In Jacque Derrida's The End Of The Book And The Beginning Of Writing

1688 Words7 Pages
In Jacque Derrida’s “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing,” and in Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning,” movement between binary opposition is the center of their writings. While for Derrida, the motion is the precondition for the sustain of writing and speech, for Stevens movement creates meaning. In both, the movement is expressed in their style of writings. Their manners of writing force the readers to take part in the act of movement. Derrida claims that writing and speech function in the same way: “the signified always already functions as a signifier"; they are both traces (7). For Derrida, the trace is the “written mark” of motion (9). Like writing, speech is also a written mark of the movement. They both leave their traces in one another incessantly. Writing is absent when speech announces itself as the primary, however, its trace is in speech; and when writing announces itself as primary, speech’s trace appears. When the trace of the…show more content…
Derrida focuses on Martin Heidegger. For Heidegger, Being,“as the thought of…transcendental signified, is manifested above all in the voice… The voice is heard… closest to the self as the absolute effacement of the signifier: pure auto-affection”(20). The Being is experience, full presence, and thus self-evident. Heidegger, like Rabbi Eliezer, uses the word “being” as the metaphor for “the originary meaning of being” (22). Because Being cannot be fully grasped (one has to be present and experience that), the written word “being” is a metaphor that conveys the Being. Through writing/metaphor, which is the contrary of full present/experience, Heidegger conveys the idea of full presence. It is the writing that enables the idea of the full present to be expressed. Derrida, again, proves how even in Heidegger, writing announces itself as

    More about In Jacque Derrida's The End Of The Book And The Beginning Of Writing

      Open Document