conditions of possibility glossematics has perhaps better isolated. It has perhaps thus better
pre-pared itself to study the purely graphic stratum within the structure of the literary text
within the history of the becoming-literary of literality, notably in its “modernity.”
Undoubtedly a new domain is thus opened to new and fecund re-searches. But I am not
primarily interested in such a parallelism or such a
((60))
recaptured parity of substances of expression. It is clear that if the phonic substance lost its
privilege, it was not to the advantage of the graphic sub-stance, which lends itself to the same
substitutions. To the extent that it liberates and is irrefutable, glossematics still operates with a
popular concept of writing. However original and irreducible it might be, the “form of
expression” linked by correlation to the graphic “substance of expression” remains very
determined. It is very dependent and very derivative with regard to the arche-writing of which
I speak. This arche-writing would be at work not only in the form and substance of graphic
expression but also in those of nongraphic expression. It would constitute not only the pattern
uniting form to all substance, graphic or otherwise, but the movement of the sign-function
linking a content to an expression, whether it be graphic or not. This theme could not have a
place in Hjelmslev’s system.
It is because arche-writing, movement of differance, irreducible arche-synthesis, opening in
one and the same possibility, temporalization as well as relationship with the other and
language, cannot, as the condition of all linguistic systems, form a part of the linguistic
system itself and be situated as an object in its field. (Which does not mean it has a real field
elsewhere, another assignable site.) Its concept could in no way enrich the scientific, positive,
and “immanent” (in the Hjelmslevian sense) description of the system itself. Therefore, the
founder of glossematics would no doubt have questioned its necessity, as he rejects, en bloc
and legitimately, all the extra-linguistic theories which do not arise from the irreducible
immanence of the linguistic system. 26 He would have seen in that notion one of those
appeals to experience which a theory should dispense with 27 He would not have understood
why the name writing continued to be used for that X which becomes so different from what
has always been called “writing.”
I have already begun to justify this word, and especially the necessity of the communication
between the concept of arche-writing and the vulgar concept of writing submitted to
deconstruction by it. I shall continue to do so below. As for the concept of experience, it is
most unwieldy here. Like all the notions I am using here, it belongs to the history of
metaphysics and we can only use it under erasure [sous rature]. “Experience” has always
designated the relationship with a presence, whether that relationship had the form of
consciousness or not. At any rate, we must, according to this sort of contortion and contention
which the discourse is obliged to undergo, ex-haust the resources of the concept of experience
before attaining and in order to attain, by deconstruction, its ultimate foundation. It is the only
way to escape “empiricism” and the “naive” critiques of experience at the same time. Thus,
for example, the experience whose “theory,” Hjelmslev says, “must be independent” is not the
whole of experience. It always cor-responds to a certain type of factual or regional experience
(historical, psy-
((61))
chological, physiological, sociological, etc.), giving rise to a science that is itself regional and,
as such, rigorously outside linguistics. That is not so at all in the case of experience as arche-
writing. The parenthesizing of regions of experience or of the totality of natural experience
must discover a field of transcendental experience. This experience is only accessible in so far
as, after having, like Hjelmslev, isolated the specificity of the linguistic system and excluded
all the extrinsic sciences and metaphysical speculations, one asks the question of the
transcendental origin of the system itself, as a system of the objects of a science, and,
correlatively, of the theoretical system which studies it: here of the objective and “deductive”
system which glossematics wishes to be. Without that, the decisive progress accomplished by
a formalism respectful of the originality of its object, of “the immanent system of its objects,”
is plagued by a scientificist objectivism, that is to say by another unperceived or unconfessed
meta-physics. This is often noticeable in the work of the Copenhagen School. It is to escape
falling back into this naive objectivism that I refer here to a transcendentality that I elsewhere
put into question. It is because I believe that there is a short-of and a beyond of transcendental
criticism. To see to it that the beyond does not return to the within is to recognize in the
contortion the necessity of a pathway [parcours]. That pathway must leave a track in the text.
Without that track, abandoned to the simple content of its conclusions, the ultra-
transcendental text will so closely resemble the precritical text as to be indistinguishable from
it. We must now form and meditate upon the law of this resemblance. What I call the erasure
of concepts ought to mark the places of that future meditation. For example, the value of the
transcendental arche [archie] must make its necessity felt before letting itself be erased. The
concept of arche-trace must comply with both that necessity and that erasure. It is in fact
contradictory and not acceptable within the logic of identity. The trace is not only the
disappearance of origin—within the discourse that we sustain and according to the path that
we follow it means that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except
reciprocally by a nonorigin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin. From then
on, to wrench the concept of the trace from the classical scheme, which would derive it from a
presence or from an originary nontrace and which would make of it an empirical mark, one
must indeed speak of an originary trace or arche-trace. Yet we know that that concept destroys
its name and that, if all begins with the trace, there is above all no originary trace. 28 We must
then situate, as a simple moment of the discourse, the phenomenological reduction and the
Husserlian reference to a transcendental experience. To the extent that the concept of
experience in general—and of transcendental experience, in Husserl in particular—remains
governed by the theme of presence, it par-
((62))
ticipates in the movement of the reduction of the trace. The Living Present (lebendige
Gegenwart) is the universal and absolute form of transcendental experience to which Husserl
refers us. In the descriptions of the movements of temporalization, all that does not torment
the simplicity and the domination of that form seems to indicate to us how much
transcendental phenomenology belongs to metaphysics. But that must come to terms with the
forces of rupture. In the originary temporalization and the movement of relationship with the
outside, as Husserl actually describes them, non-presentation or depresentation is as
“originary” as presentation. That is why a thought of the trace can no more break with a
transcendental phenomenology than be reduced to it. Here as elsewhere, to pose the prob-lem
in terms of choice, to oblige or to believe oneself obliged to answer it by a yes or no, to
conceive of appurtenance as an allegiance or nonappurtenance as plain speaking, is to confuse
very different levels, paths, and styles. In the deconstruction of the arche, one does not make a
choice.