Nick Ivins
nthirteen@hotmail.com
En Abyme
Jacques Derrida was born in French Algeria in 1930 and has revolutionized the
study of philosophical movements in the 20th and 21st Centuries. His publication
Of Grammatology inspires the application of deconstruction to common
themes underlying and comprising the major tenants of ontological and Western
logic. This deconstruction and eventual destruction of the representative form
of language is in direct opposition with the concept of mimesis as applied to
art and the written word. Derrida positions his method in the play between identity
and difference inherent in linguistic discourse and within Freud's "space
of writing" situated in the psyche. Freud's dynamic play of forces is extended
parallel to the deferment of meaning (both temporally and through disguise)
by Derrida to question the relation between so-called "objective"
and "subjective" structures. Derrida contends this application "composes"
rather than "symbolizes" meaning, incorporating the relationship between
the "signified" and "signifier" as the "orb and the
orbitary"(162 Of Grammatology). Thus we begin "wherever we
are"(162) in an "indefinitely multiplied structure" or "en
abyme [in an abyss]" of meaning (163). Each word and concept is understood
through referential context only:
"Art and death, art and its death are comprised in the space of the alteration
of the originary iteration (iterum, anew, does it not come from Sanskrit
itara, other?); of repetition, reproduction, representation, or also
in space as the possibility of iteration and the exit from life placed outside
of itself" (209)
Thus, as meaning (in the ontological or "onto-theological" and Western
epistemological sense) is deferred, and the "supplement"(298) is always
the supplement of a supplement; Derrida suggests an analysis of textual and
implied inverse logical propositions in varying levels of symmetricity to "deconstruct"
a text to "a natural catastrophe"(258) of empty representation. This
"chromatic"(214) conceptuality of language and meaning can "open"
texts to new and intense interpretation as meaning is decentralized.
Works Cited:
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. John Hopkins University Press, 1976.