Writing a National Colony: The Hostility of Inscription in the Ge ...

And yet, the metaphor of naturalized colonial settlement contains its own downfall—and in imploding one proposition that entangles scientific exploration with conquest, deconstruction rears its head in infinite regress beyond the confines of doctrine. To demonstrate this, let me recklessly take the metaphor at its word. What are we to make of the statement that the Island of Truth is enclosed “within unalterable limits”? Such an assertion would seem to run counter to the possibility of finding new knowledge altogether. Yet if, as implied, knowledge is to be sought in settlement, not mere travel, then why consider travel? Kant’s colonists seem not to have been informed, since they plan to leave the island in search of other islands to possess. Clearly, Kant’s colonists have got it wrong. As Derrida would tell us, the decision can never be one between land and sea. Rather, the locus of knowledge can only be the beach, that is, the space of meaning opened between the binary of the measured and the incommensurate, truth and its other—an ebbing and flowing space, in which the happy colonist forever chases the waves only to run back up the dunes again in a suspended Polynesian fantasy, or, perhaps, a redemptive Faustian attempt to wrest new land from the sea.

Like the Island of Truth, the presumptive national colony in Chile is inscribed by a collective of maps, surveys, letters, petitions, reports, travelogues, announcements, expense sheets, orders, laws, brochures, and literary and artistic expressions. Even before the first settlers arrive, land has been named, measured, analyzed, and assigned; landscape has been traversed, described, mapped, and organized. Even before the settlers can stake out their first plot of land, land ownership has been imagined and codified into law, bills of sale issued, titles awarded. Following and occurring within a host of writings, material occupation occurs itself as an act of writing, a transcription of desire onto the medium of soil, as John Noyes persuasively argues: