My short (open) texts….

1) Derrida’s contention that writing is the undervalued category in the writing/speech binary opposition appears to be a counter-intuitive and a(nti)-factual/historical move, in my view. The age-old proverb “Verba Volant, scripta manent” – that so well captures the privileging of writing over speech/the written “text” (not necessarily in the Derridean or Barthesian sense) over the spoken one – was imparted to me in early childhood and constantly repeated in school to me and my fellow classmates.
Beyond my personal experience and constructed “ideology” regarding writing/speech, I would like to refer to the "archive/repertoire" binary opposition that is so prominent in the emerging discipline of Performance Studies (scholar Diana Taylor, for example, wrote a book entitled precisely "The Archive and the Repertoire"). This opposition – connected primarily to an anxiety about the ephemerality and traceless-ness of speech/the “spoken word” (as well as of “incorporated” – as opposed to “inscribed” practices, to use Paul Connerton’s terminology), supports the “superiority” of writing over “speech”. Moreover, specific peoples (in Africa, the Americas) were denied “identity”/”history” in the course of “History” on the grounds that they lacked written records that would have entitled them to these.

The “rise of the public sphere” (Habermas) marked an age in which the emphasis on the writing became even more prominent, I would suggest. The contemporary world – in which everything happens in/through writing – has “inherited” this “obsession for the trace”.

After providing these “facts” in support of my argument, I will now re-consider Derrida’s fundamental claim about the writing/speech binary from a different perspective. As a purely intellectual construct, opening the category of writing to mean "ecriture" (the play of difference of language), Derrida’s claims become (for me) an intriguing, fascinating, and mysterious thought-experiment. Paradoxically, however, with the proliferation of Derridean theory (at least in the academic environment) and in politics – in a much distilled form, it appears that this “thought-experiment” has the potential of “actually” producing change into a factuality/reality that it (purposefully?) bracketed in/by Derrida.

2.1) The concept of “textuality” employed by Barthes seems to designate the quality of being a text. The question that intrigues me is whether this quality is inherent or extraneous, necessary or contingent. It appears to me that Barthes is particularly ambivalent with regard to this issue.

2.2) On page 156 of the essay ”From Work to Text”, Barthes states: “the combined action of Marxism, Freudianism and structuralism demands, in literature, the relativization of the relations of writer, reader, and observer (critic)”. The preservation of the three categories (“writer”, “reader”, “critic”) is surprising to me given Barthes’ proclamation of “the death of the author” and of the reader as producer. What need can there be for the critic if meaning (some meaning) is available for everyone and there is no such thing as “The Meaning” whom only the privileged critic is supposed to grasp?

The preservation of the critic as a distinct category in the equation of writing-reading appears to me to align Barthes with the New Critics who claimed that “Not everybody can do criticism.” (Ransom, “Criticism, Inc.”, 336), and, implicitly, that the critic can read “deeper” than the reader.

2.3) Can legality/the “Law” still retain its authority if text as a “methodological field” (as Prof. Doane defined it) is legitimated to the extent that it completely substitutes “the work”?