Playing with citations

Exergue means literally the place on a coin beneath the design where the date and location of it’s making occurred.

For Derrida, this section of the letter “plays with citation.” In his book about Fever of Archives, Derrida begins by explaining how archives are both “traditional and revolutionary; at once institutive and conservative.” The crux of this for him is “archival violence.” He then explains how the inscription of the archives occur, through printing and circumcision. Derrida argues that in order for an archive to exist it must be constructed to live in an external space,

“there is no archive without consignation in an external place which assures the possibility of memorization, of repetition, of reproduction, or of reimpression,”

and then he associates this with the Freudian death drive. For as Derrida writes, “There would indeed be no archive desire without the radical finitude, without the possibility of a forgetfulness which does not limit itself to repression.”

Derrida connects the printing of documents or inscription with circumcision, “it leaves a trace of an incision right on the skin: more than one skin, at more than one age.”

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts

-Jean-Philippe Pastor

Citability and hypertext

Derrida properly recognizes that a new, freer, richer form of text, one truer to our potential experience, perhaps to our actual if unrecognized experience, depends upon discrete reading units.

As he explains, in what Gregory Ulmer terms "the fundamental generalization of his writing", there also exists "the possibility of disengagement and citational graft which belongs to the structure of every mark, spoken and written, and which constitutes every mark in writing before and outside of every horizon of semiolinguistic communication. . . .

Every sign, linguistic or non-linguistic, spoken or written . . . can be cited, put between quotation marks." The implication of such citability, separability, appears in the fact, crucial to hypertext, that, as Derrida adds, "in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable" ("Signature").

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/

See that post with different algorithms in metabole

See the journal French Metablog with today different posts

Textual domain

As yet, no boundless writing space exists, so I have had to try to create my own simulacrum of a textual domain.

I have tried to exploit hypertext's capaciousness by offering extended passages from some of authors I cite. The current state of copyright law, however, precludes posting works in their entirety (and frankly, scanning or typing that much stuff would have been too tedious and time-consuming anyway). I have, therefore, included less than 10% of any given work to comply with the "fair use" provisions of the law. Sometimes, all you will want is a standard bibliographical reference -- just enough to enable you can to get the book or article and read it in its entirety, without my noisome interjections, distracting comments, and distorting editorial decisions.

Simple references to page numbers will occur in the text and the full bibliographic information will occur on the list of works cited (a link should take you directly from an author's name to the bibliography).

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/

See that post with different algorithms in metabole

See the journal French Metablog with today different posts

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