Writing a National Colony: The Hostility of Inscription in the German Settlement of Lake Llanquihue
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Writing a National Colony: The Hostility of Inscription in the Ge ...

Chapter 1:  Writing the Colony
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Derrida builds on Plato’s Cave Allegory to develop what he calls the “heliotropic” behavior of the sign (Margins 245). As a sunflower that turns toward the sun, the sign turns toward the thing in an attempt to embody it—a futile undertaking, since for the sign to exist, it must inevitably be different from the thing it names. The heliotrope thus exemplifies the principles of différance: The production of meaning occurs in the sign’s continuous and continuously disappointed attempt to be the thing and its necessary recourse to other signs.

Each time that there is a metaphor, there is doubtless a sun somewhere; but each time that there is sun, metaphor has begun. If the sun is metaphorical always, already, it is no longer completely natural. It is always, already a luster, a chandelier, one might say an artificial construction, if one could still give credence to this signification when nature has disappeared. For if the sun is no longer completely natural, what in nature does remain? What is most natural in nature bears within itself the means to emerge from itself; it accommodates itself to “artificial” light, eclipses itself, ellipses itself, always has been other, itself: father, seed, fire, eye, egg, etc., that is, so many other things…(Derrida, Margins 251)

Where the sun is Plato’s metaphor of truth, it becomes Derrida’s metaphor of a metaphor. Whenever there is a sign, we might attempt to paraphrase, it gestures toward a thing. Yet that thing can only ever be conceived of within the articulative field of the sign and, therefore, forever collapses into itself like the picture in a picture. Hence our attempt to paraphrase must also necessarily be heliotrope: a doomed attempt to anchor metaphor in the absence of absolute reference, an effort compelled to substitute one metaphor with another. In defying paraphrase, Derrida’s language reifies the irreducible quality of metaphor.

If one can think of language as both heliotropic and reificatory, then a host of writings can be considered an exchange network of propositions. In the host of writings, arguments are physically circulated, distributed, suppressed, forgotten, copied, quoted, commented on, reproduced, archived, remembered, and manipulated in order to approximate a truth.