The text

pure presence and the task of translation

pp. 142-170

in: Martin C. Srajek, In the margins of deconstruction, Berlin, Springer, 1998

Abstract

From an epistemological perspective everything can be understood as a sign, i.e., as an indication of the absence or removedness of pure unadulterated meaning. Linguistic and textual practice as the production of signs is what Jacques Derrida calls writing (écriture). He uses the concept of writing as a pattern to show that différence, i.e. a differing/deferring movement, is vital not only to language but to the whole world. This is true despite his cautioning remarks at the beginning of Of Grammatology, where he refers to the "problem of language," the "devaluation of the word"language'," the "inflation of the sign "language'," but he also makes clear that this is a problem that can no longer be contained within the framework of linguistics only, for it has "invaded, as such, the global horizons of the most diverse researches and the most heterogeneous discourses, diverse and heterogeneous in their intention, method, and ideology."¹ He asserts that the epoch that we are living in "must finally determine as language the totality of its problematic horizon."² It is this epoch, then, that enables the deconstractive strategy.