the living present. Such a complication, which is in effect the same that Husserl described,
abides, in spite of an audacious phenomenological reduction, by the evidence and presence of
a linear, objective, and mundane model. Now B would be as such constituted by the retention
of Now A and the protention of Now C; in spite of all the play that would follow from it, from
the fact that each one of the three Now-s reproduces that structure in itself, this model of
successivity would prohibit a Now X from taking the place of Now A, for example, and would
prohibit that, by a delay that is inadmissible to consciousness, an experience be determined, in
its very present, by a present which would not have preceded it immediately but would be
considerably “anterior” to it. It is the problem of the deferred effect (Nachträglichkeit) of
which Freud speaks. The temporality to which he refers cannot be that which lends itself to a
phenomenology of consciousness or of presence and one may indeed wonder by what right all
that is in question here should still be called time, now, anterior present, delay, etc.
In its greatest formality, this immense problem would be formulated thus: is the temporality
described by a transcendental phenomenology as “dialectical” as possible, a ground which the
structures, let us say the unconscious structures, of temporality would simply modify? Or is
the phenomenological model itself constituted, as a warp of language, logic, evidence,
fundamental security, upon a woof that is not its own? And which—such is the most difficult
problem—is no longer at all mundane? For it is not by chance that the transcendental
phenomenology of the internal time-consciousness, so careful to place cosmic time within
brackets, must, as consciousness and even as internal consciousness, live a time that is an
accomplice of the time of the world. Between consciousness, perception (internal or external),
and the “world,” the rupture, even in the subtle form of the reduction, is perhaps not possible.
It is in a certain “unheard” sense, then, that speech is in the world, rooted in that passivity
which metaphysics calls sensibility in general. Since there is no nonmetaphoric language to
oppose to metaphors here, one must, as Bergson wished, multiply antagonistic metaphors.
“Wish sensibilized,” is how Maine de Biran, with a slightly different intention,
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named the vocalic word. That the logos is first imprinted and that that imprint is the writing-
resource of language, signifies, to be sure, that the logos is not a creative activity, the
continuous full element of the divine word, etc. But it would not mean a single step outside of
metaphysics if nothing more than a new motif of “return to finitude,” of “God’s death,” etc.,
were the result of this move. It is that conceptuality and that problematics that must be
deconstructed. They belong to the onto-theology they fight against. Differance is also
something other than finitude.
According to Saussure, the passivity of speech is first its relationship with language. The
relationship between passivity and difference cannot be distinguished from the relationship
between the fundamental unconsciousness of language (as rootedness within the language)
and the spacing (pause, blank, punctuation, interval in general, etc.) which constitutes the
origin of signification. It is because “language is a form and not a sub-stance” (p. 169) [p.
122] that, paradoxically, the activity of speech can and must always draw from it. But if it is a
form, it is because “in language there are only differences” (p. 166) [p. 120]. Spacing (notice
that this word speaks the articulation of space and time, the becoming-space of time and the
becoming-time of space) is always the unperceived, the nonpresent, and the nonconscious. As
such, if one can still use that expression in a non-phenomenological way; for here we pass the
very limits of phenomenology. Arche-writing as spacing cannot occur as such within the
phenomenological experience of a
presence. It marks
the dead time within the presence of the
living present, within the general form of all presence. The dead time is at work. That is why,
once again, in spite of all the discursive re-sources that the former may borrow from the latter,
the concept of the trace will never be merged with a phenomenology of writing. As the
phenomenology of the sign in general, a phenomenology of writing is im-possible. No
intuition can be realized in the place where “the ‘whites’ in-deed take on an importance”
(Preface to Coup de dés). *
Perhaps it is now easier to understand why Freud says of the dreamwork that it is comparable
rather to a writing than to a language, and to a hieroglyphic rather than to a phonetic writing.
30 And to understand why Saussure says of language that it “is not a function of the speaker”
(p. 30) [p. 141. With or without the complicity of their authors, all these propositions must be
understood as more than the simple reversals of a meta-physics of presence or of conscious
subjectivity. Constituting and dislocating it at the same time, writing is other than the subject,
in whatever sense the latter is understood. Writing can never be thought under the category of
the subject; however it is modified, however it is endowed with consciousness or
unconsciousness, it will refer, by the entire thread of its
xxx fotnote start xxx
•
Mallarme’, tr. Anthony Hartley (Harmondsworth, 1965), p. 209.69
xxx fotnote slutt xxx
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history, to the substantiality of a presence unperturbed by accident4, or to the identity of the
selfsame [le propre] in the presence of self-relationship. And the thread of that history clearly
does not run within the borders of metaphysics. To determine an X as a subject is never an
operation of a pure convention, it is never an indifferent gesture in relation to writing.
Spacing as writing is the becoming-absent and the becoming-unconscious of the subject. By
the movement of its drift/derivation [dérive] the emancipation of the sign constitutes in return
the desire of presence. That becoming—or that drift/derivation—does not befall the subject
which would choose it or would passively let itself be drawn along by it. As the subject’s
relationship with its own death, this becoming is the constitution of subjectivity. On all levels
of life’s organization, that is to say, of the economy of death. All graphemes are of a
testamentary essence. 31 And the original absence of the subject of writing is also the absence
of the thing or the referent.
Within 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. This signification is
formed only within the hollow of differance: of discontinuity and of discreteness, of the
diversion and the reserve of what does not appear. This hinge [brisure] of language as
writing, this discontinuity, could have, at a given moment within linguistics, run up against a
rather precious continuist prejudice. Renouncing it, phonology must indeed renounce all dis-
tinctions between writing and the spoken word, and thus renounce not itself, phonology, but
rather phonologism. What Jakobson recognizes in this respect is most important for us: