Philosophy, Art, and the Specters of Jacques Derrida By Gray Koc ...

Everything does not occur “within” the text; language, too, is an example of another movement. Language depends on the (non)structure of the trace, the incessant crossing of wakes. Language gives one the necessary possibility of world, subject, thing, thinking, and speaking and simultaneously forbids the possession of each of those determinations. Thus, one is able to take hold of things only in the form of the barest of outlines, as a sketch or a silhouette, in the form of a certain poverty of sensibility and understanding that nonetheless gives itself as an apparition. Art is the paradoxical determination of this apparition that both reveals and conceals. Simply mere, art is just a little more than nothing.

This virtuality of determinations must be recalled at every turn, for there is no turning without it. In his Monologue—a short paragraph that encompasses the entire history of philosophy and poetry—Novalis writes that matters concerning speaking and writing are crazy things and that “valid discourse is merely a word-game (ein bloβes Wortspiel).” Language troubles itself merely with itself (blos um sich selbst bekümmert). When someone, anyone, says anything, anything at all, merely in order to speak (blos spricht), the secret (Geheimnis) of language is laid bare. But, when one tries to say something determinate (von etwas Bestimmten sprechen), the most hilarious and topsy-turvy (verkehrste) things are said. Meaningless chatter is the infinitely serious side of language, and, like mathematical formulae, language is a world unto itself, playing with itself in the infinite play of the relation of things. To Novalis’s observations in the Monologue, one can also add, as a jest, that the verb bloβlegen means “to lay bare, bring to light, expose, unveil,” and die Blβe indicates “bareness, clearing, glade.” I will not explicate these resonances of the metaphysical at the end of philosophy, but merely