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the beloved and literature can exist only in a state of mutual absence. The problem is the coding of writing, genre, and language itself. As a result, literature is a death sentence.124 But wait; perhaps all is not lost: “The condition for me to renounce nothing and that my love comes back to me…is that you are there, over there, quite alone outside of me. Out of reach. And that you send me back.”125 You, over there, irreducibly other than me, an other whose site and flesh I cannot appropriate, have the capacity to make literature and love possible , and finally one will be able to love oneself, but only if I don’t write to or for just you. This would mean that writing, which is also love, serves to keep “us” apart but alive. Nothing needs to be surrendered, nothing collapses, and the writer can keep on both writing and loving. Writing conceived outside of the normative circuit of discourse, which never “arrives,” prevents the authoritative consolidation of an “I,” an eye, a single site or destination, where everything would clog up with no further possibilities. While Derrida is famous for saying that “There is nothing outside the text,” or representation is the limit of our world, he still sends texts, not just to me. He just sends them, which I read or not by chance, or chance my self to read. Since writing circulates, he sends them to everyone and all the world is the concern of writing, so that his phrase can be understood as inclusive rather than divisive. Meanwhile, “Derrida,” writer, makes his promise to be there, a promise haunted by falsity: “Know that I am always ready, this is my fidelity. I am a monster of fidelity, the most perverse infidel .”126 He gives his word, although warning that promises might be false, that his site is very precarious, that he might be unreliable, and that he doesn’t even know who is writing or to whom (there might be several of each), or that he might be writing to himself.127 So Derrida addresses the problem of representation as if the implicit sense of “I am writing about this for your sake, or making this video for your sight” were abandoned: hence the epistolary form of unaddressed postcards. He took “speculation” as a modus operandi, not just a metaphor. He got the idea from Freud: Freud borrowed “funds” (terms) from other specialized discourses and moulded them, along with empirical description, into the language of a new theory . While Freud initially set the standard of empirical observation as the limit on meaning, this standard collapsed when he had to admit that, without the help of his syncretic theoretical language, he could not even perceive the processes in question.128 It seems that language does have the capacity to refigure the “real” world and that Heidegger was right when he said that it holds things forth and shows them to us, perhaps for the first time. So Derrida speculates, joyfully: “To borrow is the law. Within every language, since a figure is always a borrowed language , but also from one discursive domain to another.…Without borrowing, nothing begins, there is no proper fund/foundation [fonds]. Everything begins with the transference of funds, and there is interest in borrowing, this is even its ini30 FIGURING REDEMPTION Figuring Redemption: A Theoretical Frame 31 tial interest. To borrow yields, brings back, produces surplus value, is the prime mover of every investment. Thereby, one begins by speculating, by betting on a value to be produced as if from nothing.”129 The example is there even in the Freudian model: the Pleasure Principle is a drive (Trieb), purportedly an instinct (also Trieb) in a transfer of terms by which a universal notion (the PP) is capitalized by terms from an external discourse (biology). From this perspective the notion of borrowing never dreams of reconciliation or final redemption. Rather, it is always a risky game of chance and pleasure. To be indebted is to be called to account. But in speculating on the transfer of “funds” (e.g., the transfer of notation from one discourse or medium to another) the debtor relationship can be endlessly deferred, because in speculating in language or visual notation, I can gamble on even avoiding indebtedness. Writing by detour can become so convoluted that the path and return can be neither mastered nor retraced with certainty . So the proper names of creditor and...

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