Jacques Derrida: DISSEMINATION (AC25.D45513)

To a considerable degree, we have already said all we meant to say. Our lexicon at any rate is not far from being exhausted. With the exception of this or that supplement, our questions will have nothing more to name but the texture of the text, reading and writing, mastery and play, the paradoxes of supplementarity, and the graphic relations between the living and the dead: with the textual, the textile and the histological. We will keep within the limits of this tissue: between the metaphor of the ‘histos’ and the question of ‘histos’ of metaphor.

Since we have already said everything, the reader must bear with us if we continue on awhile. If we extend ourselves by force of play. If we then ‘write’ a bit: on Plato, who has already said on the ‘Phaedrus’ that writing can only repeat (itself), that it “always signifies (semainei) the same” and that it is a “game” (paidia).

[Note: “‘Histos: anything set upright’, hence: I. mast. II. ‘beam’ of a loom, which stood upright, instead of lying horizontal as in our looms (except in the weaving methods used by the Gobelins and in India) to which the threads of the warp are attached, hence: 1. loom; 2. the warp fixed to the loom, hence, the woof; 3. woven cloth, piece of canvas; 4. by anal. spider web; or honeycom of bees. III. rod, wand, stick. IV. by anal. shinbone, leg.”]