Text/Textuality - Etymology, Text And Semiological Text, Tel Quel, Jacques Derrida: Writing, The Text As Philosophical Paradigm
idea definition resistance misses
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.
Additional Topics
Text derives from the Latin textus (a tissue), which is in turn derived from texere (to weave). It belongs to a field of associated linguistic values that includes weaving, that which is woven, spinning, and that which is spun, indeed even web and webbing. Textus entered European vernaculars through Old French, where it appears as texte and where it assumes its important relation with tissu (a tis…
When in 1972 Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov published The Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language, it was the text as thing, the text of textual criticism, that oriented the first of their two entries on "the text," which focused on the way the text fills a gap in linguistics, rhetoric, and stylistics by providing them with a concept of the autonomous and closed unit t…
While it might be argued that the appearance of Michel Foucault's "Language to Infinity" (an essay openly in dialogue with Blanchot) in an early issue of Tel Quel is what destined the encounter between the journal and the concept of the text, this presupposes rather than establishes the relevance of Blanchot. What clearly makes Tel Quel so pertinent to the
emergence of the te…
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…
Of Grammatology draws out the relation between this text and a critique of the philosophical ethnocentrism expressed in the subordination of writing to speech. Although Derrida frames the issue in terms of a critique of Ferdinand de Saussure's account of the linguistic sign, it is clear that the problems raised regarding Husserl's figure of interweaving are not far away. Indeed, Saus…
Perhaps because Julia Kristeva's earliest articulations of the theory of textuality are framed within the context of a more intimate dialogue with Marxism than Derrida's, the text's materiality receives more direct attention. Specifically, in several of the essays that comprise Séméiotiké (1969) Kristeva links the text with the concept of productivity. This term…
As Tel Quel's "spiritual advisor," Roland Barthes (1915–1980) had enormous influence on the fate of the text. Although he often deferred to the theoretical rigor of others, he was unquestionably the text's most articulate and tenacious cultural ambassador. Like Kristeva he was keen to extrapolate the literary implications of the semiological text, and for this re…
The specific terms in which the integrity of the literary object was questioned by the semiological text helped to catalyze discussion about objects in other disciplines. Kristeva's interest in painting and music has already been remarked. The most concerted effort to make the textual paradigm matter outside literary studies, however, was in cinema studies, where in the course of the 1970s …
Derrida, Kristeva, and Sollers were all still writing. Barthes died in 1980. Of the "textual survivors," none has assumed Barthes's ambassadorial responsibilities. In that sense the hour of the text may have passed. However, precisely because the semiological text posed the question of the literary, indeed the cultural, institution, thereby challenging the very logic of discip…
Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. Edited and translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. ——. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. Originally published in French, 1973. ——. S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. Originally published in French, 1970. Benjamin, Walter. "O…
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