I want, here, to return to Ankersmit’s synesthetic example, the fierce redness of trumpets, because I think it is both more and less ingenious than his analysis gives it credit. The Dutch word translated as “fierce,” fel, has a connotation of a sharp, acute sense. So we might then think of a painful sound which alerts us, which pricks one’s ears. We might think of those scenes from Tarantino where sirens blare and the screen flares red. We might think also of the English connotations of the term “fierce,” which calls forth a bloody, violent and formidably feral foe. So, to add temperature to the mix, we might say that both redness and trumpets are “hot” senses, insofar as both raise the heat of alarm, a physiological increase in temperature and blood-flow with the release of adrenaline.

All this to explain why the redness of trumpets is richly suggestive. But we might also say that the synesthesia is not so complex, if it exemplifies nothing other than the behavioral-physiological response-system of alarm. Could alarm therefore be the building block of our language, at least in this sense?

To put it more directly, I am thinking of the difference between the theories of psychoanalysis and ethology. The psychoanalyst–and it is notable that Ankersmit uses Kernberg and not Bowlby–is keen to describe the enigmatic existence of drives that seek symbols, representations, dreams. The more ethologically minded, like Bowlby, seek to list the various physiological response systems (often focusing on how they are present within the brain), and list, also, the phenomena that can activate these systems.

We might say there is a physiological habit or tendency, a shared series of tics, on which an arbitrary system of language is constructed. Wittgenstein’s inquiries on the origin of language, in his Philosophical Investigations, are wonderfully explicative for this argument. Wittgenstein describes the hypothetical origin of language as “ostensive teaching,” derived from “the teacher’s pointing to the objects, directing the child’s attention to them, and at the same time uttering a word; for instance, the word ‘slab’ as he points to that shape.” Such a teaching ultimately relies on it not being the case that “a person naturally reacted to the gesture of pointing with the hand by looking in the direction of the line from finger-tip to wrist,” but instead looked “from wrist to finger-tip.”

Wittgenstein is hesitant to generalize from this observation the insight that any act of communication requires intuition to be understood, but acknowledges the insight that any act of communication “had in its own way already traversed all those steps [such as moving from wrist to finger]: that when you meant it your mind as it were flew ahead and took all the steps before you physically arrived at this or that one.” But, he verges on a kind of mysticism in the statement: “it seemed as if they [these steps] were in some unique way predetermined, anticipated—as only the act of meaning can anticipate reality.” It is worth noting that Wittgenstein cites Augustine throughout the Philosophical Investigations, and that his reasoning mirrors in many ways Augustine’s own De Magistro [On the Teacher], which argues that God is the first teacher, the source of all symbols, who places the signposts that direct us on the right path.

While Wittgenstein is commonly understood as the critic who denied the usefulness of speech (“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”), or as the proponent of seemingly meaningless “language games,” the mystical tones (if one is willing to read between the lines) with which he describes this line from wrist to pointer-finger indicate a faith in the innate capacity of communication.

For his part, Wittgenstein does not define a foundational block on which language can be built. A behaviorist a la B.F. Skinner might look favorably at Wittgenstein’s ostensive teaching, and argue that we are each conditioned to associate images with certain sounds and graphemes, as the child learns to associate “slab” with the object to which the teacher points. Similarly, of course, one could also claim that there are a series of built-in physiological responses (such as the eye traveling from wrist to pointer-finger), and argue that language is nothing more than a concatenation of such responses.

It is worth noting the similarities between what we have seen thus far of Wittgenstein and a surprising passage from Derrida’s Eperons, his essay on style. Even as that essay predominantly featured, as we have already seen, a parodic critique of the known, the conscious, the sensible–the continuous failure of memory and of meaning to capture phenomena–Derrida wants his audience to understand that he is not an obscurantist, is not a pure aestheticist, nor a radical hermeneutist.

Specifically, Derrida maintains: “One should not conclude, however, along with the aestheticizing and obscurantist hermeneuein, that any knowledge of whatever that means should be abandoned. On the contrary, if the structural limit and the remainder of the simulacrum which has been left in writing are going to be taken into account, the process of decoding, because this limit is not of the sort that circumscribes a certain knowledge even as it proclaims a beyond, must be carried to the furthest lengths possible. To where the limit runs through and divides a scientific work, whose very condition, this limit, thus opens it up to itself.”

This passage comes towards the end of a long essay against concretization, and amidst a long career where Derrida argues for a philosophy of language which suggests that nothing can be accessed without the mediation of language. Yet, here, Derrida stresses the “remainder of the simulacrum which has been left in writing,” which we could gloss either as the trace of the fragment or as the limited capacity for static presence that mortal beings have, the limited constancy that has been left through language. In other words, this limited constancy, of a simulacrum that is not-quite-full presence, allows for an investigation: a “decoding” “of whatever that means“.

In his italicizing of that, we might take Derrida to be saying that the operation of ostension (to keep with Wittgenstein) or of demonstration (to use everyday language), the very declaration “[Look at] that[!]“, cannot be ignored nor wholly reduced to inaccuracy, but must rather be investigated–deeply. Ostension is linked to the limited constancy of a reference among communicants; this constancy represents also the capacity for recall, such that one knows–to some extent–what one or another means when using the substantive “that” in place of a noun.

But, it is also worth dwelling on Wittgenstein’s example, where one points and speaks, offers sight at the same time as sound, because it has a strong connection to Ankersmit’s “lyrical metaphor.” Pointing and speaking, singing our words–our capacities to enlist multiple senses at the same time are limited. The lyric holds a privileged position in the human being’s capacity to signify, precisely because it is synesthetic, because one can warp the sonic quality of a word; and, to use Kristeva’s terms, warp it in such a way that a word’s semiotic valence (its value as a sound) can match or augment its semantic valence (its value according to the dictionary definition of the word). Thinking of where semiotics meets semantics, we might think of Leonard Bernstein’s own Norton Lectures, where he speculates that the common use of the “ma” sound in various linguistic groups’ affectionate term for “mama” suggests the sound of a child crying out, or nuzzling, reaching for the mother’s nipple. The “mmm” of mother’s milk is therefore used to suggest that “mama” may be the human being’s first word. Is this mystical poesis or mere physiology?

We might see the physiological function of language elsewhere in Ankersmit’s Sublime Historical Experience, particularly in his treatment of Kant. Ankersmit introduces us to “this greatest among all philosophers,” with an anecdote from Kant’s life beyond the pages: “For many years Kant was dutifully served by the faithful Lampe. But one unfortunate day Lampe could not resist the temptation to steal something from his master’s household. He was dismissed on the spot by his master, for whom property was sanctified by nothing less than the categorical imperative. Nevertheless Kant was not at ease with his Roman severitas, and he kept worrying about poor Lampe. In order to get rid of this most unwelcome manifestation of Neigung, he pinned above his desk a little note with the stunning text: ‘Lampe vergessen’—’forget Lampe.’ There is something pathetic about the naïveté of this greatest among all philosophers urging himself ‘not to forget to forget Lampe.’ Obviously, somebody who requires himself to forget is sure to remember. Or, as Jon Elster once put it: ‘the injunction “Forget it” calls for an effort that can only engrave what we are supposed to forget more firmly in our memory.'”

Ankersmit uses this as an example of how philosophers, even the “greatest among all philosophers,” remain trapped within the realm of language, lacking as they do a proper sense for the world beyond it. Ankersmit’s didactic anecdote is an example of his own model for realism/sensitivism, insofar as it takes as its starting point an attempt at journaling the world, not of commenting in the margins of a book, i.e. we are addressing Kant’s worldly actions, and not his publications. Moreover, part of the force of Ankersmit’s example, though not stated explicitly, is that the average contemporary reader probably takes Lampe’s side. We might forgive a bit of theft, given what we know of class divides, and we might question the whole divide between the philosopher and the layman who waits on him. There seems to be a great deal of sarcasm in the observation that, “[Lampe] was dismissed on the spot by his master, for whom property was sanctified by nothing less than the categorical imperative“; or, at least, there is a distancing, such that we do not necessarily accept Kant’s view that property is sanctified, merely that it was sanctified for him. We are dealing with the awareness of class whereby there is an “ambivalent loathing among intellectuals (which might explain their cannibalistic criticism), who feel the need to decry indolence, while also struggling to justify their own inactivity”.

But we could try to be more generous to Kant here. Let’s say that there was a moment where, after the end of a long meditation, Kant comes to the conclusion that he was correct in his treatment of Lampe, and has therefore used his Reason to trump his troublesome sympathies, his Neigung. In that moment of confidence, Kant writes to himself: “Forget Lampe.”

This note might amount, also, to writing: “Remember, even in your moments of discourage, that you, the greatest of all philosophers, have decided that you deserve to forget Lampe. Because I, knowing you better than any other, know that you will come to grieve your lost servant and question your punishment, and because I myself have succumbed to this instinct many times before, I will write this note for you to remember me by. Until the day that you no longer need these words, you will have them on your mantle. A firm reminder that we have already decided, after the lengthiest of deliberations, with your own mind, the greatest judge and defender that he could have, on Lampe’s guilt, on Lampe’s not deserving your sympathies. One day you will come to decide that this note is extraneous, and will place it in the trash, lest it continue to remind you of your earlier weakness.”

Kant need not have such a lengthy monologue with himself every time he reads the note in order for it to be successful. Rather, the note might simply be associated with the time of its writing, may invoke in himself the same affect of confidence as he once had. Seeing the language in his own penmanship might serve to remind him of his former existence enough to bolster his confidence. Even so, I may agree with Ankersmit’s assessment, concur that the effectiveness of Kant’s method might be dubious. Although, this does not amount to saying that Kant is shortsighted or irrational for using such a method. Rather, it points to how neither Kant nor Ankersmit understands, at least not fully, the physiological functioning of language.

The issue at hand is whether we are able to understand language as a system of associative memory, in addition to its function as a system of reference. Let me explain. “Arboreal” may be a beautiful word to me because it reminds me of elegant speech, perhaps even the image of Daphne transforming into laurels beneath Apollo’s touch, while “tree” more clumsily brings to mind things with trunks and branches, and lots of tepid conversations. Though both terms share similar referential power, their associative power differs significantly.

However, associative memory is often too idiosyncratic to be of use in philosophical analysis, at least so long as philosophy takes for granted that words act like spells, conjuring, evoking, their direct, named reference. This very idiosyncrasy–because it gets tied into the system of habituation whereby the common and the avant-guard take turns in being “literary,” because it is caught in a cycle of changing tastes rather than progressing in a line of evolutionary progress–is what philosophers fear as the enemy to their attempts at representing truth.

It would seem foolish, at least to those familiar with the history of philosophy and theory, for me to argue that philosophers/analysts/literati are “re[-]presenting truth.” In terms of time, one is free to argue that nothing is ever fully present, nor is anything really re-present: every moment is inseparable from its predecessors and sequiturs, and every moment is its own. If this previous statement is hard for the reader to maintain, I have the following metaphor to help: imagine a cord colored with impossibly many variegations, such that each section cut from the cord will differ from all others, but such that one never succeeds in cutting a perfect cross-section which contains only one color.

On the level of media, we can argue that translation is always an alteration, that language always alters the world by acting on it. But if the artist, scientist and philosopher achieve something, then I think it is fair to say that they create a new means of operating in the world, and that they make this operation to some extent reproducible, such that potentialities are–at least for a period, a community, an area–increased. To the extent that this operation and reproductions of the operation are desirable, it may be fitting to give them the name “truth.” And the idea of truthfulness may be retained if this increased potentiality is related to the decoding of what precisely that entails.

What was that? Who goes there?

Theory or analysis–whichever name one chooses–alters the body’s capacity to act upon itself, to act upon other bodies. We might therefore wonder why the philosopher has so often been limited to the production of texts, has not included other media. For isn’t the linkage of various sense-data, the use of multiple media, at play in this lyrical synesthesia, or in our ostensive teachings?

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In dwelling on that question of why the philosopher is limited to text, or at least has been limited to text, I will, here, test the hypothesis that the contemporary world’s greatest capacity for semantics to meet semiotics is in film, or at least in filmic media. In particular, we might think of the capacity to maintain the narrative structure of prose with the structure of cinema, a combination of structures that can be seen, for example, in the filmic genre of the lyric video. Lyric videos–and the correlation with Ankersmit’s “lyrical metaphor” is intentional–simultaneously present phonemes and graphemes, singing and calligraphy/typography; they may even distort the graphic representation of words in the style of an illuminated manuscript.

And in this reference to the illuminated manuscript, I want to take a few steps back, try to answer again what precisely prose or reading entails. We might de-familiarize reading, remove our current assumptions, if we imagine how the amanuensi–before the arrival of print–used the movement of his [insofar as it was often a man writing] hand to indicate not only the limits of a letter, but also the shape of a story, the form of a feeling. The illuminated letter carried pictures of the story referenced in the words, and the use of delicate filigrees or strong rubrications highlighted, emboldened, or underlined the import of a text. (And with the use of these italicized terms I mean to illustrate how typographical alterations are frequently used to add stress to the presentation of one’s language.)

But the Western monastic tradition of manuscription is not the only example wherein the graphic quality of language (its style as ecriture) relates to the meaning-effects, the physiological response, of a text. In investigating the use of gesture in writing, what I want to suggest is that the kerning of a language invents the curvature of space.

What do I mean when I say that “[written] language invents the curvature of [visual] space”? Well, it has something to do with the letter. I have in mind the experience of a student who practices the abrupt corners of a capital “Z” or “N,” who comes to understand circularity through the repetition of “o”s, who begins to understand the nuances of linearity and curvature with the complexity of a lower-case “e” or an upper-case “G”. In recognizing these spatial relations that compose and differentiate letters, students develop internalized stamps even before the rise of the Gutenberg Galaxy. Language, theory, art–they all seem to imbue the audience/practitioner with some capacity for re-cognition, the re-production of a tracing, a blueprint, of a schematic object.

Perhaps I sound too adulatory in this description of literacy, too proud of acquiring language. In Of Grammatology, Derrida notes, and critiques, the common opinion in Enlightenment European thought, which suggests that the development of more accurate and useful representations of the world is inevitable; that the use of theory and language is to create maps and models of the world. As an example: “Warburton and Condillac propose the schema of an economic, technical, and purely objective rationality. The economic imperative must be understood here in the restrictive sense of economies to be made: of abbreviation. Writing reduces the dimensions of presence in its sign. The miniature is not reserved to illuminated capitals; it is understood in its derivative sense, the very form of writing. The history of writing would then follow the continuous and linear progress of the techniques of abbreviation.” While I want to suggest that abbreviation, or the invention of miniatures, is, to a significant extent, what science, theory and art do–it is worth taking into consideration Derrida’s critique that something may always be lost in the process of abbreviation. The miniature collapses distance, and instead of mourning the loss of this distance, “[t]his becoming-absence of distance is not interpreted as a rupture by Condillac but described as the consequence of a continuous increase.”

I want to suggest, in highlighting the examples of manuscripts and miniatures, how language creates re-cognizable forms. If we turn to research on dyslexia, we may better understand the process whereby people come to spatial awareness, begin to develop the capacities for re-cognition. Brock and Fernette Eide, in their book on The Dyslexic Advantage, in a chapter on spatial reasoning, note that “researchers have found that the newborn human brain forms two mirror-image views of everything it sees: one in the left hemisphere and the other in the right. Usually this duplicate imagery is helpful because it allows us to recognize objects from multiple perspectives, so that a toddler who’s been warned about a dog while looking at its left profile can re[-]cognize that same dog from its right.

Unfortunately, when trying to re[-]cognize the orientation of printed symbols–or any other item with a natural mirror, like a shoe or glove–this ability to generate mirror images becomes a burden. Before a child can reliably distinguish an image from its mirror, he [sic] must learn to suppress the generation of its mirror image…[F]or some truly dyslexic children–in our experience roughly one in four–letter reversals can be a much more persistent and important problem. These children may reverse whole words or even whole sentences, and at the single symbol level they may reverse not only ‘horizontal’ mirrors like b/d or p/q but also ‘vertical’ mirrors like b/p, b/q, or 6/9.”

The Eides’ example helps us to understand the conflict between parsing and clumping. There are times when clumping, eliminating details in order to create a miniature, can help us to create re-cognizable images or concepts. Borges’s short story, “Funes the Memorious,” can help us to understand this better. Borges explains that Funes, after an accident that damaged his head and gave him a perfect memory, “was, let us not forget, almost incapable of ideas of a general, Platonic sort.” Funes’s incredible memory made “it difficult for him to comprehend that the generic symbol dog embraces so many unlike individuals of diverse size and form; it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front).” Funes’s memory was a curse because “[t]o think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions.” So there are times when we ought to clump, to re-cognize dogs for dogs, others where it is important to parse, to know our “p”s from our “q”s.

So, while Derrida is correct to point out that generalizing from condensed re-cognitions is apt to cause loss of detail (“the becoming-absence of distance”), there is something lost when we remember too much. “Funes, the Memorious” is one example of this (and one ought to note, here, the substantive use of the demonstrative pronoun). There are others. Indeed, Borges turns to the same theme in the paragraph-long short story “On Exactitude in Science,” which features an Empire where “the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province…” In this Empire, perfectionism–full retention–causes failure, as “following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless”.

Although, this analysis of cartography is leading us somewhat off-track: we are trying to trace the importance of calligraphy. Though the Eides mention minding our “p”s and “q”s, it is worth considering the differences between n, c, and u, as we might imagine a font or typeface which differentiates these parabolic shapes solely in terms of their direction. Similarly, they do not mention the spatial awareness by which one would differentiate an open parenthesis “(” from a capital “C”. If we observe work from cultures that have a tradition of calligraphy, it becomes apparent that there can be many nuances to the formation of angles and curves. What if “u” and “v” were differentiated not by curve and cusp, but by the angle of refraction? This is what I have in mind when I say that “the kerning of a language invents the curvature of space.”

If we return to Derrida’s study of writing in Of Grammatology, we find that, in place of calligraphy, the themes of ideographic or pictographic language are abundant. According to one strand of European thought, the ideogram of Chinese writing or the pictogram of the Egyptian hieroglyph is fetishized as an ideal representation of the world through writing; according to the other, these non-phonetic forms of writing are lesser because they do not afford (at least not readily) the abstraction of speech. (A more informed commenter on Asian cultures would, perhaps, point to the difference between Korean Hangul and Japanese Kanji, would thereby interrogate the boundaries between letter and ideogram.) Derrida’s point, simplified, is that there is no such thing as perfect writing nor speech, no form of language that translates without loss of information–just as there is no perfectly “abstract” communication, no transcendental signified: presence is always the presence of another present.

Derrida gives an example for the influence of Chinese ideograms on Western culture, noting how Ezra Pound was influenced by Ernest Fenollosa’s interpretation/translation of Chinese poetry. Of Grammatology includes the citation from Fenollosa that “should we pass formally into the study of Chinese poetry,…we should beware of English [occidental] grammar, its hard parts of speech, and its lazy satisfaction with nouns and adjectives. We should seek and at least bear in mind the verbal undertone of each noun. We should avoid the ‘is’ and bring in a wealth of neglected English verbs. Most of the existing translations violate all of these rules. The development of the normal transitive sentence rests upon the fact that one action in nature promotes another; thus the agent and the object are secretly verbs. For example, ‘reading promotes writing,’ would be expressed in Chinese by three full verbs. Such a form is the equivalent of three expanded clauses and can be drawn out into adjectival, participial, infinitive, relative or conditional numbers. One of many possible examples is, ‘If one reads it teaches him how to write.’ Another is, ‘One who reads becomes one who writes.’ But in the first condensed form a Chinese [person] would write, ‘Read promote write.'”

Fenollosa suggests that there is a “wealth of neglected English verbs,” that English is blandly tautological, relies too much on “is.” English lacks action, detail, alternative possibility. In contrast, Fenollosa suggests, the collation of verbs in the “condensed form” of “read promote write” allows speakers/listeners/writers/readers of Chinese (and we might ask which dialect precisely?) to evoke greater possibility, a rich series of interconnections between words. We are dealing with the hypothesis that the syntactic structure of a language is greatly deterministic in the cognition of its users.

Again, it might be helpful to invoke Borges, whose story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” features an imaginary culture wherein a “noun is formed by an accumulation of adjectives. They do not say ‘moon,’ but rather ’round airy-light on dark’ or ‘pale-orange-of-the-sky’ or any other such combination.” This group of language-users does not attempt to trap the breadth of experience into a single name, but instead concatenates experiences. The problem, here, is not exactly that of Funes, who remembers too many dogs instead of collapsing the different poses of a dog into the same name. Rather, the problem is novel, because there is no entity “dog” to be re-cognized.

Tlön’s writing also shares something in common with some strands of Chinese philosophy, insofar as “in [Tlön’s] literary practices…it is uncommon for books to be signed”, because “it has been established that all works are the creation of one author, who is atemporal and anonymous.” Borges then evokes the Tao Te Ching, and it is worth noting a trend in Taoism to evoke dreams as a paradigm for the flow of adjectival experiences, the loss of a solid identity. In his Norton Lectures, Borges lingers on the story where: “Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt that I was a butterfly, flitting around and enjoying myself. I had no idea I was Chuang Tzu. Then suddenly I woke up and was Chuang Tzu again. But I could not tell, had I been Chuang Tzu dreaming I was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I was now Chuang Tzu?” Or we might point to Zhuangzi’s teaching that “You and Confucius are both dreaming, and I who say you are a dream am also a dream. Such is my tale. It will probably be called preposterous, but after ten thousand generations there may be a great sage who will be able to explain it, a trivial interval equivalent to the passage from morning to night.”

In his manifesto on the importance of cinema as an art of the montage, Sergei Eisenstein uses this very principle that we have noted, this collation of differing images/adjectives/verbs without a continuous line between, to define montage. Eisenstein is not intrigued by the pictographic quality of characters: “to hell with the horse and with the 607 remaining symbols of the hsiang-cheng, the first representational category of hieroglyphs.” Instead, “[i]t is with the second category of hieroglyphs–the huei-i, or ‘copulative’–that our real interest begins.” Interest begins, because “the copulation–perhaps we had better say the combination–of two hieroglyphs of the simplest series is regarded not as their sum total but as their product, i.e. as a value of another dimension, another degree: each taken separately corresponds to an object but their combination corresponds to a concept.” In fact, this calligraphic art form is taken to be entirely invisible, because “[t]he combination of two ‘representable’ objects achieves the representation of something that cannot be graphically represented.”

Eisenstein’s essay then models this method of concatenation in its list of examples: “the representation of water and of an eye signifies ‘to weep’

the representation of an ear next to a drawing of a door means ‘to listen’,

a dog and a mouth mean ‘to bark’

a mouth and a baby mean ‘to scream’

a mouth and a bird mean ‘to sing’

a knife and a heart mean ‘sorrow’, and so on

But–this is montage!!”

Eisenstein’s argument is that the film artist should edit as much as possible, because this editing leads to, in Derrida’s terms (though he uses them critically), a “becoming-absence of distance” that is supposedly not a “rupture” but a “consequence of continuous increase.” As Eistenstein explains, the rapid contrast of the montage edit is needed because “in [his] view montage is not an idea composed of successive shots stuck together but an idea that DERIVES from the collision between two shots that are independent of one another“.

Whether we are dealing with the collation of verbs in “read promote write”, of adjectives in “round airy-light on dark”, or of nouns in “a knife and a heart”, ideogrammatic systems are taken to represent a language that is far more abbreviated, whose ellipses force us to come up short, and are therefore evocative in ways far greater than our everyday, overly linear communication.

So why talk about all this in the first place? Wasn’t our purpose to talk about calligraphy? Why does Derrida quote Fenollosa anyway? Well, Derrida’s point is that the existence of another language is often the foil by which one avoids looking at the dis-jointure and disruption in one’s own language system, by imagining that another language is broken in ways that one’s own is not. But the challenge of translating the other’s broken language leads to “a question of dis-locating [emphasis and hyphen mine], through access to another system linking speech and writing, the founding categories of language and the grammar of the episteme…” Note my emphases on themes of fragmentation and stasis, as Derrida claims that “[i]t was normal that the breakthrough was more secure and more penetrating on the side of literature and poetic writing…This is the meaning of the work of Fenollosa whose influence upon Ezra Pound and his poetics is well-known: this irreducibly graphic poetics was, with that of Mallarmé, the first break in the most entrenched Western tradition.”

In other words, having to translate “read promote write” as either “If one reads it teaches him [sic] how to write” or “One who reads becomes one who writes”, among “many possible examples”, forces one to notice the various ways that language relies on assumed interrelations among entities. We might hear echoes of Wittgenstein, here, because “when you meant it your mind as it were flew ahead and took all the steps before you physically arrived at this or that one” so that “it seemed as if they [these steps] were in some unique way predetermined, anticipated—as only the act of meaning can anticipate reality.”

Derrida seems to say that the Occidental experience of Chinese writing distends narrative, opens up the assumptions within any text or act of communication, and that the subsequent desire is to get closer to the things at hand. But, in including this citation from Fenollosa, Derrida seems to take the approach that language is always a concatenation: it is always a comparative movement from one thing to the next that can never be stopped. We might find a friendly companion to Derrida’s thought in Italo Calvino, who described the simultaneous boundedness and unboundedness of writing with the shuffling of cards, such that even a limited number of elements from which one draws can generate continuously surprising combinations of elements. (An arbitrary system of combination, of chance, is at work in Mallarmé’s “Mimique”, which is perhaps that to which Derrida is referring in his claim that Mallarmé helped to achieve “the first break in the most entrenched Western tradition.”)

But how are we to make sense of Derrida’s statement that Ezra’s Chinese-influenced poetics was an “irreducibly graphic” one? Is the claim that the dis-jointure of Chinese grammar leads to a highly evocative, and in that sense graphic, poetics? Or is this a nod to the calli-graphic quality of Chinese poetry, for which the handwriting, the ecriture, of poetry is an ineradicable aspect of its art? At the very least, neither Fenollosa nor Derrida expounds the importance of handwriting in this section. Does the absence of calligraphy in his study point to how Derrida privileges difference to simultaneity, how his critique of the “presence of the present” may make him, at times, blind to the polysemic, multimediatic construction of art or theory?

What are we to make of Derrida’s claim that “[r]epeating Warburton’s and Condillac’s statement outside its closure, one may say that the history of philosophy is the history of prose; or rather of the becoming prose of the world”? Is Derrida considering himself a philosopher, considering his work prose, and positively so, when he adds that “[p]hilosophy is the invention of prose”, because “[t]he philosopher speaks prose.” Though one might assume that the complexity of poetry necessarily succeeds simple prose, Derrida seems to operate from the opposite assumption: that poetry precedes prose. It would be remarkable if Derrida indeed subscribes to this belief, and is not merely stating that one could state or believe this, given how often his work instills doubt regarding the order of precedence.

On one level, poetry is understood as a kind of speech that precedes but partially includes writing: “Before writing, poetry would in some way be a spontaneous engraving, a writing before the fact. Intolerant of poetry, the philosopher had to take writing literally.” It seems that poetry is discontinuous, while writing aims to be coherent and sustaining. But this opposition is too readily accepted. There are times when the poetic disruption, the enjambment, the verse, the surprise, is worth its price, may be appreciated. “It is difficult to appreciate what separates Rousseau from Warburton and Condillac here, and to determine the value of the rupture.”

On one level, Rousseau is prosaic because “[h]e is more attentive to the structures of the system of writing in their relationship to social or economic systems and to the figures of passion.” The empiricist quality of Rousseau’s prose makes him less generalizing, less dogmatic: “The models of explication are in appearance less [onto-]theological…” Yet, in being so direct and prosaic, Rousseau exceeds that which can be immediately understood because “[t]he economy of writing refers to motivations other than those of need and action, understood in a homogeneous, simplistic, and objectivistic sense.” Derrida seems to be suggesting in these lines that something radically new, a break has to occur in even prosaic philosophic writing, so that discontinuity can be privileged within the supposedly rationalist/economic/scientific tracing of a structure, and this break is “the becoming-absence of distance.”

Although, there is room to argue that Rousseau’s impassioned rhetoric fails to achieve the prosaic goal of philosophy, is problematically poetic. It loses its coherence, because, “on the other hand, he neutralizes what is announced as irreducibly economic in the system of Warburton and Condillac.” It seems that Derrida does not accept a mystical strand of Rousseau’s writing that is motivated more by passion than reason, because “we know how the ruses of theological reason work in his discourse.” Derrida accepts that Rousseau’s writing is in some sense against the grain of Enlightenment rationalism, at least Condillac’s, so that “[t]o the technical and economic imperatives of objective space, Rousseau’s explication makes only one concession”, a concession which is made “in order discreetly to correct [emphasis mine] Warburton’s and Condillac’s simplism.” So we are encountering how meaningfully philosophical prose is supposed to represent the cor-rect posing of the question, is intended to be di-rect, non-circuitous.

Both Derrida and Rousseau describe prose with the metaphor of boustrophedonic writing, which (Derrida:) “is a matter of writing by furrows. The furrow is the line, as the ploughman traces it: the road–via rupta—broken by the ploughshare…How does the ploughman proceed? Economically. Arrived at the end of the furrow, he does not return to the point of departure. He turns ox and plough around. And proceeds in the opposite direction. Saving of time, space, and energy. Improvement of efficiency and reduction of working time. Writing by the turning of the ox—boustrophedon–writing by furrows was a movement in linear and phonographic script.”

Specifically, as Derrida cites him, Rousseau maintains that: “At first the Greeks adopted not only the Phoenicians’ characters, but even the direction of their lines from right to left. Later it occurred to them to write in furrows, that is, writing alternately from left to right and right to left alternately. Finally, they wrote according to our present practice of starting each line from left to right. This progress is only natural. Writing in furrows is undeniably the most convenient to read. I am even surprised that it was not established along with printing; but, being difficult to write by hand, it had to be abandoned as manuscripts multiplied.”

So the divide between left-to-right hand-writing and boustrophedonic writing is taken to be comparable to the divide between poetry and prose. In being economic, prose is taken to be the linear version of disjointed poetry. Yet, at the same time, in being a disruption at the birth of civilization–the rupture of civilization, of agriculture, of techne through nature–writing is a kind of event, a discontinuity. All this makes it so that one can never fully choose, once and for all, between continuity and change, because “there are different, indeed incompatible, economic imperatives, among which one must choose and among which sacrifices and an organization of hierarchies become necessary.”

And this sacrifice between possibilities makes it so that “for example, the surface of the page, the expanse of parchment or any other receptive substance distributes itself differently according to whether it is a matter of writing or reading.” Derrida then seems to accept the difference between prose, which may be the easiest to read, and poetry, which may be the most enjoyable to write. “In a word, it is more convenient to read than to write by furrows.” Prose requires greater effort because “[t]he space of writing is not an originarily intelligible space.” Unconscious impulses are being regulated in the work of prose. But the regulation is part of unconscious desire itself, so that writing “begins however to become so [i.e. intelligible] from the moment of origin, that is to say from the moment that writing, like all the work of signs, produces repetition there and therefore ideality in that space….one may say that the space of pure reading is always already intelligible, that of pure writing always still sensible.”

If prose always fits within neat quadrangles, then understanding how calligraphy is a poetic form, how it disobeys the ordering of prose, might help Derrida in his argument that “the surface of the page, the expanse of parchment or any other receptive substance distributes itself differently” according to circumstance. Indeed, Jie Feng, in “Writing from the other side: Critical reflections on the calligraphy of Zhang Qiang“, attempts to tie Taoist conceptions of Chinese calligraphy with Derrida’s notion of the trace. (Zhang Qiang has also undertaken experiments where he holds a brush while a woman moves the surface on which he writes, which, in many ways, recalls Derrida’s, at times problematic, attempts to complicate the binaries of masculine/feminine and engraving/receiving in Eperons, though Jie Feng does not note this similarity.)

“In China, as [Gordon] Barrass explains, ‘the earliest pictograms are said to have been inspired by the footprints or traces of animals and birds’ (2002: 258). This is the ‘starting point’ that inspires Zhang Qiang, ‘that the whole of Chinese culture could be seen as a series of traces: some strong, some faint, others invisible’ (2002: 258). Zhang (2017) uses the term ‘traceology’ to encapsulate his vision of art-making, as derived from a ‘universe’ of traces, which crucially leads him to suggest of a ‘common’ culture, we can all share. However despite the origin myth of footprints or traces, Zhang adopts a view that is not dissimilar to Derrida’s use of trace.”

Though Feng marks a tension between Zhang’s footprints and Derrida’s trace, we have already seen how Derrida’s notion of trace owes to the fragment that indicates the shape of a missing whole. Moreover, if we investigate what occurs when a bird leaves prints, we discover that the footprint is an abbreviated cross-section of the bird. The three dimensional object is reduced to a cross-section that, despite its limited surface area, is greatly distinctive. So this form of writing fits Condillac’s notion that the economy of writing is its abbreviation.

There are many ways that the investigation of Chinese calligraphy adds to Derrida’s argument: ways that perhaps he himself did not foresee. Derrida: “Our writing and our reading are still largely determined by the movement of the hand. The printing press has not yet liberated the organization of the surface from its immediate servitude to the manual gesture, and to the tool of writing.” Feng: “Furthermore, the paintbrush, while used far less now in China, is nonetheless intrinsic to an understanding of the Chinese script. Indeed, brush marks are central to an appreciation of the structure and flow of Chinese characters. Rather than simply ‘scratching’ out lines on article, the Chinese character is based upon the full dimensionality of the brush (loaded with ink) and the roll of the wrist.”

Feng may provide an addition, if we read carefully, that writing need not always be a two-dimensional cross-section. As he explains, “[t]he three-dimensionality of Chinese calligraphy gives rise to a seemingly infinite realm of expression.” This new dimensionality is generated by the pressure that the calligrapher applies onto the page, which affects how much ink will seep into the page, and how wide it will spread: “the full dimensionality of the brush (loaded with ink) and the roll of the wrist.” Chinese calligraphers therefore make significant gestures on the page through shade and texture.

Another contemporary Chinese calligrapher, Xu Bing, might add meaningfully to this conversation. To start with, his work “A Book From the Sky,” echoes the belief suggested earlier by Zhang Qiang, that there was a celestial origin to the shape of glyphs, like a bird descending to the ground. The work also attempts to achieve a representation for how “the kerning of a language invents the curvature of space”, insofar as Xu Bing invents nonsensical glyphs that look like they could be Chinese ideograms. Moreover, his Square Word Calligraphy, despite the name, demonstrates how Chinese ideograms often economize space by generating–instead of a boustrophedon, instead of a reticulated quadrangle–a spiraled circle which moves “from left to right, top to bottom, outside to inside.”

What I am trying to suggest is that Derrida’s notion of the trace, though it is an abstract concept often used to indicate the inseparability of presence/absence, makes rather literal use of the movement that the eye makes across the page in the process of reading–that Derrida questions these eye movements, which seem to occur spontaneously, but which really require time to be completed. The movement of the eye across an image might recall us to what we have already seen in Benjamin’s definition of aura as “a strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close the object may be.” Space and time. Space: the “appearance or semblance,” occurring in a single moment. Time: the movement across “distance, no matter how close the object may be.” The spontaneity of sight and touch therefore requires a simultaneous dualism/monism, occurs whenever moments concatenate themselves into a single image, just as one’s eyes unconsciously shuttle across the pixels of a picture, like a loom generating a textile, such that there is a “weave of space and time.”

Derrida himself makes use of this weave of space and time in the term spacing, where “[s]pacing (notice this word speaks the articulation of space and time, the becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space) is always the non-perceived, the non-present, and the non-conscious.” So spacing invokes the degree to which presence relies on an assumed non-presence, consciousness on an unconscious connection, such that “[a]rche-writing [another term for trace or spacing] cannot occur as such, within the phenomenological experience of a presence.” Instead, the trace, as a leftover fragment, “marks the dead time within the presence of the living present, within the general form of all presence.”

We have already seen in Derrida’s economic reading of Condillac how something must get preserved in our abbreviated models, but something is always lost to the rupture, the “becoming-absent of distance”. This “becoming-absent” defines all writing, insofar as “[s]pacing as writing is the becoming-absent and the becoming-unconscious of the subject,” because it participates “[o]n all levels of life’s organization, that is to say, of the economy of death.” To preserve something in writing we must always choose to efface something else, memory requires forgetting. In other words, “[w]ithin the horizontality of spacing, which is in fact the precise dimension I have been speaking of so far, and which is not opposed to it as surface opposes depth, it is not even necessary to say that spacing cuts, drops, and causes to drop within the unconscious: the unconscious is nothing without this cadence and before this caesura.”

While aspects of unconscious phenomena can rise to consciousness, the unconscious must always remain, which “is why there is no full speech, however much one might wish to restore it by means or without benefit of psychoanalysis.” We have already seen in the analysis of Chinese poetry how “words and concepts receive meaning only in sequences of differences,” such that “one must ask the question of meaning and of its origin in difference.”

“Such is the problematic of the trace. Why of the trace? What led us to the choice of this word?” While “[w]e have begun to answer this question”, unfortunately, due to the constant movement of meaning-making, “one can justify one’s language, and one’s choice of terms, only within a topic [an orientation in space] and an historical strategy”, such that one’s “justification can therefore never be absolute and definitive.” So instead of explaining how Derrida has in mind the movement of the eye across a page, he refers to what we have already seen: how the “trace” or Spur had been used by Levinas, Freud and Nietzsche, such that “the discourse of our time ha[s] progressively imposed this choice [of the term ‘trace’] upon us.”

But, I think, the trace as the movement of the eye is more important than Derrida discloses. Indeed, I want to suggest that there is an affinity between lyric videos and the “trace” that we have already discussed. In imagining a “trace” that is never static–a trace that is linked to the inherent destruction, the forgetfulness, of mortal being–I at first understood Derrida’s concept through the metaphor of a lyric video. I imagined a song that, telling a story as it played, was the soundtrack to an animated film. The animator would always use a line of a limited and equal length, would twist it to outline the scene or figure. As the line moved, at its fore-end, to take a new shape, to trace a new object, the back-end of the line moved with it–and so a piece of the line was lost in each new inscription/description.

The metaphor of this video helped me to understand what exactly narrative achieves, by slowly scanning the senses, shifting from one object to the next within the audience’s limited, because mortal, capacities for memory. I believe that this metaphor improves upon Freud’s notion of the “Mystic Writing Pad,” even though it is guilty of being similarly simplistic. This metaphor, at least, does a better job of illustrating the innate forgetfulness of the human body–though it does a poor job of explaining the sudden resonances, the schematic re-cognitions, of one form with another once seen.

Although, to defend my metaphor a bit, the animated line also helps to explain the difference between narrative and the typical presentation of story through film, or even in everyday life. Cinema (in its prevalent use) presents, rather than a narrow outline, an expansive image, spread across the entirety of a screen. The image is therefore open to the interpretation of the audience who must select options within this expanse. It becomes possible that the audience–looking in the wrong direction, or imprecisely tracing the contours of a scene with broad brushstrokes–does not follow. It seems that deconstruction, as a kind of close reading, a resistance of the common tendency to impose ready-made judgments on a text, has in mind this kind of linear approach. It is a cautious tracing, always aware of the limited capacities to perceive for both author and reader, within “the horizontality of spacing”.

Hence Derrida’s privileging of prose as the philosopher’s art. And hence his choice of the printed letter, which seems to overtake even his most digressive and experimental uses of the form. And we should note that Derrida does not write Of Grammatology by hand; or, at least, does not publish his handwriting.

At the same time, Derrida does use typographical marks to efface his writing. Specifically, he follows the pattern of Heidegger’s Zur Seinsfrage, [On the Question of Being] where “[Heidegger] does not allow the word ‘being’ to be read except under a cross,” a cross which is not a “merely negative symbol” but is an “erasure [that] is the final writing of an epoch”, because it “[i]s effaced while still remaining legible, destroying itself while making visible the very idea of the sign.” Derrida himself responds to the question ‘what is the sign?’ by suggesting that it is necessary to “challeng[e] the very form of the question and begin[] to think that the sign is that ill-named thing, the only one, that escapes the instituting question of philosophy: ‘what is…?'”

Spivak’s “Translator’s Preface” puts particular stress on this practice of writing “sous rature” (which she translates as “under erasure”), where it is customary “to write a word, cross it out, and then print both word and deletion.” This custom is based in the fact that language is inadequate to its task: “[s]ince the word is inaccurate, it is crossed out[; s]ince it is necessary, it remains legible.” Spivak explains that this practice is indebted to Heidegger, for whom “Being might point at an inarticulable presence.” However, Derrida’s trace is more than “an inarticulable presence”; rather, it puts emphasis on how there is an “always already absent present” because “Derrida’s trace is the mark of the absence of a presence, an always already absent present, of the lack at the origin that is the condition of thought and experience.” I would simply add that, since absence and presence are simultaneous, Derrida’s trace evokes not only the “always already absent present” which, perhaps, shares a nihilistic tone with Heidegger’s inarticulable Being; it is also an affirmation of “the remainder of the simulacrum which has been left in writing,” so that there is an always already present absent.

It is worth noting that, in addition to this method of the strikethrough, typographical changes have been evident in the continental philosophical tradition since Heidegger, who used italicization and hyphens throughout his oeuvre. In her defense of typographical novelty, Spivak seems to argue that language will always be inadequate to its task; hence, poets and philosophers need to continuously alter existing language structures enough for them to become unfamiliar, while being similar enough to be re-cognizable. There arises, then, a series of changes which do not necessarily contribute to improvement, but are demanded by the half-life of each term. The crossed-out method becomes definitive for every writing, for deconstruction itself, because, in the act of writing, “the critic provisionally forgets that her own text is necessarily self-deconstructed, always already a palimpsest.”

Spivak seems to ignore how the method of crossing-out a text is not prosaic in Derrida’s sense of philosophy, but is pictographic. We might further see the pictographic nature of the crossed-out text if we look to Jean-Michel Basquiat’s use of palimpsest in painting. The method of palimpsest may be familiar to this former graffiti artist, whose illicit work on walls ran the continuous risk of being whited-out by property-holders; such inconstancy may be familiar, too, to any urban artist whose surrounding landscape is prone to constant renovation. We might further see the themes of inconstancy if we note how Basquiat uses the shape of the face/head at various cross-sections: at the level of the mask, the skin beneath it, the skull, and indeed all the layers of dermis and muscle that lie between bone and breath. In Basquiat’s work, the image, the surface, is therefore a Rolodex, with no final resting point.

Basquiat explains that he chooses to “cross out words so you will see them more,” because “the fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them.” I do not think that Basquiat is merely saying that he takes advantage of a human propensity for curiosity, whereby people want to know others’ secrets, engage in a paranoid search for what they think is being hidden from them. I think that there is at work an effect where obscurity forces one to see one’s own seeing. When I first read trace as trace, I had to do a double-take. The crossed-out text forced me to see that I was seeing something that was not there. I think something similar is evoked in Basquiat’s intentionally sparse figures, which reveal to the viewer their own associations: “look, I only showed you X; all these other thoughts were your own.”

Warhol achieves something similar in pop art, which demonstrates, through the mere framing of commercial iconography, that advertising has become a shared system of association. Of course, Basquiat shares perspectives with Warhol, and Basquiat provides his own comments on commercial iconography, by using the Royalty (r) and Copyright (c) symbols. And, to add another example to the list, I think that Kara Walker achieves something similar to Basquiat in her series of silhouettes. In a contemporary American culture where race is often evoked solely through the color of one’s skin, Walker points out the audience’s capacity to recognize the race of characters through the use of form alone, the silhouette of clothes, of hair, of facial features; she thereby offers a clever rebuke of color-blindness. When these differences in form are turned into caricature, it powerfully forces the audience to see their own seeing, evokes into consciousness the audience’s own unconscious racist imaginary. “Look, you already knew, before I even had to explain.”

A similar process might occur if–had Derrida been able to remove an “X” of ink from the word, instead of adding the cross to it–there were blank spaces at the intersections of the cross and the word “trace.” The result would be akin to the images for the “Law of Closure” generated by gestalt psychologists, where observers subconsciously fill-in the outline of a shape. In other words, the gestalt image forces one to see the assumptions one makes in seeing.

So, clearly, the crossed-out text serves a purpose. At the same time, resorting to this sudden strikethrough disrupts the linear flow of writing. Does one read the word first? The cross first? In what order does one read the cross, the chiasmus: / then \, or \ then /? How does one write an “x” in cursive?

One should not miss the pictographic quality of the X. Indeed, Derrida remarks that this x is deeply tied to his thoughts on the pictograph, as he makes clear in his The Truth in Painting:

“X signs this picture. A crossing privileged by all the texts I’ve sold under my name and which, for the good reasons I’ve given, I no longer hesitate to bring to the surface, in word-bubbles or legendary bands.” [Dissemination] “Everything passes through this chiasmus, all writing is caught in it-frequents it. The form of the chiasmus, the X, interests me greatly, not as the symbol of the unknown but because there is here a sort of fork (the series crossroads, quadrifurcum, grid, grill, key, etc.) which is moreover unequal, one of its points extending its scope [portee] further than the other: a figure of the double gesture and the crossing we were talking about a moment ago. [Positions]”

We are dealing with a pictographic, polysemic form in which the audience must find their own way through an art, because there is no single path already cleared for them. The chiasmus is not just a variable representing some unknown location/quantity/entity, but is “a sort of fork” or “crossroads,” and this is what makes it relevant to Derrida’s privileging of polysemy, where there is more than one way to interpret a text. Perhaps this explains the difference between reading a book and watching a film, between prose narration and lived experience.

However, even as a French milieu challenges the authority of an author, Derrida–through Rousseau–observes that certain forms of writing are easier on the author than they are on the reader, and there remains an ethical injunction that writing should be enjoyed by the reader: it should, to some extent, be clear to the reader, should therefore clear a path.

We may therefore detect in Derrida an ambivalence: at certain times, his aim is to read a text closely, to achieve a deep understanding of what is implied or intended by an author; at others, he attempts to create a text that does not have a single meaning, a text that is, in its experimental/pictographic uncertainty, open to interpretation. We might say that Derrida has published both his final and his rough drafts, and that the reception of his work may become split in which is perceived to be the better, depending on a reader’s own investments in either poetry or prose.

Personally, I think that the aim of writing is to help us in a jagged wood, where the direct path, a train of thought, seems impossible to maintain. Let me explain.

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I have often had the experience of commenting on a student’s essay: “I’m sorry; I can’t follow it.” I try to explain to my students that writing is an act of hospitality, is a mode of making one’s mind welcoming, of thinking through the needs of the reader, of mapping the path a reader will take. A psychoanalytic reading might gloss this welcoming as the permission of unconscious desire to arise/arrive within consciousness, the welcoming of a repressed memory, emotion, or thought. The tradition of history, of storytelling, tries to ask, and to remember: “What comes next?” The spiritual traditions often consider what environmental conditions, what acts of service (for indeed liturgy, liturgo, evokes public service in Greek), and what care of the body are needed for the mind to welcome the divine.

And how does one welcome the divine? Or is it the divine that welcomes? I remember hearing the (mis)translation of Psalm 118 as: “Let us be glad for this is the day the Lord has made.” What is evoked, for me, in this refrain devoted to the Lord, as Host? There is something special in this statement that time, this day, becomes space, a home, the Lord has made. Time is itself a gifted space, which evokes for me an entrance, a clearing, a way forward. Experience has become ordered into a movement, like a tour–through a garden, a home, a meal. There is a kind of silent communication in the act of hospitality. A folded napkin, an assortment of flowers, my favorite candy, even a letter–the host has left this object; and, though I experience it alone, in the host’s absence, still the host’s planning seems to indicate that the experience is, invisibly, shared.

The trace of the Other, or the presence of the absent host, might become more obvious should one ever awake in a world where all other people had disappeared, perhaps even all other living creatures. Upon waking, one would have only the remnants of production, of art, with which to keep one company; imagine if one had to find–in even the slightly askew lettering of a bureaucratic and uniform warning, “Caution: In case of emergency, break glass”–the presence of another person.

When imagining this kind of hospitality, I think of the tale of the Beauty and the Beast.

Now, readings of the tale, rightfully so, might first refer to the gender and power dynamics involved. The belle’s love for the beast involves a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, where women are required to love their male captors as a means of survival. Or, if the man’s animality is intended to represent the seduction of being desired, of relinquishing power to the other, then the tale might be an analogue for the contemporary trope of which Fifty Shades is perhaps the most popular example.

Instead, I am choosing to read the tale as a response to the question: “How am I supposed to love someone despite their (dis)appearance?” When love is so often a matter of looks, how can I love someone who is ugly, or who is not even there to be seen? Love becomes something that the host expresses in absentia. The candles, the plates, the prepared objects all speak to her, and are therefore invested as tokens, declarations, of love from host to guest. While these objects can be read as the commodified form of the servant, it is possible to have such hospitable arrangements outside the French aristocratic context, where it is the host/family/community that imbues their own labor into these tokens of love.

I hope the parallels between the invisible host and the author who is absent at the moment of reading are clear.

But, the use of this tale also opens up questions over whether the author is too restraining, is dominating the reader. Indeed, there is likely a kind of skepticism evoked both by my overtly religious reference of the divine as host, and by this problematically gendered reference of the Beauty and the Beast. The skepticism is only heightened in our contemporary understanding that the author is dead, that we should not waste time looking for an author’s intent or plan as a means of understanding our own experience of a work. As Barthes explains it, “The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after.”

But I think the matter would be somewhat more complicated if we turn to the seminal text, Barthes’s The Death of the Author, itself. Barthes, like Derrida, praises Mallarmé for discovering the disruption of language, because “[i]n France, Mallarmé was doubtless the first to see and to foresee in its full extent the necessity to substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner.” Language might here include coincidence, a concatenation of forces that far exceed anyone’s conscious awareness or planning, such that “it is language which speaks, not the author.” But then Barthes goes on to say that throning language in place of authorship, as Mallarmé does, “consists in suppressing the author in the interests of writing (which is, as will be seen, to restore the place of the reader). [emphasis mine]” So the authority of the good reader, a different kind of consciousness, but consciousness nonetheless, becomes the cornerstone of Barthes’s new literary aesthetics.

There is a religious and generational conflict inherent to how Barthes questions the precedence of authority. He takes issue with the idea that “The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child.” If you hear resonances between the Author-reader, the father-child, and the trinitarian God-man relationships then you are hearing correctly. Indeed, Barthes’s vision for how one experiences the text amounts, in my reading, to an anti-Christian declaration of how one should experience life, where “a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.”

But is it really such a bad thing for one to nourish a text, to think it through? Indeed, The Death of the Author appears in the collection Image-Music-Text, and the essay immediately after it, Musica Pratica, seems to re-affirm the work of authors. As Barthes defines them, “[t]here are two musics”: “the music one listens to, the music one plays.” Barthes uses the “music one plays” to demonstrate the activity involved in the way that readers–after the death of the Author–will begin to interpret a text, where interpretation is a simultaneous reading and performance, like the piano player who reads music. Interpretation is not merely a passive reading, rather “the reading of the modern text (such at least as it may be postulated) consists not in receiving, in knowing or in feeling that text, but in writing it anew, in crossing its writing with a fresh inscription,” such that the piano player’s method of reading “Beethoven is to operate his music, to draw it (it is willing to be drawn) into an unknown praxis.”

Unfortunately, Barthes’s ideal “reading of the modern text”–the reading which, like the music that is done, involves activity–has lost its place to the music which is heard: “[i]n short, there was first the actor of music, then the interpreter (the grand Romantic voice), then finally the technician, who relieves the listener of all activity, even by procuration, and abolishes in the sphere of music the very notion of doing.” As a side-note, we might go to a piano recital to find “the actor of music,” and the emphasis on the actor might recall us to how an actor recites a role, perhaps the way a reader recites poetry, such that an actor’s knowledge of Shakespeare’s verse differs from a more placid scholar’s. For both the playwright and the musician, “[t]o compose, at least by propensity, is to give to do, not to give to hear but to give to write.”

And so we find that Barthes’s Death of the Author is in another way a resurrection of authority. Though Barthes uses an active voice to describe the way that the reader draws from a text, it is notable that the great artists of yore are not dispelled, but readers are in fact supposed to more powerfully surrender themselves to such texts, should try to embody and experience them fully, in something called writing. The matter might be sufficiently framed within Barthes’s claim that the author should “give to do”; while a more conservative voice might express this as saying that authority commands, perhaps commands attention, Barthes gives aesthetic liberties to how we interpret these commands, refers to this task-delegating as a means of giving to write, where writing is perhaps taken to be the most unbounded, least predictable, activity: “an unknown praxis”.

But I want to suggest that we ought to care a bit more for hospitality, even as post-modernists/-structuralists, in their emphasis on relativism and polysemy, seem to deride the potential for authority to become anything other than a totalitarian restriction. (Remember Barthes’s later remarks at the College de France: “language–the performance of a language system–is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.”) Consciousness becomes suspect once one sees the potential evil in human plans; and yet, the host needs some authority to function. The dissolution of consciousness (which Barthes identifies in Musica Practica as being due, at least in part, to the proliferation of technology), the fact that events are not carefully planned, are instead loosely distributed according to algorithmic functions, might indicate the late-capitalist failures associated with our suspicions of human consciousness. And isn’t writing an attempt at becoming-conscious, via the becoming prose of the world?

So the dilemma between capitalism’s inhospitable dissolution and fascism’s restrictive planning forces us to ask: whence does the host’s authority come? Well, most commonly, the host is one who lives in a space, one who guides travelers through it. The dissolution of consciousness, and the loss of hospitality, may therefore be due–in great part–to the way that transportation and communication technologies have created spaces where nobody lives, but where many people exist for brief moments; the postmodern age may be described as an age with greater travel than previous eras, even as it has less/fewer qualified guides. (And Derrida’s critique of the “becoming-absence of distance” evokes this.) Additionally, the idea of hospitality as an orienting in space may bring us back to Wittgenstein’s pointing finger, or the way that all signifiers are signposts in Augustine’s De Magistro.

And we might further elucidate this spatial metaphor. The problematic of the host’s relation to possessing a space, or how the writer’s hospitality restrains the reader in space, can be seen in the figure of the labyrinth. In saying that writers should be hospitable to readers, should have a single point of entry and exit, I am saying that they should be maze-makers. Well, maze-makers not in the sense that there are tricks and dead-ends, but in the sense that the entirety of a space is developed into a single, reticulated corridor. To some readers, a maze without dead-ends might seem pointless, but it meets the criterion that readers do not know, at the start of the journey, where they are going, even as a path has been laid for them.

In his essay on Baudelaire and modernity, Walter Benjamin explains this aspect of non-knowing present within any labyrinth: “The labyrinth is the habitat of the dawdler. The path followed by someone reluctant to reach his goal easily becomes labyrinthine. A drive, in the stages leading to its satisfaction, acts likewise. But so, too, does a humanity (a class) which does not want to know where its destiny is taking it.” So we should keep in mind how, in serving a function where one does not know, or want to know, one’s desires, labyrinths are made possible only by the flaneur, by a leisure-class, the bourgeoisie; people must be free to read.

In contrast to this maze-making, as Derrida notes, the X, or chiasmus, is a fork, not a corridor; it represents a polysemic form of writing that foregoes linearity in favor of pictographic flair. In the collection called The Truth in Painting, Derrida writes in a way that, I wager, is supposed to resemble the fourfold walls of a temple, the Greek temple referred to by Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art. “I owe you the truth in painting and I will tell it to you.” “He swears an oath to say, by speech, the truth in painting, and the four truths in painting.” “[H]e could have promised to tell the truth, in painting, to tell these four truths according to the pictorial metaphor of discourse or as a discourse silently working the space of painting”. “I write four times here, around painting.”

I try to read, to interpret, Derrida’s spatial metaphor, whereby his four essays furnish something like the space of a painting, generously. The visitor can enter at any essay, just as the temple is open at any side. The visitor to a maze signs a rather intense contract, cannot leave except by taking the route prescribed by the architect; in contrast, the temple serves another function. The visitor to the temple is under no such duress, enters the field in an open way. And so the reader may linger on whichever sentences in the temple are of interest, may move freely among them. Although, I find it important to note that my experience of Derrida’s writing has been less liberating: one becomes lost in codes, so that one hopes for a more firm kind of resistance which may act as a better guide.

“Here is an example, but an example en abyme: the third Critique. How to treat this book. Is it a book. What would make a book of it. What is it to read this book. How to take it. Have I the right to say that it is beautiful. And first of all the right to ask myself that…for example the question of order. A spatial, so-called plastic, art object does not necessarily prescribe an order of reading. I can move around in front of it, start from the top or the bottom, sometimes walk round it. No doubt this possibility has an ideal limit. Let us say for the moment that the structure of this limit allows a greater play than in the case of temporal art objects (whether discursive or not), unless a certain fragmentation, a spatial mise en scene, precisely (an effective or virtual partition) allows us to begin in various places, to vary direction or speed.”

What is a “temporal art object”: a narrative? But then aren’t all objects narratively processed, such that space is consumed within time, achieves a spacing by means of a trace? And is Derrida here talking about, and talking exclusively about, Kant’s Third Critique? Is he talking about any book? Or about his book, The Truth In Painting, specifically?

“But a book. And a book of philosophy. If it is a book of metaphysics in the Kantian sense, hence a book of pure philosophy, one can in principle enter it from any point: it is a sort of architecture.” And, since he calls a book a piece of architecture, I have wagered that Derrida’s book, his architectural project, is a temple. But is Derrida/Heidegger’s temple comparable to Kant’s own notion of “pure philosophy”? Why would “pure philosophy” not have a chronological order? Is Derrida saying that his book is omni-accessible, or that the ideal of books is to make them accessible from any angle? “In the third Critique, there is pure philosophy, there is talk of it and its plan is drawn. In terms of the analogy (but how to measure its terms) one ought to be able to begin anywhere and follow any order, although the quantity and the quality, the force of the reading may depend, as with a piece of architecture, on the point of view and on a certain relation to the ideal limit-which acts as a frame.”

When Kant explains that “principles in a system of pure Philosophy need form no particular part between the theoretical and the practical, but can be annexed when needful to one or both as occasion requires”, is the intention to say that his sentences need not be categorized a priori as exclusively practical or theoretical, but may be used, later, in either theoretical or practical discourses? In other words, it may be taken that the system is closed during the time of reading, but that, in the time of commentary, of annexation, there will necessarily be differences and distortions in the text’s lexical order.

So, in terms of the time of reading, Derrida asks: “But does one read a book of pure philosophy if one does not begin with the foundations and follow the juridical order of its writing. What then is it to read philosophy and must one only read it. To be sure, the juridical order supported by the foundations does not coincide with the factual order: for example, Kant wrote his introduction after finishing the book and it is the most powerful effort to gather together the whole system of his philosophy, to give his whole discourse a de jure foundation, to articulate critique with philosophy.” (The contrast between the order of reading and of writing has already been noted, above, in reference to Rousseau and boustrophedonic reading.)

Even as Derrida plays with these expansive motifs, there is an extent to which his tracing of the eye’s movements, his firm insistence on spacing, attempts to pinpoint where exactly something occurs. Specifically, Derrida lingers in his attempt to locate the frame, which may remind readers of his attempts to question the location of “inside” and “outside”, even as the existence of an inside always requires and pre-supposes an elsewhere, an outside. We may also think of the frame as the resisting force, what guides the visitor’s eyes, as the walls of the maze press one homeward, so that the perceiver may remain with the painting.

“One space remains to be broached in order to give place to the truth in painting. Neither inside nor outside, it spaces itself without letting itself be framed but it does not stand outside the frame. It works the frame, makes it work, lets it work, gives it work to do.” The frame is “the parergon: neither work (ergon) nor outside the work [hors d’oeuvre], neither inside nor outside, neither above nor below, it disconcerts any opposition but does not remain indeterminate and it gives rise to the work.” “The parergon stands out [se detache] both from the ergon (the work) and from the milieu, it stands out first of all like a figure on a ground. But it does not stand out in the same way as the work. The latter also stands out against a ground. But the parergonal frame stands out against two grounds [fonds], but with respect to each of those two grounds, it merges [se fond] into the other. With respect to the work which can serve as a ground for it, it merges into the wall, and then, gradually, into the general text. With respect to the background which the general text is, it merges into the work which stands out against the general background. There is always a form on a ground, but the parergon is a form which has as its traditional determination not that it stands out but that it disappears, buries itself, effaces itself, melts away at the moment it deploys its greatest energy. The frame is in no case a background in the way that the milieu or the work can be, but neither is its thickness as margin a figure. Or at least it is a figure which comes away of its own accord [s ‘enleve d’ellememe].”

The disappearance of the frame recalls the “horizontality of spacing,” where any act of writing causes something to “drop within the unconscious.” Despite its disappearance, Derrida wants to interrogate this “figure” of the frame, which, while it is unconscious, clearly lacks “thickness as margin”, but which must necessarily exist as a worldly object: the frame “disconcerts any [conceptual] opposition [between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’,] but[, as a worldly object, it] does not remain indeterminate.” And so Derrida asks: “Where does the frame take place. Does it take place. Where does it begin. Where does it end. What is its internal limit. Its external limit. And its surface between the two limits.”

The frame forces one to have to question the difference between conceptual and worldly space, such that frames may fail to exist conceptually, even as they continue to exist in a worldly position. In opposite fashion, when examining the way that that the frame invisibly separates, separates with seemingly no thickness as margin or figure, Derrida claims that: “Absolute nonadherence should certainly have no contact, no common frontier, no exchange with adherence: no [conceptual] adherence is possible between adherence and nonadherence. And yet this break of contact, this very separation constitutes a [spatial] limit, a blank, the thickness of a blank-a frame, if you like-which by suspending the relation, puts them in relation in the mode of nonrelation, reproducing here at the same time the freedom of vague beauty and the [spatial] adherence of adherent beauty.”

In other words, when examining the concept of non-adherence, Derrida notes that we cannot represent–cannot manage to think–opposing concepts without in some way putting them in a proximity, however distanced, and therefore making them spatially adhere. The play of adherence/non-adherence furnishes yet another example where Derrida tries to engage the way that conceptual space exists, without conscious awareness, as a worldly space, and to interrogate the ways that changes in worldly space may thereby change conceptual space.

In order to understand conceptual space, one must locate the frame; even the concept of size requires first a cut, a cision, such that one can know where one stops and another begins: “Before referring to size, and above all that of the human body, for example foot size, which is also called pointure in French, taille marked the line of a cut, the cutting edge of a sword, all the incisions which come to broach a surface or a thickness and open up a track, delimit a contour, a form or a quantity.”

The difference between conceptual and worldly space continues, as Derrida interrogates size: “Now the imagination, being intermediate between sensibility and understanding, is capable of two operations.” So imagination, if it is a representation, therefore is intermediate between worldly sensibility and conceptual understanding, because it may create rules beyond what is already occurring, is already sensible, and because the act of creation through representation is governed by the rules of understanding. “And we rediscover here the two edges, the two faces of the trait, of the limit or of the cise. Imagination is the cise [size] because it has two cises [cuts]. The cise always has two cises: it de-limits. It has the cise of what it delimits and the cise of what it de-limits, of what it limits and of what is liberated in it of its limits.” The representation both instills limits, cuts a line between one and another, and it removes limits, connects a continuous line alongside an identity.

These “[t]wo operations of the imagination”, the movements to cut and to connect, “are both prehensions”, where Kant defines ap-prehension and com-prehension as differing functions of the imagination. Comprehension is inherently sensory, and therefore delimits because “[i]t arrives very quickly at a maximum.” We might better understand how comprehension, as a sensory phenomenon, delimits, because, even when we say that there is “no end in sight”, truthfully, there is an end to what we can see. A mountain that extends until the horizon line will always be comprehended by that asymptote. Apprehension, in contrast, exists as conceptual space; we can say that it is the movement of connection, because it is always connected to time. It extends into a hazy memory or an inkling of the future; and, as a temporal experience, it is the “unrepresentable.”

We might understand Derrida’s deconstructive, close reading as aiding in a process of making apprehension representable, of bringing abstract, de-limited concepts into worldly comprehension, as is the case when he writes that the reading of apprehension offers “the right place, the ideal topos for the experience of the sublime…” And yet there are times, perhaps frequent times, when Derrida valorizes movement, which is the inevitable cause and consequence of subjectivity, over stasis. “A trait never appears, never itself, because it marks the difference between the forms or the contents of the appearing. A trait never appears, never itself, never for a first time.” Locating a trait suddenly becomes impossible, despite attempts at locating the frame, and despite the way that close reading continuously resists an overhasty movement outside the frame, perhaps to linger with the things themselves.

I think that Derrida frequently gives up on his own attempts at close reading, and gets lost in his attempts at creating a helpful labyrinth. He exchanges prose for pictography. And this is no wonder, given how frail human memory is. We can see how human memory, the limited capacity for constancy, is frail, as well as how writing is tied to the subsequent need for continuity, when we ask ourselves why writing in the dark is so difficult. Why was it necessary for Milton and Borges to have aides after becoming blind?

We might also read these themes–of separating (adherence/nonadherence), cutting off (size/cise, and excluding from the frame–as all indicating the anxiety present within close, deconstructive reading, particularly Derrida’s: the desire is to remove the extraneous. Indeed, Derrida’s investigation of the parergon, of the frame, recites Kant’s critique of gaudy frames and unnecessary embellishments: “Even what is called ornamentation [Zierathen: decoration, adornment, embellishment] (Parerga) i.e., what is only an adjunct, and not an intrinsic constituent in the complete representation of the object (was nicht in die ganze Vorstellung des Gegenstandes als Bestandstiick innerlich, sondern nur iiusserlich als Zuthatgehort), in augmenting the delight of taste does so only by means of its form. Thus it is with the frames (Einfassungen) of pictures or the drapery on statues, or the colonnades of palaces. But if the ornamentation does not itself enter into the composition of the beautiful form-if it is introduced (angebracht: fixed on) like a gold frame (goldene Rahmen) merely to win approval for the picture by means of its charm-it is then called finery [parure] (Schmuck) and takes away from the genuine beauty” (Meredith, 6 5, 6 7-68).

There are ways that Derrida attempts to improve upon Kant’s definition of what is extraneous, tries to interrogate where and how precisely the frame occurs, and then there are ways that Derrida seems to argue that nothing is extraneous, that one can never locate or remove the frame which is supposed to be beyond the work. We might say that Derrida is trying to locate and remove the wasteful, but that he is himself prone to ornamental waste.

Take the following example, where, I argue, Derrida loses the plot. Within The Truth in Painting, Derrida lingers for a great while on a passage from the Marquis de Sade, where sexual partners engage in coprophagy, shit-eating, as a part of coitus: “Did I not see one who, still within the same principles, would demand that I thrash him heartily on the buttocks with a cane, until he had eaten the turd he would have drawn before him from the very bottom of the place’s cesspit [tosse]? And his perfidious discharge would spurt into my mouth at this dispatch only when he had devoured this impure mire.”

What to make of this incredibly vulgar reference? Well, Derrida says that one must “[e]xtract the remainder and make it one’s own. The disseminal spurt of sperm does not emerge [debouche] into the other’s mouth before the turd has been incorporated by the mouth, his own.” So perhaps he feels like a late-comer, as if everything had already been eaten, anal-yzed, that he had nothing to eat but the remnants of other’s scraps. A helpless and circuitous task, as the same material gets endlessly digested and re-digested. The themes of shit, secretion, analysis and introjection are familiar to Derrida as a reader of Melanie Klein, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok; such analysis might also remind us of the way that “[t]he psychoanalyst…is keen to describe the enigmatic existence of drives that seek symbols, representations, dreams” while clinicians who are “more ethologically minded, like Bowlby, seek to list the various physiological response systems (often focusing on how they are present within the brain), and list, also, the phenomena that can activate these systems.”

Derrida even admits that he is having difficulty making sense, and that he wants to give up, but “[o]nce the remainder has been consumed, one must, one more compulsive time, get back down to it. To make an oeuvre and a series…[w]hat makes an oeuvre is the decisive decree, the separation of bodies, the secreting [mise au secret] of the turd: a series, itself a turd…”

These passages feature Derrida at perhaps his most openly neurotic, and he seems to confess to the reader, or to himself, through a kind of diary: “Things won’t stop computing in me”; “Must do the impossible. Get back down to it today. To work, of course”; “Get back down to it, lie down at full length, lie out without fear, without modesty, on one’s back (which then remains invisible though it exposes itself the more, more blindly, to the mirror), in the wooden box, make one’s niche there-something like the opposite of digging one’s grave-like burying one’s head, in a few brief movements, in a slightly hard cushion, giving it one’s mold and one’s own form.” “But in order to make it one’s own, to be sure of one’s own…one must, for a long time, since always, have been preparing the thing.”

So we again find double readings in Derrida’s work: we may regard him as being incredibly humble in this gesture, as he seems to say that even his own work is shit; and, we may regard him as incredibly narcissistic, asking us to eat it. Is Derrida’s guilty conscious speaking up, or is he defending himself proudly, when he writes: “Copra-necrophagy: for those who might have found forced or theatrical my curtain raising on the 120 Days…” Again, contra the object-relations theorists, I maintain that mourning is more than eating dead shit. And we might find Derrida additionally guilty, for wanting to extract meaning from everything; we might want to distance ourselves from his shit-eating habits, might want to be more discerning, more quick to decide that writing is senseless or wasteful, not worth analysis.

We may find better examples, though, where Derrida succeeds in removing, or identifying, the extraneous. In his meditation on Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art, Derrida puts particular stress on Heidegger’s analysis of a pair of peasant shoes, painted by Van Gogh. The notion that truth is something other than verisimilitude, perhaps something like the Greek aletheia (commonly translated as de-concealment), clearly motivates Derrida’s The Truth in Painting. And Derrida’s point (or his writing, reduced to a point of my making) is that even as Heidegger critiques the notion of adequacy (as mimetic equivalency), Heidegger (accidentally) supports the synonymous notion of parity in a pair of shoes. So Derrida’s point may be to ask how we may be certain that we are properly holding two images in mind, how we may know that two shoes seen at differing angles and depths are the same size. Derrida also notes that even as parity implies sameness, the shape, contour, trace of one shoe will always differ from its mirror–if we can even be sure that the left shoe is an accurate transversal of the right.

But, granted the existence of occasional insights, we still need not forgive the many lapses in writerly judgment. It is interesting to note that Geoffrey Hartman, in his essay “Monsieur Texte: On Jacques Derrida, His Glas”, even as he praises Derrida, criticizes him for “the absence of any discussion of painting,” except in a “deflected form” that “evades the problem of the painterly moment in favor of the penetration of the graphic into picture-making.” In its place, I will put forth some of my own observations of what perhaps Hartman refers to as the “painterly moment.” Derrida even confesses (if Derrida’s circuitous writing ever amounts to a genuine confession) that he has neglected to include color in his analysis, has therefore written his four essays, “[f]our times around color, too, which is thought to be extraneous to the trait, as if chromatic difference did not count.”

When I have myself taken the time to observe and admire paintings by Van Gogh, I am always put at ease by the way in which my eyes will, for the next minute or so, know precisely where to go. The curl of an iris’ petal leads, through the shape of its bend and the grade in its shade, precisely to the next, which twists, with equal grace, so that my eyes give thanks, to the next. Now, even while I do not think it phenomenologically impossible that I could imagine, pigment for pigment, these irises, the fact of the matter is that I don’t. Nor does anyone that I have met. But, conditione non grata, even if I were to, in a minute or moment, achieve this imagination, the effect would dissipate, would not be reproducible. I am not even engaging in an argument over the difference between memory and reality, embodied and conceptual space. I can grant that both the act of observing and of imagining exist as electrical, neurological currents, and that, for whatever reason, the precise ordering of these currents is salutary, soothing, for the body, and the peculiar effects by which mind becomes mechanism make it possible for those currents to, in theory, be induced by volition. Nevertheless, the stumbling of mind and body make it unlikely to follow such a path by errant means, without the painting before us.

A similar effect is achieved, within me, when I observe pointillist art-work, such that I cannot conceptually represent, in color and number, the pixels even as I viscerally absorb them. What I have called the salutary and soothing effects of these paintings has been achieved by the artist’s inhabitation of that space–which makes meditation and contemplation possible–such that artists have ordered color in ways that supersede visiting eyes, or a wandering mind.

If these experiences of Van Gogh or Seurat are any indication, then there are aspects of the flow, or synchronic trace, that can be retained within pictographic art. Yet, I remain painfully aware that even as these methods of painting are amicable to the trace, there are aspects of painting that will always be betrayed by even the most hospitably ordered corridors of prose.

So, it is worth noting the means by which this methodological technique of tracing, of reducing extraneous spatial dimensions, misses a great deal of beauty. As cinema arose as an art form, there was a great enthusiasm for its capacity to capture, or make reproducible, simultaneous movement, e.g. blades of grass swaying together in a breeze, waves undulating in an ocean, a cavalcade of dancers. It is also possible that this prosaic, not-quite-pictographic trace will never be able to reproduce such beauty as occurs when looking at the curve and cusp of a passerby’s hair; that reducing to a single strand will remove the complexity of such rich textures. When imagining, in particular, dancers in unison or blades obeying the whims of the wind as if they were bows flexing according to the command of the conductor’s wand, I am tempted to call this the sym-phonic form of beauty. The fault of this name is of course that while sym conveys the temporal unity of the act, phone refers to sound, not sight. So it might be better to call it syn-optic beauty. And it therefore makes sense that this syn-optic beauty is foreign to the method of close or deconstructive reading, given the prevalent critical suspicion of synopsis as paraphrase or translation.

And here are some examples of syn-optic skepticism from Derrida’s Truth in Painting: “This point of view puts us in view of the fact that an end is in view, that there is the form of finality, but we do not see with a view to what the whole, the organized totality, is in view.” “From this point of view beauty is never seen, neither in the totality nor outside it”.

And I am reminded of how Edward Said glosses Derrida’s theory of the text, that while there are words that appear more frequently and with greater emphasis than others, they remain words, signifiers only. “Every one of Derrida’s extraordinarily brilliant readings since and including De la grammatologie therefore builds from and around that point in a text around which its own heterodox textuality, distinct from its message or meanings, is organized, the point also toward which the text’s textuality moves in the shattering dissemination of its unorganizable energy. These points are anticoncepts, bits of the text in which Derrida believes, and where he shows, the text’s irreducible textuality to lie. These anticoncepts, antinames, counterideas escape definite or decidable classification. That is why they are only textual and why also they are heterodox. Derrida’s method of deconstruction functions then to release them, just as the climactic moment in each of his texts is a performance by these anticoncepts, these mere words. Thus what Derrida points toward is ‘a scene of writing within a scene of writing and so on without end, by the structural necessity marked within the text.’ Only words that are syncategoremes–words having, like the copula, a syntactic function but capable of serving semantic ones too–can reveal textuality in its element.”

Said then cites an example where Derrida describes these anticoncepts by his own terms: “What goes for ‘hymen’ goes, mutatis mutandis, for all those signs which, like pharmakon, supplement, and differance and a few others, have a double, contradictory, and undecidable value, which is always linked to their syntactical form, whether that might be somehow ‘interior’ and articulating and combining two incompatible significations under the same yoke, hyphen, or whether it might be ‘exterior,’ dependent on the code by which the word is made to operate. But the syntactical composition or decomposition of the sign makes the question of interior or exterior quite irrelevant. What we have to do with therefore are more or less larger syntactical operating units, and with differing economies of condensation.” “To the extent that the text depends on these ‘words,’ that it is folded around them, the text therefore acts out a double scene. It operates in two absolutely different places…The double science to which these two theaters must give birth would have been called doxa and not episteme by Plato, because of the indecision and instability fundamental to it.”

When Said glossed these ‘mere words’ as syncategoremes, “words having, like the copula, a syntactic function”, I initially misread the phrase as the syntax of the cupola, or the syntax of the dome. I imagined an essay that argued that perception of the world is singular and bounded, but that there are signifiers more interconnected than others. The signifiers that occupy highly trafficked nodes in the space of ideas, the chiasmus-like thoroughfares, would be like the centerpiece of a dome, or cupola, in that they have associations with other words, though truthfully each word would be its own center given the bounded unicity of human experience.

The imagined essay would be amicable to my claim that there are dead ends in the space of ideas (or at least certain nodes make easier thoroughfares than others). Thus would arise an aesthetics of syn-tax, of simultaneous touching which would be more ambient, less consciously perceptible than syn-opsis. “This point of view puts us in view of the fact that an end is in view, that there is the form of finality, but we do not see with a view to what the whole, the organized totality, is in view.” “From this point of view beauty is never seen, neither in the totality nor outside it: the sans is not visible, sensible, perceptible, it does not exist.” Though Derrida’s essay was on the copula and not the cupola, though it did not take up the spatiality of domes, there remains evidence that there are opposed methods of perception, tracing and synopsis, and that Derrida’s distrust of synopsis places deconstructive close reading in an amicable relation to prose, perhaps makes them inevitably paired.

Indeed, Derrida closes his Truth in Painting with a series of associations that evoke fidelity, lacing, commitment, binding, and restriction–so maybe it’s all tied together.