((xi))
impatience with prefaces is based on philosophical grounds, his excuse for continuing to write
them seems commonsensical: “Having in mind that the general idea of what is to be done, if it
precedes the attempt to carry it out, facilitates the comprehension of this process, it is worth
while to indicate here some rough idea of it, with the intention of eliminating at the same time
certain forms whose habitual presence is a hindrance to philosophical knowledge [in der
Absicht zugleich, bei dieser Gelegenheit einige Formen zu entfernen, deren Gewohnheit ein
Hindernis für das philosophische Erkennen ist].” 7 Hegel’s objection to prefaces reflects the
following structure: preface/text — abstract generality/self-moving activity. His acceptance of
prefaces reflects another structure: preface/text = signifier/signified. And the name of the “—“
in this formula is the Hegelian Aufhebung.
Au f hebung is a relationship between two terms where the second at once annuls the first and
lifts it up into a higher sphere of existence; it is a hierarchial concept generally translated
“sublation” and now sometimes translated “sublimation.” A successful preface is aufgehoben
into the text it precedes, just as a word is aufgehoben into its meaning. It is as if, to use one of
Derrida’s structural metaphors, the son or seed (preface or word), caused or engendered by the
father (text or meaning) is recovered by the father and thus justified.
But, within this structural metaphor, Derrida’s cry is “dissemination,” the seed that neither
inseminates nor is recovered by the father, but is scattered abroad. 8 And he makes room for
the prefatory gesture in quite another way:
The preface is a necessary gesture of homage and parricide, for the book (the father) makes a
claim of authority or origin which is both true and false. (As regards parricide, I speak
theoretically. The preface need make no overt claim—as this one does not—of destroying its
pre-text. As a preface, it is already surrendered to that gesture. . . .) Humankind’s common
desire is for a stable center, and for the assurance of mastery—through knowing or
possessing. And a book, with its ponderable shape and its beginning, middle, and end, stands
to satisfy that desire. But what sovereign subject is the origin of the book? “I was not one man
only,” says Proust’s narrator, “but the steady advance hour after hour of an army in close
formation, in which there appeared, according to the moment, impassioned men, indifferent
men, jealous men. . . . In a composite mass, these elements may, one by one, without our
noticing it, be replaced by others, which others again eliminate or reinforce, until in the end a
change has been brought about which it would be impossible to conceive if we were a single
person.” 9 What, then, is the book’s identity? Ferdinand de Saussure had remarked that the
“same” phoneme pronounced twice or by two different people is
((xii))
not identical with itself. Its only identity is in its difference from all other phonemes (77-78,
52-54*). So do the two readings of the “same” book show an identity that can only be defined
as a difference. The book is not repeatable in its “identity”: each reading of the book produces
a simulacrum of an “original” that is itself the mark of the shifting and unstable subject that
Proust describes, using and being used by a language that is also shifting and unstable. Any
preface commemorates that difference in identity by inserting itself between two readings—in
our case, my reading (given of course that my language and I are shifting and unstable), my
rereading, my rearranging of the text—and your reading. As Hegel (and other defenders of the
authority of the text) wrote preface on preface to match re-editions and revised versions, they
unwittingly became a party to this identity in difference:
From the moment that the circle turns, that the book is wound back upon itself, that the book
repeats itself, its self-identity receives an imperceptible difference which allows us to step
effectively, rigorously, and thus discreetly, out of the closure. Redoubling the closure, one
splits it. Then one escapes it furtively, between two passages through the same book, through
the same line, following the same bend. . . . This departure outside of the identical within the
same remains very slight, it weighs nothing, it thinks and weighs the book as such. The return
to the book is also the abandoning of the book. (ED 430)
The preface, by daring to repeat the book and reconstitute it in another register, merely enacts
what is already the case: the book’s repetitions are always other than the book. There is, in
fact, no “book” other than these ever-different repetitions: the “book” in other words, is
always already a “text,” constituted by the play of identity and difference. A written preface
provisionally localizes the place where, between reading and reading, book and book, the
inter-inscribing of “reader(s),” “writer(s),” and language is forever at work. Hegel had closed
the circle between father and son, text and preface. He had in fact suggested, as Derrida
makes clear, that the fulfilled concept—the end of the self-acting method of the philosophical
text—was the pre-dicate—pre-saying—pre-face, to the preface. In Derrida’s reworking, the
structure preface-text becomes open at both ends. The text has no stable identity, no stable
origin, no stable end. Each act of reading the “text” is a preface to the next. The reading of a
self-professed preface is no exception to this rule.
It is inaccurate yet necessary to say that something called De la grammatologie is (was) the
provisional origin of my preface. And, even as I write, I project the moment, when you,
reading, will find in my preface the provisional origin of your reading of Of Grammatology.
There can be an indefinite number of variations on that theme.
xxx fotnote starter xxx
•
Hereafter all page numbers in bold-face type refer to pages in this volume.
xxx
fotnote slutt xxx
((xiii))
Why must we worry over so simple a thing as preface-making? There is, of course, no real
answer to questions of this sort. The most that can be said, and Derrida has reminded us to say
it anew, is that a certain view of the world, of consciousness, and of language has been
accepted as the correct one, and, if the minute particulars of that view are examined, a rather
different picture (that is also a no-picture, as we shall see) emerges. That examination
involves an enquiry into the “operation” of our most familiar gestures. To quote Hegel again: