The Most Significant Passages in "Force and Signification"

My colleague Scott Koski and I are re-reading Derrida, and we've each got three quotations that strike us as worth rethinking.  Maybe you read "Force and Signification" and have some thoughts about your favorite passages?

[Think of this as our brief version of what was an old Rhetoric Society panel mainstay.  At RSA conferences, scholars would propose "the most significant passage in ___ for rhetoric.]

First, I picked this one, because it's loaded with the power of story, and that story connects to an anecdote from Borges that changed my way of thinking about representation.  The Derrida passage:

In the Theodicy, Theodorus, who “had become able to confront the divine radiancy of the daughter of Jupiter,” is led by her to the “palace of the fates;” in this palace “Jupiter, having surveyed them before the beginning of the existing world, classified the possibilities into worlds, and chose the best of all. He comes sometimes to visit these places, to enjoy the pleasure of recapitulating things and of renewing his own choice, which cannot fail to please him.” After being told all this by Pallas, Theodorus is led into a hall which “was a world.” “There was a great volume of writings in this hall: Theodorus could not refrain from asking what that meant. It is the history of this world which we are now visiting, the Goddess told him; it is the book of its fates. You have seen a number on the forehead of Sextus. Look in this book for the place which it indicates. Theodorus looked for it, and found there the history of Sextus in a form more ample than the outline he had seen. Put your finger on any line you please, Pallas said to him, and you will see represented actually in all its detail that which the line broadly indicates. He obeyed, and he saw coming into view all the characteristics of a portion of the life of that Sextus.”  ["Force and Signification"].   

And now, the Borges story:

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.  [From Wikipedia].

In both cases, the problem of signification, of the ways that a text can represent a reality, are made bare in different ways.  A map can only capture a whole reality if it at the same size and scale of that reality.  A written text requires some godly magic to do the same work.

Second, a passage that emphasizes the radical indeterminacy of writing:

"It is because writing is inaugural, in the fresh sense of the word, that it is dangerous and anguishing. It does not know where it is going, no knowledge can keep it from the essential precipitation toward the meaning that it constitutes and that is, primarily, its future." ["Force and Signification"].   

Finally, this one, because it resonates so deeply with everything I teach and write:

"Speaking frightens me because, by never saying enough, I also say too much." ["Force and Signification"].   

Scott picked these three. Scott is a scholar in Early Modern Studies, and you can probably tell, based on his choices.

First:

“In the seventeenth century they spoke of “the choice and arrangement of words, the structure and harmony of the composition, the modest grandeur of the thoughts.” Or further: “In bad structure there is always something added, or diminished, or changed, not simply as concerns the topic, but also the words.” ["Force and Signification"]

About this passage, Scott reflected in this way:

I find this quite applicable to my early modern work, though I suspect Derrida is referring to French literature specifically, but it could apply to literature in general. I pick up echoes of the writers on which I focus as they pushed back against the tastes and sensibilities of their time, critiquing the work produced by the hacks and pendant writers of London in the late 1590s.

In his second choice, Scott uses Derrida to reflect on the nature of criticism. "The idea that 'metaphor is never innocent' strikes me as being important, for we could interpret it as an indictment, though I suspect Derrida is getting as something a bit deeper."

“Now, in the sphere of language and writing, which, more than the body, “corresponds to the soul,” “the ideas of size, figure and motion are not so distinctive as is imagined, and…stand for something imaginary relative to our perceptions.” But metaphor is never innocent. It orients research and fixes results. When the spatial model is hit upon, when it functions, critical reflection rests within it. In fact, and even if criticism does not admit this to be so.” ["Force and Signification"]

About his third passage, Scott notes that "We push away as we try to pull in closer. Meaning is a moving target, and our understanding—any understanding—is based on our relative position to that which we seek."

“It may be acknowledged, then, that in the rereading to which we are invited by Rousset, light is menaced from within by that which also metaphysically menaces every structuralism: the possibility of concealing meaning through the very act of uncovering it. To comprehend the structure of a becoming, the form of a force, is to lose meaning by finding it.” ["Force and Signification"]

Revisiting the classics with my colleague has been fun -- have we missed a key passage from this work, in your mind? 

More on Scott: Koski has focused on the pamphlets of Robert Greene, arguing that Greene, by adopting such a scandalous persona—near indistinguishable on or off the page—created a buzz that deliberately amplified his popularity and success as a writer; a state cut short by his premature death. With Greene as a foundation, Koski plans to triangulate a young Shakespeare at the beginning of his career.