READING THE TEXT
that it also produces. This text is not there, neither solid nor
servile. It remains to be read. When it is read it becomes part of
a restricted economy. Derrida affirms that which cannot be
reduced to knowledge: writing.
Study Question
What does Derrida’s focus on laughter and play do to the
idea of ‘serious’ thought or of the ‘weakness’ or ‘strength’ of an
argument?
‘STRUCTURE, SIGN AND PLAY IN THE DISCOURSE
OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES’
The title of this most anthologized essay of Derrida’s is notice-
ably more academic than any other in the collection. ‘Structure,
Sign and Play’ identifies and analyses certain elements and forces
at work in the language of a group of academic disciplines and
began public life as a conference paper delivered at a conference
on ‘Critical Languages and the Sciences of Man’ at Baltimore
on the Eastern seaboard of the United States in October 1966.
The human sciences are of course defined by their object,
humanity, and would include psychology, sociology, ethnology,
political science, economics, philosophy and linguistics. On the
French scene, Michel Foucault had recently chosen The Order of
Things: The Archaeology of the Human Sciences, for the title
of his latest book (1966). Although the contemporary thinker
Derrida engages with directly in ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ is the
ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose work is also discussed
at length in Of Grammatology, Derrida’s implicit questioning
of Foucault’s inventive historicism in ‘Cogito and the History
of Madness’ continues here. The engagement is signalled by the
presence of the terms ‘discourse,’ ‘event’ and ‘episteme’ on the first
page of ‘Structure, Sign and Play’. As a historian of concepts,
Foucault’s notion of what an event might be is inevitably very
different from Derrida’s, and the opening of ‘Structure, Sign and
Play’ begins by marking an interest in the event. ‘Perhaps,’ Derrida
begins, keeping determination at bay from the outset:
Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept
of structure that could be called an “event” if this loaded word
did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of
141
DERRIDA’S WRITING AND DIFFERENCE
structural – or structuralist – thought to reduce or suspect.
Let us speak of an ‘event’, nevertheless. (351)
Derrida is speaking cautiously but clearly against the ownership
of the word ‘event’ by structural thinkers and also against a cer-
tain reduction of the event that would take place by a mode of
thought set on accounting for events, determining their place
within what ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’ called ‘the
totality of beings and determined meanings’ or within what
‘Structure, Sign and Play’ calls ‘presence’ or ‘total form’ (352).
An event, then, does not take place within the continuity of pres-
ence. We are not yet told what the content of the event Derrida
is thinking of is, but that its outward form is that of a ‘rupture
and redoubling’ (351). It would seem that it appears to be at the
same time a breakthrough and the repetition of or reflection
upon something that is already the case.
Epistēmē
I have spent some moments on the context of Derrida’s essay,
national and international, but as always in his work, the context
is ancient and still to be determined. He uses a Greek term
strongly associated with Foucault, epistēmē, (literally, ‘knowledge’
or ‘science’) to indicate that the concept and the word ‘structure’
are by no means recent inventions and that they are rooted
not in any particular academic or philosophical discourse but in
ordinary language. Foucault used the notion of epistēmē to elab-
orate a historical theory of the conditions of what may be recog-
nized as knowledge. There is, according to Foucault ‘an historical
a priori’ on the basis of which ideas appear, sciences are esta-
blished, experience reflected in philosophies and rationalities
formed.100 The account of the human sciences in The Order of
Things works with a notion of ‘modern episteme’ that starts at
the beginning of the nineteenth century. In an interview in 1977,
Foucault described The Order of Things as an attempt to write
the history of modern epistēmē, defined as
the strategic apparatus which permits of separating out from
among all the statements which are possible those that will be
acceptable within, I won’t say a scientific theory, but a field of
142
READING THE TEXT
scientificity, and which it is possible to say are true or false.
The epistēmē is the ‘apparatus’ which makes possible the
separation, not of the true from the false, but of what may
from what may not be characterized as scientific.101
Derrida’s notion of epistēmē in ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ describes
something ‘as old as Western science and Western philosophy’
and rather than being approached in terms of historical periods
is a metaphorical displacement of the depths of ordinary language.
A discourse such as philosophy gains rigour, the power to arti-
culate distinctions and wield knowledge, at the expense of what
a note to ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’ calls ‘the original
and essential equivocality of the signifier . . . in the language of
everyday life’ (390n.3). That everyday shifting of the signifier is
crucial to Derrida’s thinking. As a writer he never really leaves
what ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ calls ‘the soil [sol] of ordinary
language’ (351/409). The essay closes with an invitation to think
the ‘common ground [sol]’ and the différance that generate con-
flicting possibilities of interpretation (370/428). Derrida also
wants to think history on the basis of a conception of the event
that is not historically determined.
To return to the opening of the essay, Derrida argues that
since the beginning of Western philosophy, the force of ‘struc-
turality of structure’ has been neutralized or reduced by being
oriented in relation to a fixed point or centre that limits its play.
Centre and totality structurally complement each other. (For
example, the eighteenth-century German philosopher Johann
Gottfried Herder formulated the philosophical quest for knowl-
edge as the search for an immobile centre: ‘We wander over the
Earth in a labyrinth of human fancies: the question is; where is
the central point of the labyrinth, to which all our wanderings
may be traced, as refracted rays to the Sun?’)102 Derrida says it
has been ‘forbidden [interdite]’ (351/410) for there to be substitu-
tion of elements at the centre. Derrida emphasizes this as a dis-
cursive intervention, a prohibition rather than an impossibility,
and links the prohibition to desire and to anxiety. Classically, the
centre holds a structure together by being exempt from the play
that it makes possible. If structurality implies the possibility of
substituting elements in the structure, then the centre is both
143
DERRIDA’S WRITING AND DIFFERENCE
‘within the structure’ as its principle of coherence, ‘and outside it’
as the one element that is not permitted to remain open to the
possibilities of substitution (352). Derrida detects desire behind
this contradictory coherence. Its fixity actually expresses a force.
Derrida’s logic suggests that we perhaps have never under-
stood play and that the history of meaning is a series of failures
to understand it. ‘The concept of centred structure is in fact the
concept of a play based on a fundamental ground, a play consti-
tuted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring
certitude, which itself is beyond the reach of play.’ The purpose
of the certitude is to master the anxiety provoked by being alive,
being already in the text: ‘for anxiety is invariably the result of a
certain mode of being implicated in the game, of being caught
in the game, of being as it were at stake in the game from the
outset.’ The metaphor of archaeology that Foucault used in his
book on madness, in The Order of Things, subtitled An Archaeo-
logy of the Human Sciences, and will continue to deploy in The
Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) presupposes the presence of
the structure to be investigated and that all
repetitions, substitutions, transformations, and permutations
are always taken from a history of meaning – that is, in a
word, a history – whose origin may always be reawakened or
whose end may be anticipated in the form of presence. This is
why one perhaps could say that the movement of any archae-
ology, like that of any eschatology, is an accomplice of this
reduction of the structurality of structure and always attempts
to conceive of the structurality of structure on the basis of
a full presence that is beyond play. (353)
Such changes as have occurred are only a series of substitutions
of centre for centre going under different names. Derrida lists some
of the Greek and French terms for the determination of being as
presence: ‘eidos, archē, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence,
substance, subject), alētheia, transcendentality, consciousness,
God, Man and so forth’.103 The bound energy has, perhaps, begun
to be released from these terms belonging to philosophical dis-
course and the history of metaphysics. A certain deregulation
has begun to be possible.
144
READING THE TEXT
The Event?
But what is this event Derrida has been talking about? What has
made it possible? He sounds as if he might be making a calcu-
lated guess when he says that it ‘presumably would have come
about when the structure of structurality had to begin to be
thought’ (353). According to the logic of what he is saying about
a disruption befalling regulated play, things may be reaching a
point where it is no longer inevitable to talk about structure on
the basis of presence and its many pseudonyms. Certitude and
the denial of both anxiety and desire discussed in his argument
about the centre are no longer necessary to thought. So there
isn’t going to be a first cause in this essay. The argument has
to proceed in another way. The disruption is, as Derrida said
earlier, repetition. From it arises the possibility and necessity of
thinking ‘both the law which somehow governed the desire for a
centre in the constitution of structure, and the process of signifi-
cation which orders the displacements and substitutions for this
law of central presence’. This central presence ‘has never been
itself’. And it has been a quick step from acknowledging that law
of substitution right from the start and at the start to ‘thinking
that there was no centre’ but a sort of function or no-place where
‘an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play’. Negation
of the centre made it possible to believe that ‘everything became
discourse’, where no ‘central’ or ‘transcendental’ signified stood
outside the system of differences that language is. Derrida is
talking about how structuralism became necessary, with its priv-
ileging of language as signification in the understanding of all
sorts of phenomenon and knowledge. It was a way of beginning
to think play. But for Derrida, what is interesting about structur-
alism is not the structures it looks for and expounds but the fact
of structuralism as a reflection and disruption of metaphysics.
If, as Derrida claims in ‘Edmond Jabès and the Question of the
Book’, history is ‘the only thing that begins by reflecting itself’,
then the reflection of and upon structure would be an event that
initiates history.
So, if Derrida cannot tell us when or where the event is, with-
out annulling its effect on our awareness of time and space,
how are we to think about it? Of Grammatology suggests that
we ‘begin wherever we are’ and where we are is ‘in a text where
145
DERRIDA’S WRITING AND DIFFERENCE
we already believe ourselves to be’.104 We don’t go in search of a
starting point; it calls to us. It is stronger than we are and gets us
sniffing about, reading, finding out where we are. To say any-
thing useful about the centre, it is necessary to abandon the neu-
trality and remoteness of expertise.
‘Structure, Sign and Play’ cites a number of kinds of de-centring
modern thought as characteristic of the ‘event’ in the history of
the concept of structure that has prompted Derrida’s own essay.
He notes that these re-thinkings of the centre are destructive
interventions. They aim to keep up philosophical assurance by
amending the language of thought: getting rid of some terms,
adding new ones, re-defining others. But as attempts to destroy
metaphysics, the very conceptual framework within which they
articulate themselves, they deprive themselves of what they attack
and remain naïve about their complicity with it. Metaphysics
remains inevitable. It’s the indispensable branch of philosophy
that deals with ‘first principles of things or reality, including
questions about being, substance, time and space, causation,
change, and identity’ and is ‘the ultimate science of being and
knowing’ (OED). The scene is not simple. A naivety about the
possibility of destroying the part of philosophy that deals with
the first principles of things persists alongside an immense sophis-
tication and ingenuity in the analysis of metaphysics. These
discourses remain attached to the history of metaphysics as its
destruction and therefore can’t help but prolong what they hope
to cut off. Derrida specifies some of these highly purposeful
but necessarily inadequate attempts to think ‘the structurality of
structure’:
the Nietzschean critique of metaphysics, the critique of the
concepts of being and truth for which were substituted the
concepts of play, interpretation and sign (sign without pres-
ent truth); the Freudian critique of self-presence, that is, the
critique of consciousness, of the subject, of self-identity and
of self-proximity or self-possession; and, more radically, the
Heideggerian destruction of metaphysics, of onto-theology,
of the determination of being as presence. But all these
destructive discourses and all their analogues are trapped in a
kind of circle. (354/412)
146
READING THE TEXT
Derrida, committed to the belief that there is something other
than language, is not concerned with making one more verbal
clean-up job. ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ identifies a widespread
tendency to destructiveness that is circular and continues meta-
physics. He insists:
There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphys-
ics in order to shake metaphysics. We have no language – no
syntax and no lexicon – which is foreign to this history; we
can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has
not had already to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit
postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.
If the critique of metaphysical thinking is necessary and just, then
it must take a form other than critique. That is, it must remain
complicit with what it is trying to give up, and not give it up, in
order to give it up. Nothing must be forbidden. This logic is
totally incompatible with the notion of Derrida as the inheritor
of a Nietzschean, Freudian or Heideggerian tradition. Derrida’s
reading of the philosophical tradition is revolutionary but not
polemical.
Why Lévi-Strauss?
Within this general situation, which Derrida recognizes is not
confined to ‘philosophical and scientific discourse’ but is ‘political,
economic, technical, and so forth’, deconstruction is confronted
by a problem of economy and strategy (356). Derrida chooses to
write about the texts of the ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss
because Lévi-Strauss has developed an explicit doctrine relating
to ‘the problem of the status of a discourse which borrows from
a heritage the resources necessary for the deconstruction of that
heritage itself’ (357). For Lévi-Strauss this problem can be pin-
pointed in the opposition between nature and culture, which
he is aware that he has found it necessary to use but that he
also finds impossible to accept. No sooner has he distinguished
the natural as spontaneous and universal, and the cultural as
concerned with variable norms, than he comes up against a phe-
nomenon that is both universal and a ‘system of norms and
interdicts’ – therefore has essential features of both nature and
147
DERRIDA’S WRITING AND DIFFERENCE
culture: incest prohibition. (We note here the recurrence of the
word interdit, here in the form of a noun, that Derrida earlier
applied to the permutation or transformation of elements at
the centre of a structure.) The incest prohibition is an accepted
and consequential fact for Lévi-Strauss’s work but it is not able
to take on the immobility of a centre because its status is equivo-
cal with regard to the traditional nature–culture opposition,
and furthermore it is not reducible to a scandalous exception.
It ‘escapes’ traditional concepts ‘and certainly precedes them,
probably as their condition of possibility’ (358). The possibility
of the ‘whole of philosophical conceptualization’ depends on
something (the origin of the incest prohibition) that philoso-
phical conceptualization is ‘designed’, Derrida claims, to keep
unthinkable.
Scandalous Supplementarity
The notion of scandal returns towards the end of the essay,
where it is associated with ‘a word whose scandalous significa-
tion is always obliterated in French’: supplementarity (365). The
supplement has come up earlier in the book, in ‘Freud and the
Scene of Writing’, where ‘supplementary’ translates the German
word nachträglich, used by Freud to describe the absolute defer-
ral and belatedness of meaning in the supposed movement
between the unconscious and consciousness. From the evidence
surrounding this psychical effect, Derrida made the more gen-
eral argument that presence does not come first. He commented
that ‘the call of the supplement is primary, here, and it hollows
out that which will be reconstituted by deferral as the present’
(266). The supplement decisively affects the notion of life as a kind
of simple being-there, here and now. Neither the unconscious, nor
consciousness, can properly be understood as presences underly-
ing or completing psychic life. Rather, psychic life is the inven-
tion or ‘reconstitution’ of living presence or experience out of
a logic that relates missing meaning to a surplus of meaning, a
‘not enough’ to a ‘too much’, and acknowledges a ‘too late’ at
the heart of the feeling and the meaning of ‘now’. Derrida quotes
the authoritative French dictionary Littré: ‘Suppléer: 1. To add
what is missing, to supply a necessary surplus.’ With presence,
there’s never enough, there is always a desire for absolute presence
and there’s always also an anxiety because presence is untimely
148
READING THE TEXT
and excessive; it isn’t possible to fix or contain its meaning in
one place or at one time. Derrida’s work on and with the word
‘supplement’ is a powerful example of something that Cixous
has identified as follows:
I cannot emphasise enough that his whole philosophy is a
consequence of the displacement of everyday language, a
modern mocking of French as cliché. The writing surarrives
and puts time out of joint, derails it, it makes its entry as the
past-already while holding out the promise of the already-
future that it is, that it will be. It makes your head spin.105
It is as if Derrida was the first to read and write the word sup-
pléer awake to what it really says, has been saying and could say.
To return to ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ and its reading of Lévi-
Strauss: the ‘scandalous signification’ of supplementarity describes
the play of substitutions without centre, as in music, discovered
by Lévi-Strauss in his researches into what he called ‘the syntax
of South American mythology’. This research has philosophical
implications that cannot, Derrida insists, be assimilated within
philosophy. Philosophy requires that structures of knowledge
have a centre. Myth and the structural analysis of myth do not.
Lévi-Strauss’s work implies that ‘the philosophical or epistemo-
logical requirement of a centre’ is itself ‘mythological, that is to
say . . . a historical illusion’ (363). Derrida quotes Lévi-Strauss
describing the science of myths in terms of angled and broken
light. The science of myths includes ‘the study of both reflected
rays and broken rays’ (362). He also emphasizes that structural
ethnology, for all its refusal to stick with a single analytical dis-
course, is not simply an empirical exercise: Lévi-Strauss is not
merely gathering new evidence of or about myths but has devel-
oped a discourse that has itself the uncentredness of myth.
Derrida underlines here that ‘the passage beyond philosophy
does not consist in turning the page of philosophy (which usu-
ally amounts to philosophising badly) but in continuing to read
philosophers in a certain way’ (364).
Lévi-Strauss’s work gives us a clue to the sort of thing Derrida
won’t be advocating. The way of reading philosophers that inter-
ests him will not rely on organising their efforts into a single sys-
tem, a set of propositions to be knocked down or adopted, nor
149
DERRIDA’S WRITING AND DIFFERENCE
will it apply a fixed vocabulary of concepts to their work. Lévi-
Strauss’s model is language itself, understood as a movement of
signification without fixed centre. But where Lévi-Strauss leaves
his syntax of mythology open for fresh data, Derrida wants to
clarify two possible approaches to totalization implied by the
ethnologist’s refusal to ‘accept the arbitrary demand for a total
mythological pattern’ (365). There is the empirical incomplete-
ness brought about by the limits of what a single subject can
do or by a ‘finite richness’ that can’t be mastered. This Derrida
acknowledges, but sets aside, as it has no transformative implica-
tions for philosophy. But totalization is also impossible for an
altogether different kind of reason: ‘because the nature of the
field – that is, language and a finite language – excludes totali-
zation’. Instead of being ‘too large’, the field has intrinsically
‘something missing from it’. What is missing from language is
‘a centre which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions’.
Derrida describes how the absence of a centre, a signified around
which signification could orient itself, gives rise to an unstoppa-
ble and unsettling movement of signs:
One cannot determine the centre and exhaust totalization
because the sign which replaces the centre, which supplements
it, taking the centre’s place in its absence – this sign is added,
occurs as a surplus, as a supplement. The movement of signi-
fication adds something, which results in the fact that there is
always more, but this addition is a floating one because it
comes to . . . supplement a lack on the part of the signified.
(365–6/423)
To use the terms of the essay on Bataille in Writing and Differ-
ence, the supplement is an excess in relation to the processes of
signification that produce meaning. Derrida recognizes the use
of ‘supplement’ by Lévi-Strauss to describe a ‘surplus of signifi-
cation’, a supplementary ration [ration supplémentaire] of signi-
fiers, in relation to the signifieds (the concepts) to which they
refer. Furthermore, Derrida detects supplementarity at the ori-
gin of ratio itself. Ratio signifies a relationship of proportion, as
well as an allowance of something; the word comes from Latin
ratio, reason, from the verb rari, to think. Derrida finds an
150
READING THE TEXT
account of the origins of thought in a variability of the relation
between signifiers and signifieds.
To recap, Derrida is still interested in being and presence but
no longer accepts that whatever is, is there, or that whatever is
not, is not there. Shades of presence become conceivable. It is
time to reconsider life and death. Later, in the 1990s, ontology,
the philosophy of being, will learn how to become hauntology, a
science of ghosts that can transform knowledge itself. The sec-
ond discussion of supplementarity in ‘Structure, Sign and Play’
has radical implications for our understanding of what thought
is. We may have assumed that thought took place on the basis
of something there to be thought about – content, substance,
subject matter. Thought would aim to come nearer to what truly
is, but remains hidden. But Derrida’s reading of Lévi-Strauss
intimates something different. Lévi-Strauss observes symbolic
thought as an ethnologist considering social phenomena and
reading those phenomena as forms of language. Ethnology is
unencumbered by what philosophy has thought about itself.
According to Lévi-Strauss, symbolic thought does not originate
in relation to being as presence but becomes possible thanks to
language, which is a centreless process of signification. Thought
has to be thought as a syntax, taking into account the play of
what Ferdinand de Saussure called the ‘relations and differences
with respect to the other terms of language’ that produce its con-
ceptual and phonic values.106
We could cite as an example the equivocal term ‘totalization’
in Lévi-Strauss. As we have seen, there are two ways of conceiving
the limit of totalization: as empirical finitude or as an a priori
characteristic of language as the play of a finite system. Derrida’s
reading finds both ‘implicitly in Lévi-Strauss’s discourse’ (365).
We could, of course, point to ‘supplement’, too: it means both
a surplus, and that which completes by adding what is missing.
Both these examples show a play between different meanings that
is decisive for thought. It is impossible to determine, one way or
the other, a unified concept of totalization or of supplementarity.
Lévi-Strauss has noticed that the signifier produces more sig-
nification than can be attached to any one signified. There is an
‘overabundance of signifier, in relation to the signifieds to which
this overabundance can refer’ (366). (His observation contradicts
151
DERRIDA’S WRITING AND DIFFERENCE
the implied symmetry in the Saussurean formula that the sign
consists of the dual unity of a signifier and a signified, an acous-
tic mage and a concept.) So that is why it is so difficult to
make sense of everything. There is, according to the ethnologist,
‘a surplus of signification’, and it is this supplement that pro-
vokes symbolic thought. Thought works to redistribute the excess
(or if you prefer, lack) of meaning, so as to maintain the ‘relation
of complementarity’ between signifier and signified ‘which is
the very condition of the use of symbolic thought’. Signification
plays against the organization of signifiers in relation to signifieds
that thought is – and that same play provokes thought to try to
bind signifiers into conceptual systems and maintain itself. If we
flash back briefly to the incest taboo, that primary attempt to
subject desire to meaning, and decide a border between nature
and culture, we can perhaps see better now why Derrida places it
at the origin of conceptual thought.
The Trouble with Play
Lévi-Strauss focuses on a number of words such as mana that
have ‘apparently insoluble antinomies attached to them’. Mana
is ‘force and action, quality and state, noun and verb; abstract
and concrete, omnipresent and localised’. It is ‘in effect all these
things’. But Lévi-Strauss sees that it can be all these things
because it is none of them, but a ‘zero symbolic value . . . a sign
marking the necessity of a symbolic content supplementary
[Derrida’s italics] to that with which the signified is already
loaded, but which can take on any value required’ (366–7). These
zero signifiers can be invoked by thought to master the anxiety
caused by the overabundance of signs in relation to meanings.
Play is not exactly fun: it is characterized by tension, therefore
by desire and anxiety.
Derrida indicates two things in particular that are troubled by
play. One is history and a historicism yet to acknowledge its
complicity with ‘that philosophy of presence to which it was
believed history could be opposed’ (367). Derrida values struc-
turalism for its consequential invocation of ‘the concepts of
chance and discontinuity’. At the same time he acknowledges
that ‘ahistoricism of the classical type’, indifference to history,
won’t do either. Play is problematic for history. It’s also a trial for
presence and Derrida outlines two interpretations, two moods
152
READING THE TEXT
or styles of response to play, as incompatible with the simplicity
of presence. Neither is his own. One focuses on loss, the other
on possibility – in interpretation and in structure, sign and play.
One ‘seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an ori-
gin which escapes play and the order of the sign, and . . . lives the
necessity of interpretation as exile’ (369). The other ‘affirms play
and tries to pass beyond man and humanism’ – where man is the
one who has dreamed of ‘full presence, the reassuring founda-
tion, the origin and end of play’ (370). These two interpretations
are ‘absolutely irreconcilable even if we live them simultaneously
and reconcile them in an obscure economy’. We can’t master
these two possibilities by choosing between them.
Derrida doesn’t end with a prediction, a summary or a pro-
gramme. We have yet to conceive of the common ground of the
two interpretations. We have yet to research their detours and
temporal formations. Derrida says ‘conceive’, not ‘conceptual-
ize’; he invokes the feminine bodily processes of childbearing
and the arrival of an unheard-of living being to those who don’t
want to know what is coming and who want to relegate its his-
torical actuality to the realm of what one can choose to ignore.
Study Question
Can traditional history really tell us whether an event has taken
place? Is it dangerous and irresponsible to ask this question? Or
is it dangerous and irresponsible not to?
‘ELLIPSIS’
The word supplement brings together what is missing from a
totality and what is surplus to it. By calling the last chapter of
Writing and Difference, ‘Ellipse’, Derrida has given the piece
of the book that completes it the name of a hinting figure of
syntax that works by leaving words out. With a more conven-
tional writer one would expect a conclusion here. The essay
which ends Writing and Difference is brief and aphoristic. We
could even call it ‘poematic’, a word used by Artaud. Derrida
used the term to emphasize the value of extricating poems from
the ‘merry-go-round or circus’ that would bring them back to a
‘poetic source’ or ‘to the act or experience’ of their ‘setting-to-
work in poetry or a poetics’.107 Poetry does not work. ‘Ellipsis’
continues the analysis of circularity that began in ‘Edmond
153