2 - Infinity, inscription, the economy

Summary

Un système n'est ni fini ni infini. Une totalité structurale échappe en son jeu à cette alternative. Elle échappe à I'archéologique et à I'eschatologique et les inscrit en ellemême.

(ED, p. 180)

(A system is neither finite nor infinite. A structural totality escapes this alternative in its functioning. It escapes the archaeological and the eschatological and inscribes them in itself.)

(WD, p. 123)

The model of writing that emerges from Derrida's critique of literary structuralism in ‘Force et signification’ is not peculiar to that text alone. Despite the thematic diversity of the book, what is striking for the reader of L'écriture et la différence, as she or he moves from chapter to chapter, is the relative homogeneity of Derrida's approach to the texts and authors he selects for commentary, a certain insistence of interpretation. Thus it might be possible to formalize Derrida's model of writing, as it is deployed in the texts of L'écriture et la différence, to isolate its significant or distinctive features. Reasoning from the points gathered in chapter i, it could be said that Derrida's model consists of three ‘moments’, which, however, are not moments in a chronological or sequential sense, nor in the sense of their being necessarily distinct from one another. These three moments are infinity, inscription, the economy.

INFINITY

Already in ‘Force et signification’ there was reference to a certain kind of infinity.