A first remark

Brief One

Starting at the top. Debbie's brief was as follows:

Make a work in response to this quote:

"The gesture of sous rature (putting under erasure) implies 'both this and that' as well as 'neither this nor that', undoing the opposition and the heirachy between the legible and the erased"

The quote is from Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology and used in relation to Ari Kakkinen's work. His photographs feature places, spaces, objects, and human beings covered by white cloth, only the shape of what was there before remains.

The quote is part of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Translator's Preface to Of Grammatology. The words are taken from footnote 54. The quote also appears on the home page of Ari Kakkinen's website. It concerns a passage in Edmund Husserl's introduction to Phenomenology.

54. Cartesianische Meditationen, p. 6o; Cartesian Meditations, p. 6o. It is a common error to equate the phenomenological reduction, "putting out of play," and the sous rature, "putting under erasure," (see, e.g., Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism [Princeton, 19721, p. 216). The distinction is simple: The gesture of bracketing implies "not this but that,' preserving a bipolarity as well as a hierarchy of empirical impurity and phenomenological purity; the gesture of sous rature implies "both this and that" as well as "neither this nor that" undoing the opposition and the hierarchy between the legible and the erased.

Whilst Husserl is concerned with:

"putting out of play" of all positions taken towards the already-given Objective world, and in the first place, all existential positions . . .

Spivak deals with a distinct position evident in Derrida's work concerning direct empirical engagement with existence which does not require a bracketing of 'data' and existential positions but rather an act of erasure that allows a very practical deletion of words that at the same time allows qualities assocated with their 'present usage' and presence to stand. Taking the "concept" of Being as an example, it is possible to differentiate between the concept in use within speech or writing and that Spivak calls the "precomprehended question of Being". It is a question that bores into the fabric of the territory where language and the words it draws upon touch upon traces of 'beingness' beyond the limits of signification.

To use an analogy it might be possible to talk about a heart of darkess within my direct and immediate experience of life into which language can not penetrate but without which there would be nothing to describe its boundary - a boundary upon which my own sense of myself is construed.

So I will take as a point of departure Wikipedia's entry for sous rature.

Sous rature

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sous rature is a strategic philosophical device originally developed by Martin Heidegger. Usually translated as 'under erasure', it involves the crossing out of a word within a text, but allowing it to remain legible and in place. Used extensively by Jacques Derrida, it signifies that a word is "inadequate yet necessary";[1] that a particular signifier is not wholly suitable for the concept it represents, but must be used as the constraints of our language offer nothing better.

Sous rature has been described as the “typographical expression of deconstruction”[2] which is a movement in literary theory that seeks to identify sites within texts where key terms and concepts may be paradoxical or self-undermining, rendering their meaning undecidable.[3] To extend this notion, deconstruction and the practice of sous rature also seek to demonstrate that meaning is derived from difference, not by reference to a pre-existing notion or freestanding idea.[4]

History

Sous rature as a literary practice originated in the works of German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). The practice of placing words or terms under erasure first appeared in Heidegger's work in a letter he penned to Ernst Jünger in 1956 titled "Zur Seinsfrage" (The Question of Being), in which Heidegger seeks to define nihilism.[5] During the course of the letter, Heidegger also begins to speculate about the problematic nature of defining anything, let alone words. In particular, the meaning of the term ‘Being’ is contested and Heidegger crosses out the word, but lets both the deletion and the word remain. “Since the word is inaccurate, it is crossed out. Since the word is necessary, it remains legible.”[6] According to the Heideggerian model, erasure expressed the problem of presence and absence of meaning in language. Heidegger was concerned with trying to return the absent meaning to the present meaning and the placing of a word or term under erasure “simultaneously recognised and questioned the term’s meaning and accepted use”.[7]

French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) adopted this technique and further explored the implications of Heidegger's erasure and its application in the wider setting of deconstructive literary theory. Derrida extended the problem of presence and absence to include the notion that erasure does not mark a lost presence, rather the potential impossibility of presence altogether - in other words, the potential impossibility of univocity of meaning ever having been attached to the word or term in the first place. Ultimately, Derrida argued, it was not just the particular signs that were placed under erasure, but the whole system of signification.[7]