Text/Textuality

This is not a definition. Well, of course it is—after all, it is appearing in a dictionary—and yet, in a certain and actually rather important way, it is not. Or, put differently, precisely to the extent that the text is not an idea, this is not a definition. Of course, the text can be treated as an idea, perhaps even one whose time has come, but doing so misses something important about what the text is. In fact, what one misses in treating the text as an idea is its resistance to both idealism and the history of ideas, a resistance marked—however obliquely—by the necessarily digressive form of this definition that is not one.