"What laws do these rebirths, rediscoveries, and occultations too, obey, the distancing or reevaluation of a text that one would naively like to believe, having put one's faith in a signature or an institution, always remains the same, constantly identical to itself? In sum a "corpus," and one whose self identity would be even less threatened than one's own body [corps propre]? What must a text be if it can, by itself in a way, turn itself in order to shine again, after an eclipse, with a different light, in a time that is no longer that of its productive source (and was it ever contemporaneous with it?), and then again repeat this resurgence after several deaths, counting, among several others, those of the author, and the simulacrum of a multiple extinction? ... The web very quickly becomes indifferent to the animal source, who might very well die without even having understood what has happened. Long afterward, other animals again will come to be caught in its threads, speculating, in order to get out, on the first meaning of the weave, that is of a textual trap whose economy can always be abandoned to itself. This is called writing ... "

('Qual Quelle: Valery's Sources', Margins of Philosophy, p 278, Jacques Derrida)

...

For a mixture of reasons I'm rereading Derrida which means re-encountering all the traces of my previous readings all those years ago. So dense are the annotations, underlinings & all too-evident misunderstandings that I resort to photocopying pages & then going back through with an eraser (rubber, if you prefer - gets the prophylactic effect) to enable a virgin page, as such. The ironies latent within each of these actions will be all too evident.

It occurs to me: has this entire Blog been an elaborate detour to these 'original' well-trodden paths? (I'm thinking of all those web metaphorics I wove in the early posts).

& Derrida, of course, the pwoermdist avant la lettre with his differance ...