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The Word Processor


tendency to be dominated, even in daily life, and across the entire universe, by these types of technological devices for writing and archiving? Because everything is involved here—the relationships of thinking to the "image," to language, to ideas, to archiving, to the simulacrum, to representation. How would Plato have had to write what we call the "myth of the cave" so as to take account of these transformations? Would he only have had to change the rhetoric of his teaching, or would he have had to think quite differently about the ontological structure of the relationships between ideas, copies, simulacra, thought and language, and so on?


LA QUINZAINE LITTERAIRE: Until quite a recent period, which we could locate at the end of the Middle Ages, the transcription we have, the text, is never the author's, from his hand to the quill. With the signed manuscript there appeared a new configuration that would last for a number of centuries and which we are now coming out of, to return to the point of departure, the separation of the powers of thought and writing.

DERRIDA: There is certainly a sort of parenthesis there, several centuries long. In Greece in the fifth and fourth century B.C.E., in Plato's time, the manuscript was not an object of veneration. The signature did not yet figure; it only started to be fetishized much later on. This is not the end but we are probably moving to another regime of conservation, commemoration, reproduction, and celebration. A great age is coming to an end.

For us, that can be frightening. We have to mourn what has been our fetish. The compensations and the fetishistic substitutes confirm that the destruction is going on (you know, I don't believe there are limits to fetishism, but that's another story, if not another subject). We are frightened and rejoicing witnesses. We have experienced the transition from the pen to the typewriter, then to the electric typewriter, then to the computer, and all this in thirty years, in a single generation, the only one to have made the whole crossing. But the voyage continues ...


LA QUINZAINE LITTERAIRE: Word processing doesn't only raise problems about writing but also, in the shorter or longer term, problems about transmission.

DERRIDA: Yes, serious problems. Because of what we were saying just now, that the text is instantly objectified and transmissible, ready for publication, it is virtually public and "ready for printing" from the moment of its writing. We imagine, or we tend to believe or make people believe, that


Jacques Derrida - Paper Machine