I took it upon myself to ruin my fall quarter by taking not only a grad seminar with all of you but also taking John Kelly's advanced reading course entitled Anthropology of the Modern Subject. Good news is that this class is very much aligned with some of the things I'm interested in; bad news is that we have to read Derrida (and worse we have to read Gayatri Spivak's Derrida). But, also, good news is that we have to read Derrida.
When reading the translators preface to Of Grammatology, Derrida's seminal text explicating the need for and the methods towards deconstruction, I began to wonder if Derrida had ever heard of electronic literature. Not for the reasons outlined in the Hayle's text necessarily, that is, not because Derrida was really interested in the literary as Hayle's understands it but because I think Derrida would have found freedom in the movement and architecture of the medium.
For those who may not be familiar, (as I was not just a week ago so I would appreciate feedback if my gloss is wrong) Derrida is famous for realizing that philosophy had a serious problem at it's very foundation. Paraphrasing, Derrida realized that philosophy is always trying to answer the question of "what is..." (ex: what is being) in order to give us the very foundations of the world. Meanwhile, philosophy has never attended to the "what is...". The "what is..." is what Derrida deems the sign. This leads Derrida (fast forwarding a handful of clicks here, by the way) to they idea of erasure or putting the sign "sous rature". This is originally formulated by Heiddeger but this method is really put to work under Derrida's watchful eye. The idea being that a term is both necessary and inadequate. This is why reading Derrida is, well, annoying as portions of the text looks like this:
Derrida's use of sous rature causes him to cross out many terms right in the middle of sentences and by this Derrida means something like "is and is not". So the above gloss of Derrida's observation/critique of philosophy actually looks like the following in the text:
(Of Grammatology, 18) (My image). This sentence reads something like the sign (is and is not) that ill-named (thing and not thing), the only one, that escapes the instituting question of philosophy: 'what is...?'"
My point with regard to e-literature is that it seems to have realized Derrida's wishes for the possibilities of writing/reading for deconstruction. The possibilities of computer mediated texts offered by electronic literature allows for words to be things and not things. Electronic literature would literally allow for signs to go sous rature, for signs to be erased as the reader scrolls down the page. I was especially reminded of this by the work presented in class today by Eugenio Tisselli, Degenerative.
Does anyone have thoughts? The better question is probably if Derrida would have liked e-literautre? Or maybe he wouldn't have cared...but my thinking is that not only would it have been helpful for purely practical reasons but that the freedom given to the text by electronic literature's various methods would allow for a much for nuanced and dynamic approach which Derrida seems to attempt in his work but which is not fully grasped, I think, through writing itself.
I have only encountered Derrida through other writers, which is to say I know little about the things he brings to the table besides a basic overview of deconstruction, if such an overview could possibly be done with such a thinker. However, your use of his thought in discussion with e-lit is provoking. In terms of Degenerative, its interesting to see what this form of 'sous rature' brings to the fore, disclosing to the reader the sign of language engendered by code as signs of a sort. However, even this code is a sign in some ways because it expresses procedures that are enacted in purely 'behavioral.' That is to say, the 'sous rature' of the text changes the text…
Great thoughts! I often find myself thinking of Derrida in this class and I definitely think that he would have found e-literature highly illuminating, not only because he favors writing (Of Grammatology and his work Dissemination, particularly "Plato's Pharmacy") and technology (later in Of Grammatology he uses Leroi-Gourhan to support his view of différance), but also because he regards literature (fiction) very, very highly. In Demeure, he writes: "One can read the same text—which thus never exists 'in itself'–as a testimony that is said to be serious and authentic, or as an archive, or as a document, or as a symptom–or as a work of literary fiction, indeed the work of a literary fiction that simulates all of the positions…