Derridabase

"If writing had for Derrida a privileged empirical version, this would be less manuscripture, or even typescript (...), but the computer, which he has been using for a short while (PS, 496 again). Not just because of the "memory" traces of an electronic archive, which can only with difficulty be thought according to the opposition between the sensible and the intellegible, and more easily as differences of force or capacity (although this is already important [cf. WD, 228], helping us to think writing in a more complicated relation with space and time): but also because of the possibilities of folding a text back on itself, of discontinuous jumps establishing quasi-instantaneous links between sentences, words, or marks separated by hundreds of pages."

The guiding idea of the exposition comes from computers: G.B. would have liked to systematize J.D.'s thought to the point of turning it into an interactive program which, in spite of its difficulty, would in principle be accessible to any user.

"It is not at all by chance that Derrida talks of Joyce's books in terms of supercomputers (AL, 147-8), nor that his thought should communicate in an essential way with certain discourses on so-called artificial intelligence. Nor that we should have conceived this book a little on the model of a "hypertext" program which would allow, at least in principle, an almost instantaneous access to any page or work or mark from any other, and which would be plugged into a memory containing all of Derrida's texts, themselves simultaneously accessible by "themes", key words, references, turns of "style", etc. (which our list of references simulates for better and worse), and then to a larger memory making accessible, according to the same multiple entries, the texts quoted and invoked by Derrida, with everything that forms their "context", therefore just about the (open) totality of the universal library, to say nothing of musical or visual or other (olfactory, tactile, gustative) archives to be invented. Such a textual machine would not in the last instance be a pedagogical, technical tool, nor an efficient and technologist way of "learning Derrida", although it is undeniable, and not at all regrettable, that it would also lend itself to such uses - for the program would also include instructions displaceable according to a chance that would exceed any programming mastery by opening that mastery to it. Such a machine would suspend reading in an open system, neither finite nor infinite, labyrinth-abyss (cf. WD, 123, 160, 298-9), and would thus also retain the memory of the traversals tried out, following their nose, their flair, by all its readers, these being so many texts to plug back into the general network. Joyceware (AL, 148), Derridaware, Derridabase. But this machine is already in place, it is the "already" itself. We are inscribed in it in advance, promise of hazardous memory in the monstrous to-come, like the monumental, pyramidal, but so humble signature, so low, effaced, of Jacques Derrida, here below, now."

This is also why the following text is the linear version of a book without prescribed order of reading, written in Hypertext, to appear subsequently in electronic form.

"We have, obviously enough, been clumsy. Trying to repeat faithfully the essential features of Derrida's thought, we have betrayed him. By saying that deconstruction is, finally, none other than necessity, and that it is always already at work in the most "metaphysical" texts, we have absorbed Derrida, his singularity and his signature, the event we were so keen to tell you about, into a textuality in which he may well have quite simply disappeared."

Geoffrey Bennington, Derridabase
Bennington & Derrida, Jacques Derrida. Chicago UP 1993, pp. 1, 14 and 313-316

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