Text/Textuality

Philosophically, the semiological or second text was given its earliest and perhaps most enduring formulation in the work of Jacques Derrida. Although it is true that Barthes had a longer, much more intimate, affiliation with Tel Quel (first publishing there in 1961), he would have been the first to admit that most of the heavy theoretical lifting was done by those around him, certainly by Derrida (and earlier Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Jacques Lacan), but also by his protégée, and later master, Julia Kristeva. Certainly, Tel Quel's tenacious defense of the politics of writing (both phonetic and grammatological or arché) is unthinkable in the absence of Derrida. Indeed, Derrida's attack on idealism provided Sollers and others affiliated with the journal with rigorous means by which to link their early commitment to literature with a post-engagement leftism. Derrida's first sustained presentation of the concept of the text appears in Of Grammatology, although one finds important strands of the insight it crystallizes in his earlier reading of Edmund Husserl. There, the text is used in a way consistent with its use in textual criticism, except that it is linked to a meditation on the relation between what makes science scientific and writing, a link forged by making consistent appeal to Maurice Merleau-Ponty's use of the Husserlian concept of "interweaving" in the former's lectures on "The Origins of Geometry" from the 1950s. Invoked both by Husserl and by Merleau-Ponty to designate the encounter between language and thought, interweaving is taken up by Derrida as a way to introduce the rhetoric of textuality within a theorization of writing and its place in the dispute between science and philosophy. For example, in "Form and Meaning" (another early essay on Husserl) Derrida explicitly translates interweaving (given in German as Verwebung) as the Latin texere, and does so in anticipation of a formulation in which linguistic and prelinguistic strata are shown to interact in accord with "the controlled system of a sort of text." "Sort of" here marks the advent of the semiological text—that is, the concept through which Derrida seeks to challenge phenomenology's account of the being of meaning.