Prolegomenon to Derrida

Author(s): Richard Klein

Source: Diacritics, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Winter, 1972), pp. 29-34
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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TO

Richard
Klein

DItRRIA

PROLEOMEFNON

... and instead of only asking oneself

about the content of thoughts, one has to
analyze the way texts are made. ("positions")
Anyone who has wrestled with the monstrous
difficulties of reading Derrida will probably feel a
shiver of anticipation at the prospect of having him
interviewed. Unfortunately, the text that follows, entitled "positions," is not simply the transcription of
an oral exchange --even
assuming that we knew
what a transcription was and that it could be simple.
In fact, the text only pretends to be the record of
an interview, just as "positions" feigns being its title.
For, even if we choose to believe the preliminary
note and allow that the exchanges transcribed here
were spoken on the 17th of June, 1971 (we have no
reason not to believe it, only the possibility - opened
by the text - to doubt), we are not allowed to forget
that they have been transcribed--that means, at the
very least, spaced, punctuated, and corrected, perhaps edited and recast, that they have been "complemented" by a title, by a preliminary note justifying the form of the text, by editors' notes, by extensive notes written by Derrida, in many ways the most
interesting sections, and by fragments of an exchange
of letters that followed the discussion and which are
appended in the guise of an ending. As a result, the
text is bound to disappoint our hopes, even as its
feint or fiction - its pretense to be an interview Richard Klein teaches French literature at Johns Hopkins
and is at present finishing a book on Baudelaire.

invites the intrusion of our eager curiosity. And it is

precisely the status of our curiosity - its misery or
authenticity, its vulgarity or validity - no less than
the position(s) of the text that are put into question
by its form, this simulacrum of an interview. To put
our curiosity into question is not at all to dismiss it,
not even to bracket it within a fallen, intra-mondain
realm, concomitant with gossip and bavardage, where
its inauthenticity can be determined if not escaped.
Playing, as Derrida is doing, with the form of the
interview, in an "avant-garde" journal incongruously
entitled Promesses, is another way of repeating - a
way very different from Heidegger's - the decisive
question of the relation of philosophy (and the philosopher) to the word (figured here by the interviewers/readers). Eager spectators to the drama of a
philosopher put in a spotlight, we find our own impulses, ourselves, unaccountably put on stage.
The operation of the text has as much to do
with Mallarme's editing and writing the review he
called La Dernidre Mode under the transparent pseudonym, Marasquin, as it does with philosophical
argument. Or as much to do with the cunning little
prose-poem "Perte d'aureole" in which Baudelaire
narrates the loss of the poet's halo - the index of
his dignity and sublimity - in the moving chaos of
a muddy Paris street. In each case, the fiction serves
to situate and to demystify the halo as well as its apparent loss, the pretension of a certain language to
some more originary, transcendental condition as
well as its reduction to some aggressively empirical,
reassuring banality. In the process, the fiction works
against and, in a sense, outside the polarity, even as
it moves ceaselessly between its terms.

diacritics/Winter 1972
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30

No doubt our curiosity arises out of the desire

to tame the monstrosities of Derrida's text. In De la
grammatologie, Derrida himself inscribes his new
"science" within the horizon of some prospective
teratology whose objects would certainly include
creatures such as those we are again about to encounter: Supplement, Dissemination, Differance, Hymen, Trace, etc. The interview holds out the hope
that in the spontaneity of question and answer, under the pressure of improvisation, his thought can be
seized before it has suffered perversions, the vitiating
metamorphoses, of his exasperating, brilliant style.
Aside from all the reasons why this text is not the
same as a spoken exchange, our hope is disappointed
by the additional fact - and we might well consider
the conditions of its being a fact - that Derrida, like
many French intellectuals, is perfectly capable of
speaking the way he writes (if, indeed, he does not
already write the way he speaks), so that virtually
any passage in the interview could have been extracted from one of his published texts. Those facts,
which tend to blur the distinction between written
and spoken language, serve the broader strategy of
the feigned interview, which aims to reveal as it attacks the very premises of our hope. It attacks the
assumption that Derrida's style - or that of any
writer - is exterior to the truth he wants to convey,
as well as the notion that the truth of his texts is his
truth, accessible in proportion to its proximity to the
speaking subject. Those assumptions lie at the very
heart of the historical, ideological system that Derrida in all his work has tried to situate and deconstruct under the name logocentrism, the system in
which is included the era of what we call Western
metaphysics and whose very element is the privilege
accorded to the value of presence, the determination
of Being, of what is, either as the presence of an
entity-in-itself or as the presence of consciousnessto-itself.
The interview promises to give us the origin of
the philosophy in the person of the philosopher himself, in the flesh. And it promises to betray him, to
traduce as it translates the ideality of his production
into the simplicity of a psychology. We want to have
him there, in front of us, harried by his questioners,
parrying their blows, reduced to instinctual gestures,
to habits, tics, committing lapsus, revealing what we
suspect at bottom, in the last recourse, fathers his
whole elaborate system --a repressed, or anyway
unavowed, desire. Yet it is the whole thrust of Derrida's enterprise, here as everywhere in his work, not
to deny the existence of the father, but to situate and
analyze the necessity in every production of an irreducible remnant, what he designates as "that which
does not return [revenir] to the father." It does not
mean, in a Kierkegaardian sense, some elemental irreducible individuality, but rather, and the stress is
on the negative, that which cannot be resumed in a
point of origin, cannot be reflexively returned to the
presence-to-itself of a source.
But if the text obliges us to suspect the eagerness with which we seek out the presence of the
philosopher in person, the fact that Derrida chooses
to play the interview game should make us suspect
our suspicion. Our own experience as readers of
Anglo-American criticism should alert us to the pos-

sibility that the repression of biographical questions

--like that of all questions of origin, sources, intention, or the unconscious - may entail a greater
reduction of the literary or philosophical text than
the reductions to which naive biographical criticism
can lead. In America, we have had the experience if we still do not possess the theory - of the abstractness and sterility in the service of an entrenched
academic establishment which a "new critical" formalism can foster.
The impulse that wants to make us ask the
most vulgarly psychoanalytic questions is, of course,
not necessarily more radical than the formalist gestures of our fathers. Since Hegel, the absolute complicity of formal and thematic analysis, even when
the theme is latent or preconscious, has been well
known. Both modes proceed on the basis of some
presumed unity of the object in question, either in a
point of origin at the center, or in the enclosure of a
circumference, at the surface, and, indeed, within
that presupposition any analysis can be - as Derrida
here characterizes Lacan's reading of Poe - simultaneously thematic and formal. Both modes of discourse within that presumed unity seek to represent
the presence (or absence, for the two terms are permanently implicated) of a central, centered unit.
Hence there is no reason to assume that our curiosity
about the instinctual bases of a particular work is in
itself the ground of a very advanced critical position.
Yet a certain style of philosophical naivet6 - in the
guise of vulgar empiricism or what Derrida here occasionally refers to as "mechanical materialism" may come to serve the polemical purposes of a text
that seeks to subvert and disrupt the foundations of
philosophy. It is in that sense that the form of the
interview may invite us to practice something like
Nietzsche's "psychology of philosophers" which outrageously insists that "their most alienated calculations and their 'spirituality' are still only the last
pallid impression of a physiological fact; the voluntary is absolutely lacking, everything is instinct,
everything has been directed along certain lines from
the beginning" (The Will to Power, #458, Mar.June 1888). To possess that vulgar curiosity about the
physiological facts, the instincts underlying a philosopher's discourse can be a way of confronting
philosophy with what it tends in its very form systematically to repress. Nietzsche attacks what he calls
the "spirituality" of philosophy, and spirituality-what Derrida here calls idealism or sublimation belongs to the very nature of philosophy, to the possibility of something like onto-logy that discourses
on, that re-presents what is - the being of entities
- in the secondary mode of reflection. Nietzsche attacks spirituality from the standpoint of the instincts,
of the body, of physiological facts - from positions
that provide an indispensable staging area from
which to launch his strategic forays. Those positions
should not, however, be taken as the ground he wants
to hold. He is perfectly prepared to abandon them, to
attack them if necessary from the opposing standpoint of spirituality if they threaten to entrap him at
one of the terms of the polarity which it is his whole
aim to subvert.
Indeed, the biographical-biological question is
a way of posing the more general issue of the rela-

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tion of philosophy to the world, of mind to body, of

situating what Nietzsche, at the beginning of the passage quoted above, terms the "dangerous distinction
between 'theoretical' and 'practical.' " It is that question and that distinction which is implicity in the
very form of the interview, in the very gesture by
which the philosopher allows himself to be interrogated. That is the question - the only question -the world wants to ask the philosopher the moment
he accedes to their request, the one that in various
forms and with great insistence Houdebine and
Scarpetta keep putting to Derrida and that he invited by his participation. Houdebine and Scarpetta
and, through them, others on the Paris scene, repeatedly raise the question of History, of Dialectical
Materialism, of Marx. And after years of appearing
to finesse the question - although the appearance as
he says is deceptive - Derrida now chooses to negotiate openly in the Paris marketplace, where nearly
everyone has got a newly packaged brand of dialectical materialism to sell (and it is by no means the
worst of the available commodities) and where everyone is out to prove in the shrillest tones that he has
a product so far to the left of everything else that it
makes everything else look like Fascism. What the
best of them have, they have bought at one time or
another in some form or another from Derrida, but
of late they have tended to forget their debt and have
been crowding him very hard wanting to know what
has he done for them lately.
The situation can be seen very clearly in what
develops as the essential disagreement between Derrida and his interviewers. Houdebine keeps pressing
Derrida to accept the notion of heterogeneity as a
more inclusive term than the indissociable terms
alterity and spacing by which Derrida designates
features of what at other times he calls dissemination
or diflerance, the irreductible space constituted between two - as well as the movement of differentiation which interrupts any identity of a term to
itself, any homogeneity or interiority of a term
within itself. According to Houdebine, the concept
of heterogeneity comprehends the other two, alterity
and spacing, and thereby implicitly transcends them.
(Read: Houdebine comprehends Derrida.) The concept transcends them to the degree that it claims to
be "the position of that alterity as such" [en tant que
telle], and insofar as it is sustained in its possibility
by the negation of the categories, other, body, matter;
it negates them as entities being present [presences],
but preserves them in the form of a "non-presence."
Whether this move is ultimately intelligible, and in
its actual form I find it very murky, its urgency is
quite understandable and its potential weakness can
be formulated. The political motive of its detour, to
encompass categories like body and matter, is clear
enough; its weakness, as Derrida suggests, is that it
seems to be menaced by the specter of Hegelian dialectics in the movement by which one term is "sustained" by the negation of other terms. It is just
that synthesizing, reconciling movement of negation
which it is the explicit aim of Houdebine, and of
Derrida, to conjure. It goes without saying that the
very premises of Houdebine's argument owe everything to Derrida and one strongly suspects, as Derrida hints, that where Houdebine claims to exceed

Derrida, he has, in fact, fallen behind the radicality

of his positions.
Throughout the interview Derrida largely accepts the materialist standpoint that Houdebine and
Scarpetta are eager to impress on him, but he does so
cautiously and with repeated reservations. His reserve
should not be construed as an attachment to some
last gasp idealism; it is prompted by his uneasiness
with the category of materialism, a category, as he
says repeatedly, which is not at all incompatible per
se - quite the contrary - with a dialectical, idealist
philosophy. Indeed, Houdebine's bold leap into materialism may serve to illustrate the vast web of complicity that links the term to its opposite and the
endless resources which idealism possesses to ensnare even its most subtle opponents. Derrida is at
one with Nietzsche in wanting to use materialism as
a lever for intervening in that metaphysical polarity,
for reversing the hierarchy and displacing idealism
from its accustomed position of superiority. At the
same time his use of the term "materialism" constitutes a new "concept" but one which is never allowed to become a new foundation, a new principle
commanding the text from some exterior, eminent
position. The name remains in place, according to
Derrida's poleonymic strategy, but it is transformed
by its function within the deconstructing text. It becomes one of those "undecidable" terms, a simulacrum, a "false" verbal, nominal, semantic property,
"which no longer allows itself to be comprehended
within the (binary) philosophical opposition and
which, however, inhabits it, resists it, disorganizes it
but without ever constituting a third term, without
ever giving way to a solution in the form of a speculative dialectic."
Derrida has mostly kept himself removed from
the bitter ideological and political struggles that have
swept France with hysterical fury since 1968. He has
from time to time seen fit to mark his solidarity with
the group around Tel Quel. Every now and then he
makes a discreet political gesture. Mostly he remains
silent, listening. His unwillingness to engage more
freely and more frequently in public dialogue or
public polemics seems to reflect the same reserve he
has shown in confronting Marxist texts - a reserve
born of his strategic sense that he could engage them
only at his peril. The polemical style of Parisian
intellectual life, whose themes are almost always
marxisants, represents an immense trap in which the
careful distinctions, the micrology he practices, could
be swiftly swallowed up. It is much easier to make a
Parisian audience understand the necessity of a stratified reading of Rousseau than to make them see
that the texts of Marx or Lenin, like any text, have
their strengths and weaknesses, their blandness and
insight. So he has tended to avoid public interventions and Marxist themes in order to mitigate the
kinds of inevitable misreading which his texts invite.
They invite misreading even as they take elaborate precautions against it, loudly and tirelessly exposing the principles of its inevitability. For Derrida's
project, like Heidegger's or Nietzsche's or even
Hegel's, is to escape the systematic constraints of
Western metaphysics, to disrupt it and disorganize it,
while acknowledging the necessity of staying within
it, inhabiting it, mobilizing the resources of its lan-

diacritics/ Winter 1972

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31

32

guage against itself. (The architectural metaphor persists throughout Derrida's work.) It is, therefore, an
illusion to think that we can merely step outside the
house of metaphysics and dance freely in the sunlight. Those who imagine that they can simply leap
beyond it soon discover that the stones are ready to
spring up again around them. The only possible
strategy is the much more patient and laborious one
(but one free of the romantic pathos attached to the
work of the negative, thus a gay science) by which
the foundations of the structure may be carefully but
decisively deconstructed, displaced, disorganized-giving rise, not to a new space outside the old enclosure, but to new angles, new possibilities of organization within it. The process requires that one
use the elements of the structure against the structure in order to insure that no stone is left unturned,
ready to rise up behind our backs. The price of using
those old stones in new ways is the miscomprehension of those who will miss the novelty of their
textual transformation and see in the paleonyms only
their familiar meanings and functions.
Derrida's texts invite misreading. To respond
to those misreadings in the context of a public,
polemical discussion would be to submit his positions
to the massive risks of simplification and schematization. But the risks of silence can be even greater. To
remain unremittingly silent in the face of the misinterpretations that have begun to proliferate is to
seem, after a while, to flatter them, to concede to
them. Silence speaks, often ambiguously.
Derrida's solution is to grant an interview. But
if we obey his injunction to observe the way a text
is made as closely as we examine its content, it becomes clear, as I have tried to show, that he has
given us the simulacrum of an interview, an "undecidable" text, a "false" form, one that allows him to
play between conflicting determinations. To grant an
interview is to concede certain strategic possibilities
as well as certain philosophical premises; to refuse
one is to concede others. Derrida's solution is to
elaborate this inter-interview, curiously fragmented,
partly written/partly spoken, faithfully transcribed/
meticulously corrected, journalism/theatre, philosophy/bavardage, performed at various places (Paris/
the country) strangely unspecified.
One would like to situate this text. Philosophy,
at least since Phaedrus, has always had to choose between the city and the country, a choice that inevitably entailed a whole series of binary oppositions
(see Derrida, "La Pharmacie de Platon," La Dissmination. Paris: Le Seuil, 1971). In our time, it is
tempting, for example, to compare the locus of Heidegger's wandering the Holzwege in the Schwarzwald to Sartre's writing L'Etre et le ndant on a table
at the Flore, to take them as emblems of the divergent ways that philosophy can be in the world, that
the theoretical can intersect the practical. In those
terms, Derrida must be considered a sub-urban philosopher, traveling in and out of the city, dwelling in
a place neither city nor country, in the anonymous
fiction of a community structured by the false urbanism of shopping centers and by the false ruralism
of well-kept lawns. But the suburbs - we need
hardly be reminded - are spreading. What began by
being a mere supplement to the city, an ungainly

graft on the countryside, has come increasingly to

displace those poles so that we begin to wonder how
we are ever going to decide whether the city has become a mere adjunct, a suburb to the suburb, or
when spreading suburbs begin to touch, whether we
should consider the suburbs of Lyons as the countryside outside the suburbs of Paris, or vice versa.
There are many who deplore the withering of the
city, the disappearance of the countryside. But there
are many more who have come to love the suburbs,
have renounced nostalgia and find freedom in the
newly won realization that both the city and country
have always been structured by the suburbs. Cities
have always been only denser suburbs, a series of
paths, landmarks, and dwellings articulated by open
spaces; their center is a fiction. The countryside has
always been a sparser suburb, a landscape punctuated
by dwellings, landmarks and paths; its naturalness is
a fiction. It should be clear that what we are in fact
describing in this extended notion of "suburb" is
what we might be tempted to call the textuality, or
"ecriture," of geo-graphy; the space between elements
as well as the differentiating movement of spacing by
which what we call city, country, or suburb, comes
to be articulated, to be constituted.
The purpose of the detour through the suburb
was to lead us back to the question of the interview,
to the textuality of the text, which, in fact, we have
never left. For the notion of suburb at which we
finally arrived bears the same relation to the ordinary
sense of the word as this interview does to a "real"
interview, as the title "positions" bears to a real title,
as Derrida's "philosophy" bears to philosophy. In
every case we are dealing with what Derrida calls
the unity of a simulacrum. Like the motif of "differance" with which the interview begins, they are
neither concepts nor simple words, although they
may produce conceptual effects and verbal concretions, although they are linked paleonymically to
some word or concept within the binary philosophical
oppositions they deconstruct.
They escape the duality. They are third terms,
but not in a Hegelian sense; they are not dialectical
terms that come to resolve contradictions, to negate
them as they sublimate or idealize differences in a
presence-to-itself. In the same way, the concept, dissemination, cannot be defined, as Derrida explains
here in several dense pages. The very force and form
of its disruption "bursts the semantic horizon." Dissemination fractures the unity of the text, whether it
is given in the form of a simple origin to which the
text could be seen to return, in which its meaning
could be resumed, or in the form of a distant horizon
of meaning whose unity is teleologically determined
by a totalizing dialectic that structures the multiple
meanings of the text. As an example of the last, Derrida cites the dialectically organized structure of
Jean-Pierre Richard's L'Univers imaginaire de Mallarmi. By disrupting the unity of the text, its origin
or its horizon, the movement of dissemination-the "principle" of the text - makes impossible any
exhaustive formalization of the work or any saturating account of its meanings or intentions.
The simulacrum cannot be defined. Whenever
Derrida tries to "conceptualize" it, we find him proceeding largely by negation. He repeatedly refers us

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to other texts where we can observe the simulacrum

in operation. It functions, as we have been trying to
suggest, at every level of this text. We need only
examine the positions of the title "positions" to discover it lustrously at work.
The title is proposed in the last line of the
letter appended to the interview, purportedly written
by Derrida after the fact. Thus, what pretends to entitle the text, to head it, precede it and dominate it, is
in fact its product, comes from its end-although not
even from its end but from a supplement which has
the position of an end. Derrida's interest in everything that follows or supplements or interrupts what
passes for the text "itself" is well-attested. Most recently it is the focus of a text entitled "Hors livre"
which pretends to be the preface to La Dissemination, and whose theme is prefaces - their curious
status, written after the fact, in a position to resume
or determine what follows them, even though they
are only prefaces, texts designed to efface themselves
before the text itself, which they seem to dominate.
But Derrida has also written, in "La Double Seance,"
of titles, in particular of Mallarm6's injuction to
"suspend the title," which "like a head, a capital, the
oracular, stands too high [porte trop haut], speaks
too loudly [parle trop haut], both because it raises
its voice, deafens the text that follows, and because
it occupies the top of the page, an authority, a chief,
an archont" ("La Double Seance," in La Dissemination, p. 204).
On the one hand, Mallarm6 urges that the title
be suspended, silenced, canceled in its function as
title. At the same time, the title should be suspended,
hung above the text; in suspense like a chandelier
[lustre] or the dot over an i, it marks the suspense
which constitutes the text, the empty space, the
blank, a kind of frame or border, above the text,
around it, out of which it is generated. Thus, for
Mallarm6, as for Derrida, "to suspend the title"
marks the necessity of displacing it, effacing its pretention to dominate and command the text from
above, but not eliminating it. Both of them denounce
the illusion that one can destroy its authority merely
by overthrowing it. By eliminating it entirely, one
merely assures that it will re-emerge to do its work
in another, less visible fashion. By the ellipsis of the
title, one creates the illusion, for example, that the
text has no exterior, no dominating principle from
above which determines it. But that can be another
way of affirming the presence of the text to itself, its
autonomous, self-generated unity --a view of the
"La Double
text, as Derrida has shown inS"ance,"
that is in perfect complicity with the notion of a text
subordinated to some external tutor or principal who
gives the law.
Against the double risk of allowing the title to
remain in place and dominate the text, or excising it
and permitting its work to continue in some more
subterranean way, Derrida - following Mallarm6 -proposes to suspend it above, but to re-inscribe its
position in such a way that it constantly disrupts its
own appearance. In other words, Derrida fashions a
he "gives" an interview; he creates a
title--as
fiction.
Let us assume that "positions" is the title of
the interview. In fact, it appears on the title page -

what is the function of a title page? second place.

suspended in

Jacques DERRIDA
positions
Entretien avec
Jean-Louis HOUDEBINE
et
Guy SCARPETTA
The "title" is poised between Derrida and his interviewers, positioned between them, separating them,
binding them. In a sense, more than one, Derrida is
the chief here, the archon. But if Derrida is the
eminent center, he is sustained, thereby undercut, by
a second title, "positions," the "real" one.
In the letter appended to the interview, Derrida
insists on pluralizing the title. The plural "positions"
both echoes the dominant theme of his argument
with Houdebine and signals his resistance to Houdebine's attempt to find a term which would be the
position of otherness as such. Derrida argues that
the singular form, Setzung in Hegel, is an indispensable element of dialectics. It is always the position-of-the-other in the dialectical movement by
which the Idea poses itself to itself as other, "as
other (than) itself in its finite determination, in view
of repatriating itself, returning back to itself in the
infinite richness of its determinations, etc." The notion of position always implies, however distantly,
however teleologically, a dialectical re-appropriation
of a presence to itself. Against that Hegelian notion,
he proposes the plural, a term whose proximity to
the other is the difference of a letter, whose function
within a process of differentiation is hardly distinguishable from the singular's dialectical movement.
It is different enough, however, to be decisive.
positions is a title, out of position, in second
place, uncapitalized, without its head, its majesty. It
is active, multiple, additional. "I will add," Derrida
writes, "concerning positions: scenes, acts, figures of
dissemination."
Unlike placement, site, place, situation, position insists
on the manner with which a thing in question is placed,
or on the relative place of several objects. (Robert)
Positions of players on a football field or of pieces on a
chess board.
Technology: positions in the setting of a piece, in a
mechanism.
Heraldry: the positions (or points) on a coat of arms.
Music: positions, the relative place of sounds that form
a chord.
Linguistics: the positions of phonemes, their relation to
one another.
Military: positions, the placement of troops, installations,
or constructions.
The plural implies not merely the placing of an
entity in its proper place - in its determined finitude, but it insists on the relative difference among
elements, their manner of standing to one another,
the movement of their differentiation, what Derrida
calls their differance.
positions is a title, a beginning, an authority, a
chief. It assumes those titles and privileges, that
authority, but as a fetish, as a substitute title, a false
one, an actor, with all the power of illusion. But also
an author, a genetrix, a disseminator, a phallus. It is

diocritics /Winter 1972

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34

disseminating, multiple, exploded, cut-off, castrated.

It is present but absent, absent when it is present,
the movement of self and other, the purloined letter,
what Lacan calls the sign of the symbolic order, the
movement of signifying itself. For Lacan it is the
sign of an absence, the absence which allows what
appears to appear, Being, the absence, or the forgetfulness, that allows what is to appear, which generates the appearance of appearances. Like the theatrical mask that stands for the theatre, which reveals
as much as it hides, it is a fiction whose meaning is
fiction, whose signifie is Signifying.
But the title is not a mere fiction. It is also
something other than that, a simulacrum. In a cryptic
sentence Derrida insists on the necessity of distinguishing a fiction from a simulacrum, which, he says,
"is a structure of duplicity which mimes and doubles
the dual relation." The simulacrum belongs to the
order of four; it doubles a double. The phallus as
mask or fiction, the sign of the movement of signifying, is a three, the unity of 1 and 2, of what is and
is not, of presence and absence, of image and thing,
of what is and what veils what is, truth and fiction,
reality and appearance. The simulacrum contains the
1 and 2, just as the three does, but it also doubles
them, is other than they. "La dissemination" is a text
on quarters, squares, and fours. To put it simply and Derrida takes ninety pages to put it as densely as
one could imagine - the simulacrum is the other of
fiction, not in the sense of its truth, but as the other
of self-and-other, of repetition-and-difference, of fiction and non-fiction; what, in a sense, stands outside
them, is their exteriority, their opening out of themselves. At the same time, it is not exterior to them,
outside them; for it is also the condition of their possibility, the differance which structures them, which
determines the poles of the sign as poles, determines
their determinability as well as the possibility of their
movement.
Derrida at the interview was particularly reluctant to define dissemination, for reasons we resumed above. The only thing of which one can be
sure, therefore, is that my attempt to define it is
inevitably and in principle wrong. What may be
clear, however, is that one should look into "La Diss6mination" to find what seems to me to be the
fundamental and radical difference between Lacan
and Derrida. For many, those sections where Derrida
sketches his reservations towards the Lacanian system will constitute the greatest interest of this text.
Derrida has left their elaboration for another time.
On the surface --or rather just beneath what we
might consider the surface difference of style and
themes their work seems to share a fundamental identity of interest and an essential continuity
of function. Derrida suggests at one point in the
interview that his own work could well be organized
around the notions of mimesis and castration. The
same could be said of Lacan. The way of gauging
their divergence would be to examine the way they
inscribe the phallus. And as I have tried to suggest,
the difference is the cryptic difference between a fiction, which becomes in Lacan the Sign of Signifying,
an ultimate Referent, the Phallus as an emblem of
the symbolic order, and a simulacrum which .
(Cf. "La dissemination," in La Dissimination).

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