Paper Machine - Brossura

Derrida, Jacques

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0804746206 ISBN 13: 9780804746205

Casa editrice: Stanford Univ Pr, 2005

Riassunto

This book questions the book itself, archivization, machines for writing, and the mechanicity inherent in language, the media, and intellectuals. Derrida questions what takes place between the paper and the machine inscribing it. He examines what becomes of the archive when the world of paper is subsumed in new machines for virtualization, and whether there can be a virtual event or a virtual archive.

Derrida continues his long-standing investigation of these issues, and ties them into the new themes that governed his teaching and thinking in the past few years: the secret, pardon, perjury, state sovereignty, hospitality, the university, animal rights, capital punishment, the question of what sort of mediatized world is replacing the print epoch, and the question of the “wholly other.” Derrida is remarkable at making seemingly occasional pieces into part of a complexly interconnected trajectory of thought.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

The late Jacques Derrida was Director of Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. Among the most recent of his many books to have been translated into English are Eyes of the University (2003), For What Tomorrow... with Elisabeth Roudinesco (2003), Counterpath with Catherine Malabou (2003), Negotiations (2002), Who's Afraid of Philosophy? (2002), and Without Alibi (2002). All of these have been published by the Stanford University Press.

Dalla quarta di copertina

This book questions the book itself, archivization, machines for writing, and the mechanicity inherent in language, the media, and intellectuals. Derrida questions what takes place between the paper and the machine inscribing it. He examines what becomes of the archive when the world of paper is subsumed in new machines for virtualization, and whether there can be a virtual event or a virtual archive.
Derrida continues his long-standing investigation of these issues, and ties them into the new themes that governed his teaching and thinking in the past few years: the secret, pardon, perjury, state sovereignty, hospitality, the university, animal rights, capital punishment, the question of what sort of mediatized world is replacing the print epoch, and the question of the “wholly other.” Derrida is remarkable at making seemingly occasional pieces into part of a complexly interconnected trajectory of thought.

Dal risvolto di copertina interno

This book questions the book itself, archivization, machines for writing, and the mechanicity inherent in language, the media, and intellectuals. Derrida questions what takes place between the paper and the machine inscribing it. He examines what becomes of the archive when the world of paper is subsumed in new machines for virtualization, and whether there can be a virtual event or a virtual archive.
Derrida continues his long-standing investigation of these issues, and ties them into the new themes that governed his teaching and thinking in the past few years: the secret, pardon, perjury, state sovereignty, hospitality, the university, animal rights, capital punishment, the question of what sort of mediatized world is replacing the print epoch, and the question of the wholly other. Derrida is remarkable at making seemingly occasional pieces into part of a complexly interconnected trajectory of thought.

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PAPER MACHINE

Cultural Memory in the PresentBy Jacques Derrida

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2001 ditions Galile
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-4620-5

Contents

Translator's Note.................................................................................................................................ix1. Machines and the "Undocumented Person".........................................................................................................12. The Book to Come...............................................................................................................................43. The Word Processor.............................................................................................................................194. "But ... No, but ... Never ..., and Yet ..., as to the Media": Intellectuals. Attempt at Definition by Themselves. Survey......................335. Paper or Me, You Know ... (New Speculations on a Luxury of the Poor)...........................................................................416. The Principle of Hospitality...................................................................................................................667. "Sokal and Bricmont Aren't Serious"............................................................................................................708. As If It Were Possible, "Within Such Limits"...................................................................................................739. My Sunday "Humanities".........................................................................................................................10010. For Jos Rainha: What I Believe and Believe I Know............................................................................................10911. "What Does It Mean to Be a French Philosopher Today?".........................................................................................11212. Not Utopia, the Im-possible...................................................................................................................12113. "Others Are Secret Because They Are Other"....................................................................................................13614. Fichus: Frankfurt Address.....................................................................................................................164Notes.............................................................................................................................................183

Chapter One

Machines and the "Undocumented Person"

So there's such a thing as papier-machine-typing paper, printer paper, machine paper. And what we think we recognize under this name, a French one.

So there's what we normally use, following the "usual" name, papier-machine, to the letter, in the strict or the literal sense: the form of a matter, the sheet designed as the backing or medium for a typewriter's writing, and also now for the printing, reproduction, and archiving of the products of so many word-processing machines, and the like. This then is what becomes a figure here, what a rhetorician would also call a "locus."

Machine paper: so the title gestures toward a place, a figure, in fact more than one figure.

By effectively displacing the normal usage of the expression papier-machine to put pressure on its articulation; by juxtaposing, without a hyphen, two nouns of equal stature (paper and machine, machine or paper: neither is ever the attribute of the other, or its subject), this title is an attempt to name a singular configuration, an addition, an ordered set of metaphors, tropes, and metonymies. What then does paper mean here? What should we understand by machine? What is the meaning of the hypothesis or the prosthesis of their subjectless coupling: machine paper?

There would be no justification for this title unless slowly, laboriously, in the time taken by the texts gathered together here, it awakened, heralded, or prepared something like a "thinking" of "machine paper," a thinking of a hyphen that is visible or invisible, between the machine and the paper. Not a speculative thought, not a philosophy, not even a theory, but an experience of writing, a path ventured, a series of "political" gestures (at the center of this book, we will hear the echoing, for instance, in more than one register, literal and figurative, of the question of the person with no papers, crushed by so many machines, "when we are all, already, undocumented, 'paperless'").

Over a short period, about four years, gestures of this kind recall the attempts arising from an anxious seeking, a modest strategy, in short an effort of orientation in thought, at the point when some are hastening to announce the end of a history constrained not only by the authority of the book but by a paper economy-and therefore the urgency of reactivating its memory and its origin.

From this place-a rhetorical topos and an experiential situation-from this historical spot where we are passing through, even more or less settled down, we then wonder: What's going on? What's taking place between the paper and the machine? What new experience of taking place? What does an event become? What becomes of its archive when the world of paper (the world made of paper or what globalization still gets from paper) is subordinated to all these new machines for virtualization? Is there such a thing as virtual event? A virtual archive? Would it be that new? An unprecedented "scene of writing," I would have said in the past, or another "archive fever"? What does that offer us for thinking about the relationship between the act, the actual, the possible, and the impossible? Between the event and fantasy, or the spectral? For what new rights? And what new interpretation of "the political"?

All the texts in this book are due-to occasions, to provocations, to opportunities given, sometimes by people close to me, personal friends or political friends. So, taking them as determining situations, I thought I should at least indicate the "places" for which these texts were initially written. Always in reply to an invitation, a request, or a survey.

All of them institutions (highly national or quite international, if not universal) given over to the machine and to paper, each held to its own rhythm, to the original temporality of its survival.

All of them institutions imposing (as we can tell from writing and reading) their norms, their rules of the game, the memory or the fantasy of their experience, the authority of their assumed competence.

All of them institutions whose names in each case, and just the title (a whole program), would by themselves deserve more than one work, whether or not a book.

1. The book, the great archive or the great copyright library of the book: the Bibliothque nationale de France [French National Library].

2. The journal, between the book and the newspaper: Les Temps Modernes, Les Cahiers de mdiologie, the Revue internationale de philosophie.

3. The newspaper or magazine, daily, fortnightly, or monthly: La Quinzaine Littraire, Le Monde, L'Humanit, Die Zeit, Le Figaro Magazine, Le Monde de l'ducation.

My warm thanks to all those who have given their agreement for me to collect these texts together, after having given me the chance to respond to their invitations or questions.

Chapter Two

The Book to Come

A question of "good sense," first of all, and of sense: the meaning of venir in "the book to come" does not go without saying. But the word book is as difficult to define as the question of the book, at least if the wish is to grant it a sharp specificity, and to cut it out in its irreducibility, at the point where it resists so many neighboring, connected, and even inseparable questions.

For instance, to go to the closest connection: the question of the book, and of the history of the book, should not be conflated with that of writing, or the mode of writing, or the technologies of inscription. There are books, things that are legitimately called books. But they have been and still are written according to systems of writing that are radically heterogeneous. So the book is not linked to a writing.

Nor is it appropriate to conflate the question of the book with that of technologies of printing and reproduction: there were books both before and after the invention of printing, for example.

And the question of the book is not the question of the work. Not all books are works. On the other hand plenty of works, even literary or philosophical works, works of written discourse, are not necessarily books.

Finally, the question of the book should not be conflated with that of supports. Quite literally, or else metonymically (but we will continually be concerned with these figures of the book, with these metonymical, synechdochic, or simply metaphorical movements), it is possible, and this has certainly been done, to speak of books that have the most different kinds of support-not just the classical ones but the quasi immateriality or virtuality of electronic and telematic operations, of "dynamic supports" with or without screens. We cannot be sure that the unity and identity of the thing called "book" is incompatible with these new tele-technologies. In fact this is what we have to debate.

What then do we have the right to call "book" and in what way is the question of right, far from being preliminary or accessory, here lodged at the very heart of the question of the book? This question is governed by the question of right, not only in its particular juridical form, but also in its semantic, political, social, and economic form-in short, in its total form. And the question of the book, as we shall see, is also that of a certain totality.

So all these preliminary distinctions are indispensable even though, as we are well aware, the problematic of the book as an elaborate set of questions in itself involves all the concepts that I have just distinguished from the book: writing, the modes of inscription, production, and reproduction, the work and its working, the support, the market economy and the economics of storage, the law, politics, and so on.

I will start again from round about the question of the book with the different but related question of the "support." This is the question that comes to mind when we are interested in the current process, in its future, and in what is transforming the present form of what we call book.

Here and now we are speaking in a place that is still, essentially, a future place that has barely been inaugurated and that we already, or still, call "library," bibliothque.

Even before its proper name, before its national and French proper names (Bibliothque nationale de France and Franois Mitterrand), this precinct bears an ordinary name, bibliothque. This beautiful name is entitled in more than one way to be a title. As we know it means the place where the book (biblion) is dealt with. The book is dealt with as a question, and books are dealt with in certain ways-the open history of this treatment and these ways is, we know, immense, complicated, multiple, convoluted. I will say something about this in a moment.

I mentioned the Greek word biblion not to sound scholarly, or even-it's too easy-to explain the word bibliothque. I spoke Greek to observe in passing that biblion has not always meant "book" or even "work." ("Work" is something else again, which will perhaps take us, in a little while, to the margins of a serious problem, that of the future relationship between on the one hand the form book, the model of the book, and on the other hand a work in general, an oeuvre, an opus, the unity or body of an oeuvre marked out by a beginning and an end, and so a totality: assumed to be conceived and produced, and indeed signed by an author, a single identifiable author, and offered up for the respectful reading of a reader who doesn't meddle with it, doesn't transform it on the inside-in what we now call an "interactive" way.)

But does any oeuvre, be it literal or literary, have as its destiny or essential destination only a "bookish" incorporation? This must be one of the very many questions that await us. Biblion, which didn't initially or always mean "book," still less "oeuvre," could designate a support for writing (so derived from biblos, which in Greek names the internal bark of the papyrus and thus of the paper, like the Latin word liber, which first designated the living part of the bark before it meant "book"). Biblion, then, would only mean "writing paper," and not book, nor oeuvre or opus, only the substance of a particular support-bark. But biblion can also, by metonymy, mean any writing support, tablets for instance, or even letters: post. A bibliophore (bibliophoros) is someone who carries the letters (which aren't necessarily books or works). He's a sort of postman or else a scrivener-the secretary, the lawyer, the clerk of the court.

The extension of these metonymies pushed biblion toward the meaning of "writing" in general (in that it was no longer reducible to the support but came to inscribe itself right on the papyrus or tablet, without however being a book: not all writing is a book). Then-new extension-it was pushed toward the "book" form that is what interests us this evening, and which already has a long and complicated history from the volumen, the papyrus scroll, to the codex, in which notebooks are bound to boards placed over them.

Already in Greek, bibliotheke means the slot for a book, books' place of deposit, the place where books are put (poser), deposited, laid down (reposer), the entrept where they are stored: a bibliophylakion is the deposit or warehouse, the entrept, for books, writings, nonbook archives in general; and the bibliopoleion is the bookstore or librairie, a name, often given to the bibliothque, and that has been kept, of course, in English ("library").

As to the kinds of treatment these places have in store, let me just stress the traditional words I had to use to describe them, and which are all leads to follow for future reflection. These are the verbs poser, dposer, reposer, and entreposer. Like the presence of the Greek tithenai ("to put") in bibliotheke, they all point up the act of putting, depositing, but also the act of immobilizing, of giving something over to a stabilizing immobility, and so to the statute, to the statutory and even state institution, which alerts us to all the institutional, juridical, and political dimensions that we must also debate. Setting down, laying down, depositing, storing, warehousing-this is also receiving, collecting together, gathering together, consigning (like baggage), binding together, collecting, totalizing, electing, and reading by binding. So the idea of gathering together, as much as that of the immobility of the statutory and even state deposit, seems as essential to the idea of the book as to that of the library. And since the question of the future that we have been asked to consider this evening concerns the book as much as the library, I imagine that there will be no surprise in rediscovering these motifs of the thetic position and the collection: of the gathering together that is statutory, legitimate, institutional, and even state or national.

Let me mention in passing that all these motifs are themselves collected together in the question of the title. Can we imagine a book without a title? We can, but only up to the point when we will have to name it and thus also to classify it, deposit it in an order, put it into a catalog, or a series, or a taxonomy. It is difficult to imagine, or at any rate to deal with, with a book that is neither placed nor collected together under a title bearing its name, its identity, the condition of its legitimacy and of its copyright. And in connection with titles, it happens that the name of this place, Bibliothque, gives its title to a place which, as it already does, will more and more in the future have to collect together (in order to make them available to users) texts, documents, and archives that are further and further away from both the support that is paper and the book form.

This is in truth the question that we are being asked this evening. "What about the book to come?" Will we continue for long to use the word library for a place that essentially no longer collects together a store of books? Even if this place still houses all possible books, even if their number continued to hold up, as I think can be envisaged, even if for a long time books still represented the majority of texts produced, nonetheless the underlying tendency would be for such a place increasingly to be expected to become a space for work, reading, and writing that was governed or dominated by texts no longer corresponding to the "book" form: electronic texts with no paper support, texts not corpus or opus-not finite and separable oeuvres; groupings no longer forming texts, even, but open textual processes offered on boundless national and international networks, for the active or interactive intervention of readers turned coauthors, and so on.

If we still say library or bibliothque to designate this kind of place to come, is it only through one of those metonymic slippages like the one that led to the Greek noun biblion being kept, or the Latin noun liber, to designate first of all writing, what is written down, and then "the book"-even though at the beginning it meant only the papyrus bark or even part of the living bark of a tree?

Still thinking, under a preliminary head, about titles, or copyright brands, the title chosen for this exchange, as it can be read on the posters, says very precisely: "On the Book to Come." The title does not say "The Book to Come," but "On the Book to Come." As you know, the expression the book to come has a long history. It was already a book title, hence a title printed on the cover of a book, the book by Maurice Blanchot entitled, in 1959, Le Livre venir, The Book to Come.

Now Le Livre venir, the title, is printed on the book, on Le Livre venir, and this mise en abyme, a structure that libraries have always favored, takes off once more by itself, when you think that this title, Le Livre venir, printed on Le Livre venir, is also to be found or found again in Le Livre venir, hence within a book, of course, enveloped, gathered up, folded into a book that deals with the book.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from PAPER MACHINEby Jacques Derrida Copyright © 2001 by ditions Galile. Excerpted by permission.
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Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Stanford Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0804746206
• ISBN 13: 9780804746205
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero di pagine: 203
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile