н о
C O N C E P T S
the concept o f the text and in some respects has had the effect o f bring
ing the idea o f the text into disrepute, as something extremely recondite,
ideologically charged, and so on. Others had tried to define the idea more
perspicuously. Julia Kristeva, for instance, in a number o f places put the
methodological concept o f text in opposition to notions o f representation
and communication: they belong to different methodological networks.
But she avoids any idea that modern writings are texts while old-fashioned
writings are not (she writes about medieval narrative, for instance). Kriste
va sought to treat language in general through the concept o f text, which
stresses that discourse is not simply expression by a subject but produces
the subject and that it is fundamentally intertextual, related to other dis
courses. She writes, for instance, “I f one grants that é’Perj signifying prac
tice is a field o f transpositions o f various signifying systems (an intertextu-
ality), one then understands that its ‘place’ o f enunciation and its denoted
object are never single, complete, and ideiitical to themselves, but always
plural, shattered.
The text discloses the mechanisms through which lan
guage produces its effects and dislodges speakers from strictly representa
tional relations to language, thus threatening the identities o f speakers by
treating them as constructed, not given.
Jacques Derrida, in remarks such as the famous “il n’y a pas de hors-
texte,” articulates a conception that might be used to rescue the notion o f
text from the characterizations Barthes had given it, to make it more cen
trally normative o f language in general. In the afterword to Lim ited Inc,
entitled “ Towards an Ethic o f Discussion,” Derrida writes;
[T]he concept o f text I propose is limited neither to the graphic, nor to the book,
nor even to discourse, and even less to the semantic, representational, symbol
ic, ideal, or ideological sphere. What I call “text” implies all the structures called
“real,” “economic,” “historical,” socio-institutional, in short: all possible referents.
Another way of recalling, once again, that “there is nothing outside the text” [qu’il
n’y a pas de hors-texte]. That does not mean that all referents are suspended, de
nied, or enclosed in a book, as people have claimed, or have been naive enough to
believe or to have accused me of believing. But it does mean that every referent,
22. See, e.g., Julia Kristeva, “La productivité dite texte,” in Semeiotike: Re
cherches pour une sémanalyse (Paris; Seuil, 1969), 208-45.
23. Julia Kristeva, The Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 59-60.
all reality, has the structure of a differential trace, and that one cannot refer to [se
rapporter à] this real except in an interpretive experience. The latter neither yields
meaning nor assumes it except in a movement of differential referring. [Celle-ci
ne donne ou ne prend sens que dans ce mouvement de renvoi différantiel {sic)]
That’s all.^"
The argument that the referent has the structure o f a differential trace, that
it is textualized and not something o f a different nature, has been conduct
ed in many places. One o f the more striking comes in Derridas discussion
o f Rousseau’s Confessions, where Rousseau characterizes writing and signs
in general as “suppléments” to the thing itself but in fact shows that his ex
perience is, in Derridas words, “an endless linked series, ineluctably mul
tiplying the supplementary mediations that produce the sense o f the very
thing that they defer; the impression o f the thing itself, o f immediate pres
ence, or originary perception. Immediacy is derived. Everything begins
with the intermediary” [Tout commence par l’intermédiaire]
The more these texts want to tell us o f the importance of the pres
ence o f the thing itself, the more they show the necessity o f intermediaries.
These signs or supplements are in fact responsible for the sense that there
is something to grasp. What we learn from these texts is that the copies cre
ate the idea o f the original and that the original is always deferred— never
to be grasped. Experience is always mediated by signs, and the “original” is
produced as an effect o f signs, o f supplements.
For Derrida, Rousseau’s texts, like many others, propose that instead
o f thinking o f life as something to which signs and thus texts are added to
represent it, we should conceive o f life itself as suffused with signs, made
what it is by processes o f signification. Writings may claim that reality is
prior to signification, but in fact they show that “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” :
when you think you are getting outside signs and text, to “reality itself,”
what you find is more text, more signs, chains o f supplements.
It is this interweaving o f signs and supplements, of language with
what we call real life, that provides the most elementary rationale for the
notion o f text; if language or logos were a separate stratum that were found-
24. Jacques Derrida, “Towards an Ethic of Discussion,” in Limited Inc
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 148. See also the French ver
sion: “Vers une éthique de la discussion,” in Limited Inc (Paris: Galilée, 1990),
273.
25. Derrida, O f Grammatology, 157.
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
