Playing doubles: Derrida's writing
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Peter W Nesselroth
His research interests include Dada and surrealism, stylistics, and literary semiotics. His recent publications include ‘Le dé-règlement (rhétorique) de tous les sens’ (2001); ‘
Je remplace’ (2001); ‘L'enigme d'Isidore Ducasse’ (2003); and ‘Le Dédoublement du sens de Dada à Derrida et vice-versa’ (2005).
Abstract
This article attempts to clarify Derrida's notion of écriture and to show, through a close reading of three lectures on literary figures (Valéry, Ponge, Joyce), how he puts theory into practice.
Saussure thought that linguistics would be a branch of semiology, a general theory of signs and signification. His conventional logocentric privileging of speaking over writing was the initial step on the road that made phonology the dominant discipline within the science. Linguists and philosophers have trivialized, ignored, and repressed the other epistemological path, that of grammatology. Derrida's field of analytical inquiry (the signing of signs or ‘signs’ as both noun and verb), includes semiology in an even more general theory of signifying practices (oral communication, mathematics, painting, philosophy, history, literature, etc), since writing and the written are the conditions of their very existence. They all depend on inscription because cultural transmission requires repeatability, duplication, reproducibility, etc. Yet without writing spoken language could not be described and linguistics would not exist. Neither would ‘culture’ in general.
About the author
His research interests include Dada and surrealism, stylistics, and literary semiotics. His recent publications include ‘Le dé-règlement (rhétorique) de tous les sens’ (2001); ‘Je remplace’ (2001); ‘L'enigme d'Isidore Ducasse’ (2003); and ‘Le Dédoublement du sens de Dada à Derrida et vice-versa’ (2005).
© Walter de Gruyter
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Articles in the same Issue
- Wounded warriors: Further explorations into a biocultural semiotics
- ‘Reloading’ movies into commercial reality: A multimodal analysis of The Matrix trilogy's promotional posters
- The use of language to create realities: The example of Good Bye, Lenin!
- The narrative semiotics of The Daily Show
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- Semiotic systemity of visual artworks: Case study of The Holy Trinity by Rublev
- ‘What's in a picture?’ A comparison of drawings by apes and children
- ‘Aller sans mais se sentir avec’ : emplois absolus non-innocents de avec et sans
- An interview with Paul Newman
- ‘Superreader’: Riffaterre revisited
- Application d'une hypothèse de linguistique textuelle : Le génotexte
- Information, semiotics, and symbolic systems
- Assuming positions: Organizational change as mediated through metaphors
- Icon, index, symbol and denotation, connotation, metasign
- Toxic substances, semiotic forms: Towards a socio- and textual analysis of altered senses
- Playing doubles: Derrida's writing
- Paratextology
- Semiotics of space: Peirce and Lefebvre
- Gesture and language
