21

The Word Processor


computer make the text "too readable" and "too clear" for us. The volume, the unfolding of the operation, obeys another organigram, another organology. I don't feel the interposition of the machine as a sort of progress in transparency, univocity, or easiness. Rather, we are participating in a partly new plot. Heidegger points out that the work of thinking is a handiwork, a Handlung, an "action," prior to any opposition between practice and theory. Thought, in this sense, would be a Handlung, a "maneuver," a "manner," if not a manipulation. But is that a reason for protesting against the machine? Having recourse to the typewriter or computer doesn't bypass the hand. It engages another hand, another "command," so to speak, another induction, another injunction from body to hand and from hand to writing. But it's never at any moment, at least for the time being, a matter of handless writing, writing while keeping your hands in your pockets. Far from it. Handless writing is perhaps what we are doing now as we record our voices. But hands are not only in hands. Basically, the history I have just outlined is not marked by a breaking off of manual gestures or by the event of a hand being cut off; instead it would be another history of the hand, a history still maintained within the hand, a history of a hand-held writing,4 even if, of course, the hand's destination is being slowly displaced, in a long-term history. Ultimately it's the hand we're talking about, and its relationship with the eye, with the rest of the body, and so on. We would instead have to think about other twists of manual labor, about virtually instant transitions, the time of the mutation, in a flash, by sleight-of-hand. Between the pen-tool and the pencil-tool on the one hand, and machines on the other, the difference is not the hand, because it is maintained and stays relevant, it's also the fingers. With mechanical or electrical writing machines, with word processors, the fingers are still operating; more and more of them are at work. It is true that they go about it in a different way. You do it more with the fingers—and with two hands rather than one. All that goes down, for some time to come, in a history of digitality.


LA QUINZAINE LITTERAIRE: In the four-handed book you wrote with Geoffrey Bennington, there is a photograph showing the Bodleian Library miniature that is the subject of The Post Card, in which we see Plato planted behind Socrates, and Socrates writing with a quill and a stylet in his hands. In the photographed scene, the person holding the "quill" is you. Perhaps that's about the invention of a new form of dialogue. A dialogue


Jacques Derrida - Paper Machine