| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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not end at the last word and engage other texts, other readers, and other realities. These connections evidence how nothing fully exists either outside of or inside of the text without consideration of difference. Texts function in the absence of reality as “the immediate presence of content” (243), presence that requires further signs and supplementation which point to additional chains of signs and supplementation that defer, rather than assure, the fulfillment of meaning.
Texts are imbued with potential meanings of difference, but also are imbued with actions and consequences rooted in the empirical world. Texts are not merely typewritten records of language or supplements of oral discourse, but are narratives that enable reconstructions of meaning and identity. The black squares of print are not the boundaries of conceptualization, and their white margins are not the only spaces difference might occupy. The world and the reader as subject are also texts, and their presences exist both within and beyond their structural fixity. Through deferrals of meaning, the supplement signifies an “in-betweenness” of meaning and nonmeaning, of identity and nonidentity, of existence and nonexistence that expresses “inherent lack” of reified center (Derrida, Of Grammatology 88–89).
Decentering texts and destabilizing signs allow us to trace meanings of difference outside of textual and theoretical margins and enable us to partake in the unrestricted semantic play of limitless possibilities of interpretation. Derrida offers “two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, [and] of play.” The first is the “lost or impossible presence of the absent origin” (Writing and Difference 292). The second is “the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin” (292). Recognizing the possibilities of difference prevents the totalization of opinions by reengaging