergson’s Matière et mémoire] in all individuals, we would be touching on the social relation that constitutes a particular language [la langue]. It is a treasury deposited [un trésor déposé] by the practice of speech in subjects. . . ⁷

The storage-house and thesaurus of memory, with all its “psychic imprints,” is of course essential to the functioning of languages and of language as such. “Essential” here means irreducible and in some sense unbudgeable, “passive.” Speech itself is originarily passive, notes Derrida (G, 97/66), “but in a sense of passivity that no intramundane metaphor would be able to communicate.” Once again we run up against a fateful and fatal metaphoricity that is olderFate had separated the brother and the sister, till to each other they somehow seemed so not at allthan both the tenor and vehicle of any given metaphor. Once again we confront the pastness and passivity that so occupied Merleau-Ponty toward the end of his life, a passivity profoundly related to the genesis of space and time in the “hollow of being.” As we shall see in chapter 6, it preoccupied Heidegger as well.

“Such passivity,” continues Derrida, now reaching the point that is central to our own inquiry, “is also the relation to a past, to an always-already-there that no reactivation of the origin would be able to master fully and reawaken to presence.” It is not merely a question here of the historical past, or of a social backdrop, or of the genesis of a given milieu or a particular language. “This impossibility of reanimating absolutely the evidence of an originary presence,” Derrida now writes, with the pen of a phenomenologist and quasitranscendentalist, “thus would take us back to [nous renvoie à] an absolute past [un passé absolu].” The “impossibility” of evidence, the “impossibility” of the restoration or restitution of originary presence “would” conduct us back to an absolute past. Why the subjunctive? Presumably because it is difficult to see how “impossibility” can “conduct us” anywhere. Such a past would in effect be as absolutely unattainable as an “absolute beginning with the absolute.”⁸ Strangely, perhaps unaccountably, Derrida takes this impossibility as an authorization: “It is this that authorizes us to designate as trace that which does not let itself be summarized in the simplicity of a present.” Such an authorization has its price or its forfeit. Derrida must challenge the way in which Husserlian phenomenology treats as equal partners the traces of retention and protention: by privileging protention and anticipation in this way—for it is a spurious equality—one risks “effacing the irreducibility of the always-already-there and the fundamental passivity we call time .” Derrida does not take up the admittedly captious questionIn the strange relativeness, reciprocalness, and transmittedness, between the long-dead father’s portrait, and the living daughter’s face, Pierre might have seemed to see reflected to him, by visible and uncontradictable symbols, the tyranny of Time and Fate that I shall now pose: By insisting on the “irreducibility” of a “fundamental” passivity, does one not stress the “always” and the “there” of “always-already-there,” and is not such insistence itself a trace of the typotopographical tradition? The appeal to time as a “fundamental” passivity, the passivity that founds being or serves as the horizon of its meaning or the condition of its possibility, should at least betray the fact that it is not easy to draw traces without wax.

It is precisely this issue, less specious than it might seem at first, that Derrida now confronts, one that has everything to do with the verge: If the trace were to conduct us back to an absolute past, it would be in order to “oblige us to think a past that one can no longer comprehend in the form of modified presence, as a past present [un présent-passé].” The absolute past is neither a present perfect nor an imperfect, neither a passé simple nor a passé composé, all of which would be forms of tensed past-present or present-past. The absolute past defeats our grammar and our (en)grammatology. Strictly speaking, and thinking rigoreusement, “the absolute past that is retained in the trace [qui se retient dans la trace] no longer merits . . . the name of ‘the past’.” The absolute past is retained in the trace; yet such absolutely mysterious retentionNow Pierre began to see mysteries interpieced with mysteries and mysteries eluding mysteries; and began to seem to see the mere imaginariness of the so supposed solidest principle of human association does not yield up a recuperable present-past. The absolute past does not stand, does not hold, as does Heidegger’s Gewesenheit, “having-been,” to be discussed in chapter 6. Thus both historic having-been (the perfect) and fresh retention (the just-now), both the Heideggerian and the Husserlian phenomenological pasts, undergo erasure, “especially inasmuch as [d’autant plus que] the strange movement of the trace announces as well as [autant que] recalls: differance differs and defers [la differance diffère].”

Strange movement. Perhaps the very movement Aristotle attempts to descry and describe as anamnesis, starting from an arkhe kinesios and advancing to a mid-point or penultimate point, whether that motion be linear or circular or an even more bizarre spiral-like combination of the two. Perhaps that spiral motion, from ruling center to a series of wandering satellites in the constellation, better suits the movement of the trace than the image of furrow and wake (sillage), which always seems to be written in wax rather than on water. Yet however much we are meant to focus on the strange motion of the trace, rather than on the substance of its retained mark, however diligently we try to thinkthe nominal conversion of a sister into a wifeof tracings without wax, it will not do to abandon typography altogether. That the logos is a typos, an imprint, is an essential concomitant of the new thought of passivity; that this imprint is the “scriptural resource of language,” indicates that logos is not a creationist activity, “the replete and continuous element of divine speech” (G, 99/68). However much Derrida emphasizes the difficulty of the thought of finitude, and however much he takes finitude to be essentially bound up with the psychoanalytic economy of life-deathWhat was it to be dead? What is it to be living? Wherein is the difference between the words Death and Life?rather than a Nietzschean or Heideggerian discourse on the death of God, there can be no doubt that “the hinge of language” in Derrida attaches to a whole series of discourses in contemporary philosophy that resound with intimations of mortality. At one point in his text (G, 101/69), Derrida writes that “signification takes shape only in the hollow [creux] of differance,” thus going to join volens nolens the thought of Merleau-Ponty. Thus Derrida cannot ascribe to Levinas and Heidegger alone the thought of “a past that never was and that never can be lived . . . in the form of presence” (G, 103/70); as we saw in chapter 2, that very thought is at the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s approach to the atmospheric past in Phenomenology of Perception. A further (unspecified) reference to the Merleau-Pontian hollow occurs precisely at the point in the lecture on “Differance” where Derrida introduces the notion of a radical past:

Differance is what brings about the fact that the movement of signification is possible only if each element that is said to be ‘present,’ appearing on the scene of presence, is related to something other than itself, preserving to itself the mark of the past element and allowing itself from the outset to be hollowed out [se laissant déjà creuser] by the mark of its relation to a future element. The trace is related no less to what one calls the future than to what one calls the past; it constitutes what one calls the present by its very relation to what is not it—absolutely not it; that is to say, not even a past or a future as modified presents.⁹ (M, 13/13)

As intimations of mortality, all these discourses devote themselves to overcoming the concepts, categories, and structures they themselves employ. Derridean thought of the trace is, to say the least, no exception. Yet before taking up the explicit question, Why the word trace, why a word so impacted in the mnemic metaphysics of presence? It would be well for us to diverge a moment from the realm of grammatology to the scene of psychoanalysis. For it is here, as we have indicated, that in Derrida’s view the discourse of (in)finitude is undone; and it is also here that my own doubts concerning the transcendental framework of Derridean deconstruction meet their most direct response.

A persistent theme in “Freud and the Scene of Writing” is that Freud’s own conceptual apparatus is again and again undone by what it goes to confront. Psychoanalysis deconstructs the metaphysics of presence without ever confronting it directly, as though by magic, and Derridean deconstruction pursues psychoanalytic discourseHe held her tremblingly; she bent over him, toward him; his mouth wet her ear; he whispered itboth to dismantle it and to enter under its spell. That spell arises from the psychoanalytic devotion to something like an absolute past. I shall intervene only in those few moments of the “Scene” where the “spacing” of time is discussed in a way that is directly relevant to the quasi-transcendental structure and auto-deconstruction of the trace.

“That the present in general is not original but reconstituted, that it is not the absolute form, fully alive and constitutive of experience, that there is no purity of the living present—such is the theme, so formidable for the history of metaphysics, that Freud calls on us to think by means of a conceptuality that is unequal to the thing itself” (ED, 314/212). The reconstituted character of the present is the sole Freudian thought that resists total absorption into traditional metaphysics and contemporary science. Communications between the unconscious and consciousness, through the portal of the preconscious, or between id, ego, and superego, are not mere translations of a text established and “archived” once and for all. Nor is the communication between perceptual consciousness and the world “outside” the straightforward inscription of an unchanging text, whose original form could be established by a Hobbesian or Cartesian plumbing of the mind. Rather, all such communications revert to a circulation of “psychic energy” and even a kind of “psychic writing” that in some sense is prior to mundane writing. Of course, that “in some sense prior” is what gives us all our trouble: we ought to fear matching Freud’s inadequate conceptuality with inadequacies of our own, inadequacies that hide in phrases like une conceptualité inegale à la chose même, or la possibilité de l’écriture, or above all in the prepositional phrases “prior to” and “on the basis of” that structure our own inquiry. A certain awkwardness should mar discourse on transcendental or queasy quasitranscendental structures, a certain transcendent gawkiness should here be our only grace. In a rare instance of transcendent gawkiness, Derrida’s own text (ED, 315) betrays the difficulties and dangers that infest the verge of the absolute past: he begins a parenthesis in mid-sentence and closes the sentence long before finally closing the parenthesis—after nine further lines of text. The parenthetical point is abstruse, and I will not be able to discuss it fully here:

The “objectivist” or “mundane” consideration of writing teaches us nothing if we fail to refer it to a space of psychic writing (one would say transcendental writing, were one, with Husserl, to see in the psyche a region of the world. Yet as this is also the case with Freud, who wants at the same time to respect both the being-in-theworld of the psychical, its local-being [être-local], and the originality of its topology, which is irreducible to any ordinary intra-mundaneity, it is perhaps necessary to think that what we are describing here as the work of writing [travail de l’écriture] effaces the transcendental difference between origin of the world and being in-the-world. Effaces it while producing it: milieu of the dialogue and the misunderstanding between the Husserlian and Heideggerian concepts of being-inthe world).

Here the paragraph ends—tantalizingly, parenthetically, transcendently awkwardly. It does not help to add Merleau-Ponty’s name to that milieu and its dialogue, not without a full discussion. Let it suffice for the moment to cite the labor and travail, work and passion, agency and suffering of the trace, the travail of scription, which undoes while producing: efface en produisant. What does the trace efface? Not “itself,” but the “transcendental difference” between the genesis of the world in and for a constitutive-transcendental phenomenology of consciousness and our being in-the-world in and for an existential-fundamental ontology of Dasein. However, if the “transcendental difference” between genetic phenomenology and ontology of Dasein erases itself in the self-production of the trace in psychic scription, does not the “self-production” of the “trace” become as problematic as the difference it eradicates? It is not clear to me how the “transcendental difference” between the Husserlian project of, say, a phenomenology of internal time-consciousness (see note 27 of chapter 2, above) and the Heideggerian analysis of ecstatic temporality (discussed in chapter 6, below) establishes or inscribes itself; it therefore remains a lucus a non lucendo to speak of the effacing of such a difference, especially by a “psychic writing” in which scription performs the transcendental function while the psyche remains as fugitive as it ever was for both phenomenology and fundamental ontology. Scription, which is in-the-world, offers no short route to the world that is sought by phenomenology and fundamental ontology. Deconstruction unsettles those projects, and perhaps undoes them forever, but it does not dissipate the enigmas they went to confront. How odd it would be if we thought that deconstruction could be a simple substitute for either project, as though Derrida had never put into question the logic of the supplement.

What is the status of the psychic scription on which psychoanalysis—for all its inadequate conceptuality—depends? What the foregoing chapter failed to elucidate after considerable laborsThe girl moved not; was done with all her tremblings; leaned closer to him, with an inexpressible strangeness of an intense love, new and inexplicableI cannot here utter in a word. Derrida is at least concerned to show that the site (lieu) of psychic inscription is inherently unstable; whether one is occupied with the earlier or the later topology of the psyche, scription is never the mere “displacement of significations in a limpid, pregiven, immobile space,” never the “white [blanche] neutrality of a discourse” (ED, 316/213). As we saw in the preceding chapter, effraction is “rupture and irruption making their way (rupta, via rupta),” opening up for the first time, as it were, form and matter, space and time—indeed, “procuring a reversibility of time and space” (ED, 317/214). The word reversibility signals the transcendental function of psychic scription, as does the reference to the work, workings, and worked nature of the psychic travail that produces the mysterious Erinnerungsspur or “mnemic trace.” Derrida emphasizes “the itinerant work of the trace, producing and not merely traversing its route,” the trace that—like William Carlos Williams’s saxifrage—clears its own path, se fraye elle-même son chemin (ED, 317/214). However, if in Of Grammatology (G, 90/61) Derrida suggests that transcendental passage is a parcours that leaves no durable marks, then one may wonder why the (mere) parcours is not enough for the transcendental trace, which here is made to “produce.” And yet the travail of the selfproducing trace also points to its own undoing in the retardation of Nachtraglichkeit not only of psychosexual development but of psychic writing as such. The primitive scene is a scene of scription, not a tableau or an archive; the transcendental scene is one of tracings—not traces—without wax. Those tracings would require that we read Freud’s remarks concerning the atemporality of the unconscious in the way that Heidegger reads Kant: the putative atemporality of the deepest stratum of psychic life may rest on an inappropriate, “vulgar” sense of time; just as one may have to abandon the Nacheinander of the Kantian transcendental analytic for the Wiederholung of the question of time as the horizon of being, so one may have to abandon the “atemporality of the unconscious” for the impossible-unthinkable-unsayable of “the absolute past.”Over the face of Pierre there shot a terrible self-revelation; he imprinted repeated burning kisses upon her; pressed hard her hand; would not let go her sweet and awful passiveness.Nachträglichkeit and a kind of silent, spacing periodicity would displace the Nacheinander of time, letters, quality signs, reality signs, and all such durable traces in wax:

What is proper to writing, as we have indicated elsewhere, is (in a difficult sense of the word) spacing [espacement]: the diastem and the becoming space of time, along with the deployment, on an original site, of significations which linear consecutivity and irreversibility, passing from point-of-presence to point-of-presence, can only tend to repress, and which to a certain extent they fail to repress. Especially in the writing we call phonetic. The collusion between it and the logos (or the time of logic) that is dominated by the principle of noncontradiction—the fundament of the metaphysics of presence in its entirety—is profound. Now, in all silent or not purely phonic spacing of significations, concatenations are possible that no longer conform to the linearity of logical time, or of the time of consciousness or preconsciousness, or of the time of “verbal representation.” The frontier between the nonphonetic space of writing (even in “phonetic” writing) and the space of the scene of dreams is uncertain. (ED, 321/217)

We shall therefore soon pass to the scene of dreams; if not to the Freudian scene, then to the backroom of Plato’s dream. Yet not before putting (or pushing) the question of reversibility. If the irreversibility of phonic or phonetic script, proceeding punctually from instance to instance, is undone in a scription that is essentially reversible in terms of the spacing of time and timing of space, reversible in a sense even more radical than that of the Hegelian dialectic of space-time (discussed in chapter 5, below); if reversibility is the mark of the trace in its transcendental employ, as the mark of what a phenomenology of embodiment would call the fleshthey changed; they coiled together, and entangledly stood mute of the world; then why would one insist on retaining traces of the trace? With or without wax?

“Why the trace ?” asks Derrida (G, 102/70). “What has guided us in the choice of this word?” There can be little doubt that part of the answer to this question lies in the powerful impetus of the engrammatological tradition of memory and reminiscence itself. Yet question and answer alike are displaced here, and even out of place: “If words and concepts attain their sense only in concatenations of differences, one can justify one’s language and choice of terms only from within a topic and an historical strategy.” Such justification does not dream of ever being “absolute and definitive.” Absolute justification is absolutely passe, vanished in a passé absolu. If justification and evidence are dreams of proximity, immediacy, and presence, deconstruction is a removal to the outside, a movement of the outside, espacement, even in that place where interiority seemed to be sovereign and where absence itself seemed to be a witness to the veritable being of the past—the topos of memory. “If the trace, the arche-phenomenon of ‘memory,’ which must be thought prior to the opposition between nature and culture, animality and humanity, and so on, pertains to the very movement of signification, signification is a priori written, whether or not it is inscribed in one form or another in a ‘sensuous’ and ‘spatial’ element that one would call ‘exterior’.” Traces remain emblems of exteriority, to repeat, whether with or without wax.

Arche-writing, premier possibility of speech, then of ‘graphie’ in the narrow sense, birthplace of the ‘usurpation’ denounced from Plato to Saussure, this trace is the opening [l’ouverture] of the premier exteriority in general, the enigmatic relation of the living being to its other, as of an inside to an outside: spacing. The outside, the “spatial” and “objective” exteriority that we believe we know to be the most familiar thing in the world, familiarity itself, would not appear without the grammè; without differance as temporalization; without the nonpresence of the other inscribed in the meaning of the present; without the relation to death as the concrete structure of the living present. (G, 103/70-71)

The opening of this first or premier exteriority will soon take us to Hegel’s dialectic of interiorization/exteriorization, the very mystery of Erinnerung and Gedächtnis, which we shall examine in the following chapter. For it is the dream of spirit from Plato onward, Plato’s dream, that grammatology is so rudely disturbing—no doubt by the creaking and bumping of its hinge unhinged: “That the signified is originarily and essentially (and not only for a finite and created spirit) trace; that the signified is always already in the position of the signifier; such is the apparently innocent proposition wherein the metaphysics of the logos, of presence and consciousness, must reflect écriture as its death and its resource” (G, 107-8/73).

PLATO’S DREAM

Derrida suspects that Plato’s theory of writing is “more subtle, critical, and disquieted [inquiète] than the theory that presides over the birth of Saussurian linguistics” (G, 50-51/33-34). We might therefore begin to consider Plato’s dreamI will know what is, and do what my deepest angel dictates.—The letter!—Isabel,—sister,—brother,—me, me—my sacred father!—This is some accursed dream!by noting some of the places in Of Grammatology where the discussion of Phaedrus comes to the fore, only then turning to Derrida’s detailed account in “Plato’s Pharmacy,” where the disquiet mounts. Finally, I will intersperse some remarks from a recent essay by Derrida on khora in Plato’s Timaeus, where dream and disquiet merge.¹⁰

Derrida cites Phaedrus when it is a question of explicating the exteriority of both signifier and signified in script. Plato’s Socrates seems to deny such exteriority when he invokes, through “a metaphorical mediation,” scripture of the truth in the soul, as opposed to “bad writing.”¹¹ Thus the entire problem of metaphoricity, of “script as metaphoricity itself,” is at issue in Derrida’s reading of Phaedrus. The wickedness of script proves to be its operation of contamination, precisely through the mechanism of this metaphoricity: if Saussure believes language to be an internal (phonemic) system, he nonetheless decries the fact that “notation” (shades of Augustinefor thee, thy sacred father is no more a saintand Quintilian!) is superimposed on it. “Scripture’s malady comes from the outside (exōthen), said Phaedrus (275a) long ago” (G, 51—52/34). Hence the dour tone of condemnationUnutterable that a man should be thus!in Saussure’s Genevan Cours, the Calvinist rhetoric of irruption, corruption, sin, and defilement betraying a certain continuityNow look around in that most miserable room, and at that most miserable of all the pursuits of a manwith the Platonic tradition. Writing is the invasion of an inside by an outside, a demonic incursion, a devilish inversion of the “natural” relationship of submission to the magisterial soul by the servile body—or, rather, by a body waxing rebellious and passionate. It is here that Derrida asserts the priority of the scriptural metaphorics over the metaphorics of embodiment, even though the implosion of vehicle and tenor in metaphoricity “itself” would make such an order of implication quite untenable. More troubling than such an unjustified and unjustifiable hierarchy is the suspicion that “tracings without wax” might dream of suppressing the body or subjecting it to the ostensibly more fundamental structures of scripture; for such orders of implication within a deconstructed metaphoricity are perhaps contaminated in unforeseen ways by the very metaphysics of pure (disembodied) presence that it desires to put in question.

Toward the close of Derrida’s “theoretical matrix” (Part I of the Grammatology), in the context of “the complicity of origins,” Plato’s Phaedrus again enters the discussion (G, 139/91-92). To the entire complex of logo-phonocentrism, linearism and ethnocentrism, metaphysics of presence and alphabetic script, Derrida poses a series of questions that arise from his reading of Phaedrus and the other dialogues. These sundry related centrisms he gathers under the rubric heliocentrism, concerning which he asks:

Why should speech have been “eclipsed” in the West by script? . . . And is it not necessary to meditate on this heliocentric concept of speech? As well as on the resemblance between the logos and the sun (whether as the good or as the death that one cannot look in the face), or between the logos and the king or father (the good or the intelligible sun are compared to the father in the Republic at 508c)? What must script be in order to menace this analogical system in its secret and vulnerable center? What must script be in order to signify the eclipse of that which is good and that which is father? Is it not necessary to stop thinking of script as the eclipse that comes to interrupt and obfuscate the glory of the word? And if there is some necessity of eclipse, must not the relation of shadow and light, script and speech, itself appear otherwise?

Finally, in the context of Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages, in the final chapter of the Grammatology (G, 413/292), Derrida invokes Phaedrus once again. Here it is a matter of disclosing the way in which graphic illustration and representation in general never fully achieve what I have been calling iconography—the restoration of full presence through the identity of image and original. “The original possibility of the image is the supplement: that which is adjoined without adjoining anything [qui s’ajoute sans rien ajouter], in order to fill a void that demands filling in something that is already replete [pour combler un vide qui dans le plein demande à se laisser remplacery (G, 412—13/292). The (il)logic of the supplement manifests itself not only in Rousseau but also as early as Plato’s Phaedrus:

Script as painting is thus at one and the same time the malady and the remedy in the phainesthai [the “to-appear” of things] or in the eidos [their aspect, outward appearance, form]. Early on, Plato says that the art or technique (tekhnē) of writing is a pharmakon (a drug or tincture, whether salutary or noxious). And what is disquieting about script is already felt in its resemblance to painting. Script is like painting, like the zōographeme that is itself determined (in Cratylus, 430— 432) within the framework of mimēsis. Resemblance is disquieting: “I think that what is really quite terrible in writing, Phaedrus, is also the fact that it truly resembles painting (zōgraphia) a great deal” (275d). Here painting, zoography, betrays being and speech, words and things, because it fixes them [les fige].

Such fixing or fixating is ambiguousScarce know I what I have writtenand we ought to pause over the ambiguity before proceeding to “Plato’s Pharmacy.” The whole point of typography is to fix imprintsShe looked fixedly in his face, and stood rootedin the soul; iconography can succeed only if the image is figuredShe tossed her ebon tresses over her; she fixed her ebon eyes on himon the original; and engrammatology can flourish only if the letters or elements are scanned so closelyIsabel eyed him fixedlythat the mind is fixed on them. Such holding, figuring, and fixing in the waxen tablets of soul, on the gland, or in the neuron mark the very achievement of the process. What has Plato to complain about? How can script, fixed and firm like the laws of a city, be bad?¹² Derrida paraphrases the reply of Thamus, king and judge, a reply we have already heard in chapter 1 and which we shall have to reconsider here: “It’s [i.e., script’s] scions take the form of living beings, but when one questions them they no longer reply. Zoography has brought death in its train. Script does the same. No one is there, and certainly not the father, to respond to interrogation.”

As we enter the strange world of Plato’s apothecary (the one who occupies the apotheca, “storehouse”) we will want to remember the themes touched on thus far: the exteriority of signification and of the signified as such, which putatively makes script deleterious; the metaphorical mediation by which scription appears both outside and inside the soul, “bad writing” penetrating or contaminating the soul, “good writing” dwelling within as the voice and breath of the divine word; the interlacing of the scriptural metaphor with the entire metaphorics of soul and body, in spite of the apparent supremacy of the former metaphorics over the latter; the heliocentrism of speech, the paradoxical eclipse of speech betraying the secret vulnerability of the solar father; and the supplemental character of all representation and illustration, their disquieting function as resemblance through fixation of images taking us back to the ambiguity of “good” as opposed to “bad” writing, scripture versus script, living word haunted by cadaverous text. Yet because the chambers of Derrida’s and Plato’s Phaedrus are so vast and so artfully constructedFrom eight o’clock in the morning till half-past four in the evening, Pierre sits there in his room;—eight hours and a half!I will focus on a small number of points: first, typography and weaving, the mnemic and dialectical arts, the two principal arts of philosophy; second, iconography and genealogy, the paternal-filial relation of speech and writing; third, engrammatology and pharmacology, as realms of supplementation, contamination, and complicity; fourth, Derrida’s dream.

(1) If mortar and pestle are the apothecary’s emblems, those of the philosopher are the tools associated with typography and weaving—the signet and the loom, both employing the “verge.” Derrida selects as his motto for “Plato’s Pharmacy” a dictionary entry on the word kolaphos. Among its meanings (blow on the cheek, slap, peck, and so on), not surprisingly, are the typographical senses of notching, engraving, and marking. We know the word today as the publisher’s colophon. Related to it is the word glyph (cf. Griffel, grapheion), to scratch a surface, hollow it out (creuser). The cutting edge and the hollow are but two sides of the same coinage—which is coinage as such. Both the hollowing tool and its matrice are touched by the verge, are on the verge; both are on the verge of being the verge.

Because Sophist and Statesman (251ff. and 277ff) consistently define dialectic as the art of weaving, it is natural that DerridaHere surely is a wonderful stillness of eight hours and a half repeated day after day. In the heart of such silence, surely something is at work. Is it creation, or destruction?should at the outset of Part I of “Plato’s Pharmacy” introduce textuality, textile, weave, web, and a part of the loom that produces these: histos, “anything set upright,” especially the mast or spur of a ship, the beam of a vertical loom, or the sail or web itself, even a spider’s web. One of the meanings of histos that Derrida cites is: “III. baguette, verge” (D, 73/65). Just as the verge of a loom or mast of a ship is nothing without its glistening woven stuff billowing in the wind, what Homer calls histia leuka, hollowing out as a kind of cosmic bowl or receptacle, so is the apothecary’s pestle nothing without the crater-shaped mortar.

This profusion or confusion of escutcheons, armorial bearings, and guild symbols is in fact an essential part of the pharmacology that will challenge traditional typography. For the pharmakon, rather than being any identifiable and reliable substance, is itself the antisubstance par excellence; it is “that which resists every philosopheme, exceeding them indefinitely as nonidentity, nonessence, nonsubstance, and for that very reason furnishing them with the inexhaustible adversity of its base and its absence of base” (D, 79/70). Already we are quite close to the “third kind” of Plato’s Timaeus, the unintelligible and nonsensuous khōra, the baseless base of paradigms and beings. For it is the verge as hollow and matrixthe devouring profundities, now opened up in him, consume all his vigorthat will pose insurmountable problems for typography and engrammatology. Derrida emphasizes the importance of the ambiguity of the typos, as both the cutting edge of the eidos and the graphic imprint: the type is not only the graphic character but also “the eidetic model,” and the cutting edge itself also appears to share in the traits of the matrice it means to inscribe. It is as though the typos itself were always already a trace—a problem that will return in Derrida’s discussion of Timaeus (D, 184/159). It is as though typography itself mixes the contrary values (good/bad, true/false, essence/appearance, and so on), which derive their entire value from being held in separation from one another; mixes them all precisely insofar as it fails to preserve the inside/outside distinction on which all opposition depends, insofar as it fails to preserve pure interiority and exteriority. The typos cuts both ways:

If script, according to the king and under the sun, produces the inverse of the effect it claims to produce; if the pharmakon is nefarious; that is because . . . it is not of this world [pas d’ici]. It comes from down below, is exterior or foreign to the living, which is right here inside, foreign to the logos as zōon that it claims to aid or supplement. The imprints (typoi) of script this time do not inscribe themselves, as hypothesized in Theaetetus (191ff.), in a hollow within the wax of the soul [en creux dans la cire], thus responding to the spontaneous and autochthonous movements of psychic life. Knowing that he can confide or abandon his thoughts to the outside, to the vestibule [à la consigne], to physical, spatial, and superficial marks that one lays out on a tablet, the one who has at his disposal the tekhne of script will come to rely on them. He will know that he can absent himself without the typoi ceasing to be there, that he can forget them without their ceasing to serve him. They will represent him even if he forgets them; they will sustain his speech even if he is not there to animate them. Even if he is dead. Only a pharmakon can retain such powers, power over death, no doubt, but also in collusion with it. Thus pharmakon and script always involve a question of life and death. (D, 119/104-5)

Yet if incised letters threaten verdant life with stony death, if the life within is put at risk by a certain pallid exteriority,Builds Pierre the noble world of a new book? or does the Pale Haggardness unbuild the lungs and the life in him?it is nonetheless true that script mimics memory in its very typos—Elle mime en son type la mémoire (D, 120/105)—to the extent that it is impossible to preserve the truth of memory from its simulacrum, genuine remembrance from the aide-mémoire, inside from outside. The monument of deathHe is learning how to live, by rehearsing the part of death and the musty archive mushroom within the soul itself. “The space of script, space as scription, opens in the violent movement of this supplementation [suppléance], in the difference between mnēmē and hypomnēsis” (D, 124/109). Yet the difference is itself intrinsic to memory: “The outside is already in the work of memory” (D, 124/109). Typography is the dangerous supplement of effraction within memory itself. Even before memory lays itself low with letters, it suffers the violence of the trace. Typography is pharmacology, from the outset. And even though Plato will quickly turn to his second trade, the art of weaving; even though he will prefer dialectic to grammar and typography; even though he will insist that living speech is a psychic graphie without effraction, a writing in the soul for purposes of demonstration, education, transmission, and especially unveiling and uncovering (alētheia); such weaving will nevertheless want its warp and weft to perdure, and the verge of the loom will be driven hard. Precisely because life is ephemeral and eminently vulnerable, it needs the supplement of forms and laws engraved in stone. If script is the flower of evil, that flower is nonetheless carved in granite. Does not Plato’s Socrates, for all his devotion to life, prefer perdurant death? Presuming that Plato’s Socrates, looming behind, is not himself a flower of script.

Such a presumption cannot of course be sustained. Not only because of the postcard that depicts Socrates writing at the behest of Plato, but for reasons developed in Timaeus, with its khora. To be sure, Timaeus is all about typography. Derrida emphasizes that fact throughout his essay, referring to “these types of translation . . . , hermeneutical types,” and to the receptacle that “seems to receive these types” (269); to “these known types of being, recognized or, if you prefer, received by philosophical discourse” (270), and to the khora, which “does not have the characters of a being” (271); to the “immense history of interpretations and reappropriations” that “superimpose inscriptions and reliefs, giving form to it [i.e., khōra] by impressing types there” (272); to “every ratiocination of the philosophical type,” or “ontological type,” which is at once “defied and taken up again by the very thing that gives place to it” (273); to the inability to assign khōra to either mythos or logos, inasmuch as it is neither a philosopheme nor “a fable of the mythic type” (275); and to the “structure of pre-inscription and of typographic prescription” (277-78) in Plato’s dialogue. Furthermore, Timaeus is also about Socrates, who seems as malleable and resilient as khōra itself. Socrates is of many kinds, though not quite sophistic imitator, not quite poet, not quite the philosopher-statesman he is always desirous of addressing. Yet his being many types threatens the operation of typography as such: “Socrates effaces himself, effaces in himself all types, all genres, including that of the men of image and simulacrum whom he feigns to resemble . . .” (281). Right from the start, the strange affinity of Socrates and khōra is expressed in a series of motifs one might call “typomorphic.” The Socratic type, which is of course a melange of types and no specific type at all, anticipates the sequence of types to be imprinted on the choric ekmageion or porte-empreinte, “this material that is always ready to receive the imprint”; the Socratic nontype thus anticipates the ambiguity of the imprinted relief (ektypōma) on the stamp or signet itself, and hence cannot be typed as father or mother or even infant. In his innocence and duplicity he is all three at once. Which makes it difficult to presume anything about that flower of script we call Plato’s Socrates.

(2) If typography and weaving are matters of life and death, they verge on the scene of succeeding generations, of genealogy and the family. A strange scene of kinship as well as kingship, father and son, father and sun, solar paternity and divinity; Derrida calls the scene of the pharmacy basileo-patrohelio-theological (D, 154/134). Generation and genealogy, kinship and descent, are matters of passage from like to like—hence matters of iconography. However, just as typography is hollowed out from the inside by its own metaphorics, so is the icon continually displaced by its simulacra, lost among idols. The very myth of writing, its Egyptianism, discloses the distance of every icon from its original. The father logos is the father of the logos. Even if god-theking-who-speaks (D, 86/76—77) is a father who spurnsI will be impious, for piety hath juggled me, and taught me to revere, where I should spurnthe pharmakon of writing, the origin of the logos is his own father in turn; a certain anachronism infects the line of descent, such that “the logos is a son,” indeed, a son who would be destroyed “without the presence and the present attendance of his father” (D, 86/76-77). Without the paternal logos to answerWhen Pierre was twelve years old, his father had died, leaving behind him, in the general voice of the world, a marked reputationfor him, the son is mere scription and silence. He is an orphan, and perhaps a parricide as well. Viewed from the position of King Thamus, who holds the scepter and verge in his own right hand, writing is not only wretched but also treacherous and treasonous. The son’s miseryLet the ambiguous procession of events reveal their own ambiguousnessis ambiguous:

. . . the orphan’s distress, to be sure; for the orphan not only needs to be helped by a presence but also needs that help transported to him and brought to his aid. Yet in lamenting the orphan one also accuses him—and writing—of pretending to distance himself from his father, emancipating himself from his father with an air of complacency and self-sufficiency. From the position of the one who holds the scepter, the desire of writing is indicated, designated, and denounced as the desire to be an orphan, the desire of patricidal subversion. Is not this pharmakon criminal? Is it not a poisoned gift?

The duplicity of the son—scription as both scripture and script—thus represents what Derrida calls “genealogical rupture and remoteness from the origin” (D, 83/74). The myth of scription is thus scription of the myth: repetition without knowledge. And the duplicity of sonshis father’s shrine seemed spotlessis an inherited duplicity, the duplicity of the father logos. Sons are the typoi or spitting images of their fathersfor Fierre was not only his father’s only child, but his namesakeif what the fathers spit is seed or ink. Whether in Egyptian, Assyrian, or Babylonian myths of scripture, scription, and script, the oppositions that dominate those myths find themselves undone by duplicities within the Platonic text. Speech and writing, life and death, father and son, master and servant, first and second, legitimate son and orphan bastard, soul and body, inside and outside, good and evil, seriousness and play, day and night, sun and moon (D, 96/85)—all suffer a certain contagion or contamination across the line of each binary opposition. In spite of Hegel’s insistence in The Philosophy of Right (§140f.) that Plato’s Socrates is ironic toward personsmajestically and holily walked the venerated form of the departed husband and fatherbut never toward ideas, the Platonic text is worked by what Derrida calls “a subversive dislocation of identity in general” (D, 97/86). Amon-Re, the father of Thot, is the hidden or eclipsed sun, the enucleated eye and egg of history.¹³ There is no eye that can read engrammatologically the icon of the origins, inasmuch as the grapheme is the origin and possibility of logos as such (D, 100/88). Thus Thot, like Hermes Psychopompos, is both the patron of writing and the god of the dead: he is the monumentBlessed and glorified in his tomb beyond Prince Mausolus is that mortal sire, who, after an honorable, pure course of life, dies, and is buried, as in a choice fountain, in the filial breast of a tender-hearted and intellectually appreciative childor mausoleum of the father. The dead one too identifies himself as the god: he is Thot, il est ThotThrown into that fountain, all sweet recollections become marbleized; so that things which in themselves were evanescent, thus became unchangeable and eternalerist Thot (D, 104/92). The Platonic text too, not only the Nietzschean,¹⁴ is thus marked by ob-sequence, by which the generations themselves and all genealogies are displaced:

The system of these characters elaborates an original logic: the figure of Thot is set in opposition to his other (father, son, life, speech, origin or orient, and so on), but in supplementing it. That figure joins and opposes by repeating or replacing [tenant lieu]. At the same time, it takes shape, takes its form precisely from that which it simultaneously resists and for which it substitutes. Hence it opposes itself, passes into its contrary; this messenger-god is thus a god of absolute passage between opposites. If he had an identity—but he is precisely the god of nonidentity—it would be that coincidentia oppositorum to which we shall soon once again have recourse. Distinguishing himself from his other, Thot also imitates him, makes himself his sign and representative, obeys him, conforms to him, replaces him, if need be by violence. He is thus the other of the father, the father, and the subversive movement of replacement. The god of writing is thus simultaneously his father, his son, and himself. He does not allow himself to be assigned a fixed place in the play of differences. Cunning [ruse], ungraspable, masked, a plotter and trickster like Hermes, he is neither a king nor a jack; he is ratherLike knavish cards, the leaves of all great books were covertly packeda sort of joker, a deployable signifier, a wild card, putting some play into play [donnant du jeu au jeu]. (D, 105/92—93)

As phantasm and simulacrum, scription cannot possibly serve the iconographyIn this shrine, in this niche of this pillar, stood the perfect marble form of his departed father; without blemish, unclouded, snow-white, and sereneof which it nevertheless makes us dream. Eikastikē, precisely because it is mimetic, can only be good by being bad. “Imitation responds to its essence and is what it is—imitation—only by being flawed in some particular point; or, rather, by being in default” (D, 160/139). This, we recall, is the lesson of Cratylus. Imitation, no matter how efficiently typographic, is essentiallyand again, and again, still deep and deeper, was stamped in Pierre’s soul the cherished conceit, that his virtuous father, so beautiful on earth, was now uncorruptibly sainted in heaveniconoclastic. And essentially patricidal:

What is the father? we asked above. The father is. The father is (the lost son). Writing, the lost son, does not reply to this question, she is scripted [elle (s’) écrit]: (that) the father is not; that is to say, is not present. When it is no longer a lapsed speech of the father, writing suspends the question what is? which is always, expressed tautologically, the question “what is the father?” and the answer “the father is that which is.” (D, 169/146)

Parricidic scriptThe stabbed man knows the steel; prate not to him that it was only a tickling featheris thus parasitic scriptone little bit of paper scratched over with a few small characters by a sharpened featherin which parasite and host remain not only inseparable but also indistinguishable, so that the very metaphoricity of scription and its division into “good” (inscription of scriptural truth in the soul) and “bad” (extrinsic and effractive script) is dispersed. Dispersedhis father no more a saint, and Isabel a sister indeed?or disseminated:

According to a scheme that will dominate all Western philosophy, a good writing (natural, living, knowing, intelligible, interior, speaking) is opposed to a bad writing (artificial, moribund, ignorant, sensuous, exterior, mute). And the good can be designated only through the metaphor of the bad. Metaphoricity is the logic of contamination and the contamination of logic. Bad writing is, with respect to the good, like a model of linguistic designation and a simulacrum of essence. . . . [Thus] the conclusion of the Phaedrus is less a condemnation of writing in the name of present speech than the preference for one kind of writing over another, for a fecund trace as opposed to a sterile one, for a generative sowing of seed (because deposited in the inside) as opposed to a sowing that is scattered outside in pure loss: the risk of dissemination. (D, 172/149)

Dissemination inevitably invokes the co(s)mic family scene of Timaeus, with the demiurgic father who looks to (and hence himself is not) the paradigms, the monogenic son who should be the very icon of his father, and the formbut also the subtler expression of the portrait of his then youthful father, strangely translated, and intermarryingly blended with some before unknown, foreign femininenessof the wandering cause, the matrix and receptacle of becoming, in whom the difference between son and father—the lapse or slippage from pure being to corruptible becoming, the lapse from good demiurgic scripture to bad matricidal script—unfolds: the familial scene isAh, fathers and mothers! all the world round, be heedful—give heed! Thy little one may not now comprehend the meaning of those words and those signs, by which, in its innocent presence, thou thinkest to disguise the sinister thing ye would hint. Not now he knows; not very much even of the externals he consciously marks; but if, in afterlife, Fate puts the chemic key of the cipher into his hands; then how swiftly and how wonderfully, he reads all the obscurest and most obliterate inscriptions he finds in his memory; yes, and rummages himself all over, for still hidden things to readthe place and space of khōra. khōra, broached by “a bastard reasoning,” is neither logos nor mythos as such, nor a hybrid scion of both. The customary rhetorical opposition of proper-versus-metaphorical sense fails in and through such discourse. Here a kind of anachronism interrupts all succession or order of implication. khōra anachronizes the questions of being and essence, anachronizes the self-presencings or showings on which all iconography would depend. Anachronizes them by anticipating everything that future interpretations will say of khōra:

With khōra itself, if at least one can speak of this x which must never have any proper determination, whether sensible or intelligible, material or formal, and thus no self-identity. Everything happens as if the coming history of interpretations of khōra had been written in advance, that is, prescribed, reproduced and reflected in advance in a few pages of Timaeus “on the subject” of khōra “itself.” (272)

Because the cosmos is itself a sensuous icon of the intelligible paradigms, discourse about it can only be likely: mythical discourse plays with the image, plays with verisimilitude, just as the beings we encounter in the world are “iconic beings,” modeled on the forms, hence “like” them (282). Just as the living memory of the Athenians is exiled in the graphic vestiges of the Egyptian archive visited by the poet and lawgiver Solon, so is the being on which becoming is said to have been modeledThe old mummy lies buried in cloth on cloth; it takes time to unwrap this Egyptian kingencrypted in an ancient script. It will have been the engrammatological script of all traditional memory systems.

(3) Yet if engrammatology is pharmacology, the ancient script will never have been pure, never originary, but always contaminated, complicit with opposition. The effort to distinguish extraneous hypomnesis from interior anamnesis, however essential, however necessary, is a failed effort. A futile effort. A dream.It is all a dream—we dream that we dreamed we dream.Plato’s dream.

It is a dream of wars fought against the sophists, themselves Socratic eidōla, who are taken to be icons of the master. Whereas the sophists employ memory in order to fuel their mechanical, lifeless elenchus, relying on an endless recurrence of blows by lethal monuments, Socrates’ Plato treasures reminiscence as the gentle (re)productive unveiling of pure presence. Duped by the sophists’ endless procession of spurious arguments, the men of Athens will execute the original rather than the copies—execute it not by art butthe dark hemlock hath no music in its thoughtful boughsby hemlock. Invasion by the extraneous is breach of justice and violent death. Yet if life itself is such invasion, must not Socrates’ Plato (as we have already asked) opt for deathTherefore, never more will I play the vile pigmy, and by small memorials after death, attempt to reverse the decree of death, by essaying the poor perpetuating of the image of the original. Let all die, and mix again!rather than this life?

The outside is already in the work of memory. Evil insinuates itself in the selfrevelation of memory, in the general organization of mnemic activity. Memory is essentially finite. Plato recognizes this in attributing life to it. As in the case of every living organism, he assigns, as we have seen, limits to it. For a memory without limits would not be memory but the infinity of a presence to self. Thus memory always already needs signs in order to recall the nonpresent, to which it necessarily relates. The movement of dialectic testifies to it. Memory allows itself to be contaminated by its premier exteriority, its premier supplement, hypomnēsis. Yet what Plato dreams of is a memory without signs. (D, 124/109)

Why the dream? Because the very ideality of the eidos depends on its iterability, the perfect repetition of the same. Such repetition in turn requires a doubling, a supplementation. Yet the doubling suggests that the original lets itself be typed (D, 125/109: puisse lui-meme se faire ‘typer’), lets itself be represented by a signifier, and even by the signifier of a signifier. Plato’s dream is alwaysin the warm halls of the heart one single, untestified memory’s spark shall suffice to enkindle such a blaze of evidence, that all the corners of conviction are as suddenly lighted up as a midnight city by a burning building, which on every side whirls its reddened brandson the verge of nightmare. “Thus, even though writing is exterior to (interior) memory, even though hypomnesia is not memory, it affects and hypnotizes memory from the inside. Such is the effect of this pharmakon” (D, 125/110). That is the nightmare.

How is one to explain memory’s susceptibility, its exposure to the ill effects of drugging, hypnosis, and bedazzlement, if not by conceding that these exterior threats are always already at work on the inside, that the game is rigged? How fight the concession, fend off the nightmare, except by the mythologic of the dream? Here Derrida recollects Freud’s famous “reasoning of the kettle” in Interpretation of Dreams, in which the logic of his own dream, “Irma’s injection,” is exemplified (D, 126/111; Freud, StA 2, 138—39). The young doctor protests his innocence by way of a comic overdetermination (which merits repetition in his study of Witz):

The entire plea—for this dream is nothing else—reminds one intensely [lebhaft] of the self-defense of the man who was accused by his neighbor of having returned a kettle in a damaged condition. Number one, he had returned it undamaged; number two, the kettle already had holes in it when the neighbor lent it out; and number three, he never borrowed a kettle from his neighbor. But all to the good: if only one of these three lines of defense can be made to stick, the man will have to be declared innocent. (StA 4, 61 and 191)

Derrida extends the logic of the dream—the logic of the kettle, kratēra, bowl, or receptacle—to the engrammatology of memory and reminiscence:

(1) Writing is rigorously exterior and inferior to living memory and living speech, which are accordingly intact. (2) Writing is harmful to them because it stupefies them and infects their very life, which would be intact if it were not for writing. There would not be gaps [trous] in memory and in speech if there were not writing. (3) Besides, if one has resorted to hypomnesia and writing, it is because living memory is finite, because it already had gaps in it before writing left its traces there. Writing has no effect on memory.

The very overdetermination of the logic of the kettle, in which each explanation supplements the other by destroying it, suggests that only the thinnest sheet separates the surfacefar as any geologist has yet gone down into the world, it is found to consist of nothing but surface stratified on surface. To its axis, the world being nothing but superinduced superficiesof hypomnesia from genuine anamnesia. Very much like the vulnerable middle surface of the mystic writing pad, which adheres to the waxen substratum of the system but communicates with the outermost surface as well, thus linking memory and perception. Yet the “invisible thickness” of this frayable sheet functions more as unifier than as segregator. If “perception” stands for what cannot be remembered, for unlimited effraction and hence oblivion, then unification is in fact a contamination or complicity. “At one blow, the unity of this sheet, of the system of this difference between signified and signifier—is it not also the inseparability of sophistry and philosophy?” (D, 127/112). A profound complicity also between the most intransigent of sophisms and the most inflexible of laws. If legislation (nomothesia) requires that the laws be inscribed and fixed in letters (en grammasi tethenta: Laws VII, 793b-c); if in other words laws are “engrammatical” (the only near-appearance of “engrammatology” in “Plato’s Pharmacy,” to my knowledge); then the infiltration of hypomnesia inside the walls of the City of Memory has always already begun. The machinery of the law, effraction, is already bitched by a breaching of the law, by infraction. Precisely as the mechanism of the most primitive memory, the memory that calamitous life must fabricate if it is to avoid starvation, rests on the most intense and lively hallucination.Pierre, the lips that do now speak to thee, never touched a woman’s breast; I seem not of woman born.When cathected desire, dynamic image, and judgment coalesce, the result may be a vision or an envisagement, a miracle or a mirage, the rising sun or the vanishing moon, fool’s fire. Depending on a certain accidental turn of the head.The brightest success now seemed intolerable to him, since he so plainly saw, that the brightest success could not be the sole offspring of Merit; but of Merit for the one thousandth part, and nine hundred and ninety-nine combining and dovetailing accidents for the rest.Depending on a quality that leaves no traces, but only impossible indicators or signs. The logic of the dream advances inexorably through a series of complicities—anamnesia and hypomnesia, legislation and engrammatology as pharmacology—en route to what Timaeus calls “the nurse of becoming.”

The essence of the pharmakon is that it has no stable essence, no proper character; “it is in no sense of the word (whether metaphysical, physical, chemical, or alchemical) a substance” (D, 144/125—26). Far from being monoeidetic, the pharmakon is aneidetic. Which is to say that the eidos “itself” is complicit with this medicine whose effects are far from being simple. If there is an eidos of the pharmakon at all, it occupies a strange place:

It is rather the anterior milieu in which differentiation in general is produced, along with the opposition between the eidos and its other; this milieu is analogous to the one that later will be reserved—after, and in accord with, a philosophical decision—for the transcendental imagination, this “art concealed in the depths of the soul” [Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B 180], which cannot simply be relegated to either the sensible or the intelligible, to either passivity or activity. The milieu-element will always be analogous to the mixed-medium. In a certain manner, Plato thought and even formulated this ambivalence.

Nowhere more so than in the hypodokhē, the “receptacle” of khōra, which itself involves manifold forms of hypomnesia. khōra is actually a kind of chiasm, as the letter khi (ϰ) in both hypodokhē and khōra betrays: it is—as Merleau-Ponty too would have said—the scene of “double participation in the distinct regions of soul and body, of the invisible and the visible” (D, 145/127). If the pharmakon is “the movement, the place, and the play” of difference, the differance of difference, khōra is the inaccessible nonplacefor though the young lady might have been very beautiful, and good-hearted, yet no one on this side of the water certainly knew her history; and she was a foreigner; and would not have made so suitable and excellent a match for your father as your dear mother afterward didof that movement, that play. It is the world of dreams. For exampleLook again. I am thy real fatherPlato’s.

The programme of khōra, somewhere between mythos and logos, not readily identifiable with either of these taken in isolation, can be apprehended—if only in a dream (fût-ce en rêve). Which is precisely what Timaeus says of this third kind, “which we behold as in a dream” (52b 3: oneiropoloumen blepontes), and of which “we have only this dreamlike sense” (b 7—c 1: oneirōxeōs). That dreamlike sense, far from being an inadequate logos or a pure mythos, is the reason your father did not want his portrait taken was, because he was secretly in love with the French young lady, and did not want his secret published in a portraitour only access to the inaccessible. And it is an access through a series of fictional receptacles, each one contained in yet another, like Chinese boxes orLook, again, I am thy father as he more truly wasRussian Babas. Except that there is no end to them, no end or bottom at which one would find “the philosophy-of-Plato” (287). It is not simply a matter of renouncing the abstraction of “Platonism,” and rejecting the securities of scholarly or philological asceticism; it is a question of the strategy of examining the fictionsConsider this strange, ambiguous smile, Pierre; more narrowly regard this mouth. Behold, what is this too ardent and, as it were, unchastened light in these eyes, Pierre?one by one. And just as Symposium is a monument of memory, a multiple retelling, so is Timaeus a concatenation or a telescoping series of fictions: (1) the text of Timaeus itself, which begins, “One, two, three—but where is the fourth, my dear Timaeus?”; (2) the discussion of the preceding day, often identified with the text we call Republic; (3) its résumé by Socrates; (4) young Critias’ recounting the tale he has already told the others the day before, on their way home; (5) the tale as told by Solon to Critias’ grandfather when the latter was only ten—for Solon was a friend of Grandfather Critias’ father,I am thy father, boy. There was once a certain, oh, but too lovely young Frenchwoman, Pierre. Youth is hot, and temptation strong, Pierre, and in the minutest moment momentous things are irrevocably done, Pierre; and Time sweeps on, and the thing is not always carried down by its stream, but may be left stranded on its bank; away beyond, in the young, green countries, Pierre. Look againCritias’ great-grandfather Dropides; (6) Solon in turn is relating a discussion he had with an Egyptian priest of Sais—for Solon is a Lehrling zu Sais—who recounts (7) the myth of Phaethon, sonProbe a little, Pierre. Never fear, never fear. No matter for thy father now. Look, do I not smile?—yes, and with an unchangeable smileof Helios, and (∞) the tale of Athens and Atlantis. The last-named tale is preserved in writing in the archives of the temple of Neith. This emboitement of written fictions is recounted by Critias at 26b-c, at which point the tale of Atlantis is postponed in order that Timaeus can recount the creation of the universe. Thus the entire discourse of Timaeus is punctuated, articulated, and scannedOnce upon a time, there was a lovely young Frenchwoman, Pierre. Have you carefully, and analytically, and psychologically, and metaphysically, considered her belongings and surroundings, and all her incidentals, Pierre?by a series of returns, moving farther and farther back in time to a kind of absolute past, a time “before.” These returns are altogether necessary, and are about nothing else than necessity, Anankē, prior to all the oppositions of philosophy. It is a dreamlike discourse (293) whose origin is always indefinite, postponed, “confided to a responsibility that is ceaselessly adjourned, without a fixed and determinable subject”:

From relating to relating the author distances himself increasingly. The mythic utterance thus resembles a discourse that has no legitimate father. Orphan or bastard, it is thus distinguished from the philosophic logos which, as Phaedrus says, must have a father who replies—for him and about him. This familial scheme by which one situates a discourse will be found at work when we are situating—if one can still put it this way—the site of all sites, that is, khōra. (291)

Such scansion backward, and such packaging of discourses one in another as a kind of bottomless reflection or mise en abyme, is a matter of constraint and play in the Platonic text. The apothecary occupies a backroom, “an arrière-boutique in the penumbra of the pharmacy” (D, 147/129), no doubt overlooking the garden where his homeopathic herbs flourish, as in Hawthorne’s noxious text, “Rappaccini’s Daughter”; it is here—in the apotheca, if not in the garden—that the philosopher plays, constrained only by languageConsider; for a smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities, Pierreand by the things themselves, his textual “operations” proceeding “prior to the oppositions between conscious and unconscious, freedom and constraint, voluntary and involuntary, discourse and language.” What Plato produces—or Socrates, wielding two verges, with Plato behind him—is anything but a Platonic corpus or lexicon. “In a word, we do not believe that there exists, strictly speaking, a Platonic text, closed in on itself, with its inside and its outside” (D, 149/130). If Sōkratēs-pharmakos speaks with the voice of the father, and Plato writes only after Socrates’ death, in order to expiate the father, transgressing the law of Thamus and thus repeating the patricide, that voice and its death are inextricably mixed in the dialogues. “The containment [emboitement] of scenes is abyssal. The pharmacy has no foundation [fond]” (D, 170/148). In no strong sense can it in fact be the voice of the father: Socrates is midwife rather than sire and is “in a relation of supplementation from father to son” (D, 177/153). As for Plato, if it is he who writes, “the scene is complicated: condemning writing as the lost son or parricide, Plato conducts himself as a son who is writing this condemnation, thus expiating and confirming the death of Socrates” (D, 177/153). Plato may dream of tracings without wax, but he dreams in black ink.Here, then, is the untimely, timely end;—Life’s last chapter well stitched into the middle; Nor book, nor author of the book, hath any sequel, though each hath its last lettering!—It is ambiguous still

(4) John Llewelyn, in Derrida on the Threshold of Sense, presents two texts from Derrida’s La Carte postale that indicate in a telling manner the extent to which Plato’s dream may be anyone’s. For exampleLook again. I am thy real fatherDerrida’s.

Me, I am a man of my word [un homme de parole]. I have never had anything to write. When I have something to say I say it, or say it to myself. Basta. You are the only one to understand why I have found it absolutely necessary to write precisely the opposite—when it is a matter of axiomatics—of what I desire, of what I know my desire to be, in other words, you: living speech, presence itself, proximity, the proper, the keep, and so on. Of necessity I had to write topsy-turvy—and in order to give myself up to Necessity.¹⁵

And several pages later:

I have understood that it was you. You have always been “my” metaphysics, the metaphysics of my life, the “verso” of everything I write (my desire, speech, presence, proximity, the law, my heart and my soul, everything I love and that you know before I do)

At the back of “Plato’s Pharmacy” (D, 195/169)A rickety chair, two hollow barrels, a plank, paper, pens, and infernally black inkafter having explicated the graphics of supplementarity and its doublings, repetitions, and reversals, including what he calls (whether or not in memory of MerleauPonty) “original reversibility,” Derrida presumably instructs the printer to set a series of points—too many for an ellipsis or a time-line—to serve as a kind of curtain separating the pharmacy proper from the apotheca or thesaurus, the backroom where elixirs are mixed and tinctures concocted.Is there then all this work to one book; which shall be read in a very few hours; and, far more frequently, utterly skipped in one second; and which, in the end, whatever it be, must undoubtedly go to the worms?“After having closed the pharmacy, Plato retired, sheltered from the sun. He advanced a few paces into the shadow, toward the fund of reserves [vers le fond de la réserve], hunched over the pharmakon, decided to analyze.”

“Because we are beginning to write, write in a different way,” says the Grammatology (G, 130/87), “we should re-read in another way.” In what way, it is perhaps too soon to tell.Two books are being writ; of which the world shall only see one, and that the bungled one.At any rate, in such a way that traces are not taken to be typoi and eikones fixed for engrammatological decipherment. “In the viscous liquid, quivering in the depths of the drug, the entire pharmacy was reflected, repeating the abyss of its phantasm.”

In what follows the verb tenses change from perfect and past to the present, inasmuch as the analyst is apparently present to the phantasm at hand. “And so the analyst knows how to distinguish, between two repetitions.” Why the comma appears where it does, as though to bar the word distinguish from its direct object and to open the between in such a way that it encompasses the analyst and all his know-how, no one can say. Nor why, at the bottom of the page (D, 196/170), the same thing occurs in multiple iterations: “He knows how to distinguish, between two repetitions.” And yet again: “It would be necessary to distinguish, between two repetitions.”The larger book, and the infinitely better, is for Pierre’s own private shelf That it is, whose unfathomable cravings drink his blood; the other only demands his ink. But circumstances have so decreed, that the one can not be composed on the paper, but only as the other is writ down in his soul.At all events, between these two repetitions of the repetition, the mood is set. And it is subjunctive.

He would like to isolate the good repetition from the bad one, the true repetition from the false one.

Again he hunches over: each repetition repeats the other [elles se répètent l’une l’autre].

Holding the pharmakon in one hand, his calamus in the other, Plato transcribes the play of formulae while murmuring to himself. The closed space of the pharmacy amplifies immeasurably the resonance of his monologue. His immured words hurtle themselves into the corners of the room, some words disintegrate, fragments of phrases separate off, disarticulated members circulate among the passages, are fixed for the time of a single turn, translating one another; they rearticulate, repercuss, contradict, tell tales, return like responses, organize their exchanges, protect themselves, institute an internal commerce, take themselves to be a dialogue. Replete with meaning. An entire history. All philosophy.

Plato’s analysis is here interrupted by a series of blows, strokes, beats, or coups—the diabolical concussionWith the soul of an Atheist, he wrote down the godliest things; with the feeling of misery and death in him, he created forms of gladness and life. For the pangs in his heart, he put down hoots on the paper. And every thing else he disguised under the so conveniently adjustable drapery of all stretchable Philosophythat brings illness and death (pharma being according to at least one etymology [D, 151 n. 54/132 n. 59] related to frapper); the counterstroke or antidote that neutralizes the diabolical blow; a forceful stroke or an impotent one, such as writing in water, or a toss of the dice; a peripety or sudden turn in the fortunes of characters in a play (coup de theâtre)—culminating in the typographic blow with which “Plato’s Pharmacy” began: “. . . kolaphos . . . glyph . . . colpus . . . blow . . . glyph . . . scalpel . . . scalp . . . khrysos, chrysolite, chrysology. . . .” Having returned Dionysius’ adulterated gold, his filthy lucre, Plato is now in search of the Philosopher’s Stone, dreams of the purest gold. The sound of words, like hammer blows, distracts him.

Plato stops up his ears, in order better to hear himself speaking, better to see, better to analyze.

He knows how to distinguish, between two repetitions.

He is looking for gold. . . .

It would be necessary [II faudrait] to distinguish, between two repetitions.

—But each repeats the other once again; each substitutes itself for the other. . . .

—Not at all: they do not replace one another, since they all join up. . . .

—That’s just it. . . .

These bits of detached monologue, disiecta membra bouncing off the walls, aligning haphazardly, between two repetitions of writing, as though in dialogue. Meanwhile, all the while, silently moving, the apothecary’s verge, the inky reed or calamus in paths untrodden, whoever you are holding me now in hand, the base of all metaphysics, recorders ages hence, roots and leaves themselves alone, trickle drops! my blue veins leaving! here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting, I dream’d in a dream, we two boys together clinging, one the other never leaving, what think you I take my pen in hand to record?

That still has to be noted. And this Second Letter will have to be finished: “. . . Think this over and take care lest some day you rue having unwisely divulged your views. The best safeguard will be to learn by heart instead of writing. For it is impossible for what is written not to be disclosed. That is the reason why I have never written about these things, . . . and why there is no written work by Plato, and never will be. What people call his works are the works of a Socrates become young and magnificent once again. Farewell. Do as I say. As soon as you have read and re-read this letter, burn it. . . .”

Plato’s dream, writ large, is never to have written. Never to have written is best for man, ancient wisemen say. And second best? To dream of the Egyptian priests of Neith guarding in their archive what ancient wisemen have written is best for man. To dream of a Socrates become young and robust again, a Socrates producing works, a Socrates (as one translator of the Letters has it) “embellished and modernized.”¹⁶

To dream that the purest thinker of the West should also be the thinker who wrote the most and best of all. To dream that one’s own writing could vanish in flamesSteadfastly Fierre watched the first crispings and blackenings of the painted scrollwithout a trace, or that the only tracings left would be without wax, would be no more than ashes. To dream that these ashes would glow in the memory of man, glimmerfor one swift instant, seen through the flame and smoke, the upwrithing portrait tormentedly stared at him in beseeching horrorin the innermost cavities of the heart where nothing extrinsic intrudes, would perdure and never smolder, never never be lost.

—I hope this doesn’t get lost. Quickly, a double . . . graphite . . . carbon . . . reread this letter . . . burn it. There there is ash. [II y a là cendre.] And now it would be necessary to distinguish, between two repetitions. . . .

The night passes. In the morning, knocks are heard at the door. They seem to be coming from outside this time, these coups. . . .

Two knocks . . . four. . . .

—But it may be a residue, a dream, a morsel of a dream, an echo of the night. . . this other theater, these coups from the outside. . ..

No attempt at summary. But where do tracings without wax leave memory and reminiscence? If typography, iconography, and engrammatology show themselves to be the dream of perfect recuperation of a past in the present, oneiric restoration or restitution to full presence, then what will memory, reminiscence, and writing be for us without them? Us?

No doubt, I have been on the verge of such questionsPierre, when thou just hovered on the verge, thou wert a riddle to me; but now, that thou art deep down in the gulf of the soul,—now, when thou wouldst be lunatic to wise men, perhaps—now doth poor ignorant Isabel begin to comprehend theefrom the very outset. It is time to confront more directly the consequences of the passing of the dream both for the metaphysics of memory and the memory of metaphysics.

Hegel’s is a metaphysics of memory in an unheard-of sense, and I shall now take up the themes of memory and remembrance in his mature system (in the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences) and in his “introductions” to it, or to the first part of it (in the Philosophical Propaedeutics and Phenomenology of Spirit). Heidegger’s thought too is in memory of metaphysics, and what-hasbeen plays an unparalleled role in his career early and late (unless Hegel be that parallel). Chapter 6 will thus take up again what we have heard Derrida call the “absolute past,” interrogating Heideggerian Gewesenheit with the help of Nietzsche’s imperfect thought—of time and its “It was.” Finally, in chapter 7 I will turn to a number of Derrida’s most recent writings in order to revert from the memory of metaphysics to what will very much look like a renewed metaphysics of memory. Yet it will merely be an idol or “slight” image, by no means an icon, of metaphysics; for it will have been a matter of asking what happens after the Platonic letter is burned (by Plato himself); after the Hegelian pyramid sinks into its own internal shaft (as Hegel himself, in spite of himself, bears witness); and after the Heideggerian gathering of time and being (as Heidegger himself reminds us) dispersesAnd here it may be randomly suggested, by way of bagatelle, whether some things that men think they do not know, are not for all that thoroughly comprehended by them; and yet, so to speak, though contained in themselves, are kept a secret from themselves? The idea of Death seems such a thingto mirth and mourning.

Between two repetitions. Outside. On the verge.