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Outward Bound: On Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude

  • Christian Thorne (author)
Chapter of: Speculations 3(pp. 273–289)

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Metadata
TitleOutward Bound
SubtitleOn Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude
ContributorChristian Thorne (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0010.1.12
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/speculations-iii/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
CopyrightThorne, Christian
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2012-09-03
Long abstractilN’yapasdehors-texte. If post-structuralism has had a motto—a proverb and quotable provocation—then surely it is this, from Derrida’s Of Grammatology.1Text has no outside. There is nothing outside the text. It is tempting to put a conventionally Kantian construction on these words—to see them, I mean, as bumping up against an old epistemo-logical barrier: Our thinking is intrinsically verbal—in that sense, textual—and it is therefore impossible for our minds to get past themselves, to leave themselves behind, to shed words and in that shedding to encounter objects as they really are, in their own skins, even when we’re not thinking them, plastering them with language, generating little mind-texts about them. But this is not, in fact, what the sentence says. Derrida’s claim would seem to be rather stronger than that: not There are unknowable objects outside of text, but There are outside of text no objects for us to know. So we reach for another gloss—There is only text...ain’t nothing but text—except the sentence isn’t really saying that either, since to say that there is nothing outside text points to the possibility that there is, in a manner yet to be explained, something inside text, and this something would not itself have to be text, any more than caramels in a carrying bag have to be made out of cellophane.
Page rangepp. 273–289
Print length17 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Christian Thorne

(author)