language entails this vulgar and mundane concept of temporality (homogeneous, dominated
by the form of the now and the ideal of continuous movement, straight or circular) which
Heidegger shows to be the intrinsic determining concept of all ontology from Aristotle to
Hegel, the meditation upon writing and the deconstruction of the history of philosophy
become inseparable.
The enigmatic model of the line is thus the very thing that philosophy could not see when it
had its eyes open on the interior of its own history. This night begins to lighten a little at the
moment when linearity—which is not loss or absence but the repression of pluri-dimensional
33 symbolic thought—relaxes its oppression because it begins to sterilize the technical and
scientific economy that it has long favored. In fact for a long time its possibility has been
structurally bound up with that of economy, of technics, and of ideology. This solidarity
appears in the process of thesaurization, capitalization, sedentarization, hierarchization, of the
for-mation of ideology by the class that writes or rather commands the scribes. 34 Not that the
massive reappearance of nonlinear writing interrupts this structural solidarity; quite the
contrary. But it transforms its nature profoundly.
The end of linear writing is indeed the end of the book, 35 even if, even today, it is within the
form of a book that new writings—literary or theoretical—allow themselves to be, for better
or for worse, encased. It is less a question of confiding new writings to the envelope of a book
than of finally reading what wrote itself between the lines in the volumes. That is why, be-
ginning to write without the line, one begins also to reread past writing according to a
different organization of space. If today the problem of read-
((87))
ing occupies the forefront of science, it is because of this suspense between two ages of
writing. Because we are beginning to write, to write differently, we must reread differently.
For over a century, this uneasiness has been evident in philosophy, in science, in literature. All
the revolutions in these fields can be interpreted as shocks that are gradually destroying the
linear model. Which is to say the epic model. What is thought today cannot be written
according to the line and the book, except by imitating the operation implicit in teaching
modem mathematics with an abacus. This inadequation is not modern, but it is exposed today
better than ever before. The access to pluridimensionality and to a delinearized temporality is
not a simple regression toward the “mythogram;” on the contrary, it makes all the rationality
subjected to the linear model appear as another form and another age of mythography. The
meta-rationality or the meta-scientificity which are thus announced within the meditation
upon writing can therefore be no more shut up within a science of man than conform to the
traditional idea of science. In one and the same gesture, they leave man, science, and the line
behind.
Even less can this meditation be contained within the
limits of a regional science.
The Rebus and the Complicity of Origins
Were it a graphology. And even a graphology renewed and fertilized by sociology, history,
ethnography, and psychoanalysis.
Since individual markings reveal the particularities of the mind of those who write, the
national markings should permit to a certain extent researches into the particularities of the
collective mind of peoples 36
Such a cultural graphology, however legitimate its project might be, can come into being and
proceed with some certitude only when the more general and fundamental problems have
been elucidated; as to the articulation of an individual and a collective graphie, of the graphic
“discourse”—so to speak—and the graphic “code,” considered not from the point of view of
the intention of signification or of denotation, but of style and connotation; problems of the
articulation of graphic forms and of diverse sub-stances, of the diverse forms of graphic
substances (materials: wood, wax, skin, stone, ink, metal, vegetable) or instruments (point,
brush, etc., etc.); as to the articulation of the technical, economic, or historical levels (for
example, at the moment when a graphic system is constituted and at the moment, which is not
necessarily the same, when a graphic style is fixed); as to the limit and the sense of variations
in style within the system; as to all the investitures to which a graphie, in form and substance,
is submitted.
((88))
From this latter point of view, a certain privilege should be given to re-search of the
psychoanalytic type. In as much as it touches the originary constitution of objectivity and of
the value of the object—the constitution of good and bad objects as categories that do not
allow themselves to be derived from a theoretical formal ontology and from a science of the
objectivity of the object in general—psychoanalysis is not a simple regional science,
although, as its name indicates, it is presented under the heading of psychology. That it
adheres to this title is certainly not a matter of indifference and hints at a certain state of
criticism and epistemology. Nevertheless, even if psychoanalysis did not achieve the
transcendentality—under erasure—of the arche-trace, even if it remained a mundane science,
its generality would have a controlling meaning with regard to all local science. Here I am
quite obviously thinking of researches of the type under-taken by Melanie Klein. An example
of it may be found in the essay on “The Role of the School in the Libidinal Development of
the Child”37 which evokes, from the
clinical point of view, all the investments with which the
operations of reading and writing, the production and manage-ment of the number, etc., are
charged. To the extent that the constitution of ideal objectivity must essentially pass through
the written signifier, 38 no theory of this constitution has the right to neglect the investments
of writing. These investments not only retain an opacity in the ideality of the object, but
permit the liberation of that ideality. It gives the force without which an objectivity in general
would not be possible. I do not dissimulate the gravity of such an affirmation and the
immense difficulty of the task thus assigned to both the theory of objectivity and
psychoanalysis. But the necessity is commensurate with the difficulty.
It is in his very work that the historian of writing encounters this necessity. His problems
cannot be grasped except at the root of all sciences. Reflection on the essence of mathematics,
politics, economics, religion, technology, law, etc., communicates most intimately with the
reflection upon and the information surrounding the history of writing. The continuous vein
that circulates through all these fields of reflection and constitutes their fundamental unity is
the problem of the phoneticization of writing. This phoneticization has a history, no script is
absolutely exempt from it, and the enigma of this evolution does not allow itself to be domi-
nated by the concept of history. To be sure, the latter appears at a deter-mined moment in the
phoneticization of script and it presupposes phoneticization in an essential way.