reduction of the trace

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If the trace, arche-phenomenon of " memory, " which must be thought before the

opposition of nature and culture, animality and humanity, etc., belongs to the

very movement of signification, then signification is a priori written, whether

inscribed or not, in one form or another, in a " sensible " and " spatial " element

that is called " exterior. " Arche-writing, at first the possibility of the spoken

word, then of the " graphie " in the narrow sense, the birthplace of " usurpation, "

denounced from Plato to Saussure, this trace is the opening of the first

exteriority in general, the enigmatic relationship of the living to its other

and of an inside to an outside: spacing. The outside, " spatial " and " objective "

exteriority which we believe we know as the most familiar thing in the world, as

familiarity itself, would not appear without the grammé, without difference as

temporalisation, without the non-presence of the other inscribed within the

sense of the present, without the relationship with

death as the concrete structure of the living present. Metaphor would be

forbidden. The presence-absence of the trace, which one should not even call its

ambiguity but rather its play, carries in itself the problems of the letter and

the spirit, of body and soul, and of all the problems whose primary affinity I

have recalled. All dualisms, all theories of the immortality of the soul or of

the spirit, as well as all monisms, spiritualist or materialist, dialectical or

vulgar, are the unique theme of a metaphysics whose entire history was compelled

to strive toward the reduction of the trace. [from Chapter Two, Of Grammatology,

1967]

 

 

 

Derrida

 

 

 

 

 

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