My Derrida notes - hope they make sense too

Derrida’s Double Session

Turns around 'Mime'/'Dumb-Show'/'Mimesis' from Divagations ('Mimique')

Mimesis opens up problem of TIME, cos imitated always comes before imitator 203 – but then Socrates wonders whether thing mimed could be ‘to-come’: Derrida: ‘The overtures of “hope’ (elpis), anamnesis (the future as a past present due to return), the preface, the anterior future (future perfect), all come to arrange things.’

Mneme and mimesis being on a par, since both are unveiling, drawing-out of thing from ‘the crypt where it prefers itself’ 206 – so memory and mimesis v close

D: closure of metaphysics ‘is discreetly but absolutely displaced in the workings of a certain syntax, whenever any writing both marks and goes back over its mark with an undecidable stroke…. This redoubling of the mark, which is at once a formal break and a formal generalization, is exemplified by the text of Mallarmé’ 207

Also: this dislocation ‘does not take place in writing. This dis-location (is what) writes/is written.’

So, Derrida’s hymen, between-space: ‘Thanks to the confusion and continuity of the hymen, and not in spite of it, a (pure and impure) difference inscribes itself without any decidable poles, without any independent, irreversible terms. Such difference without presence appears, or rather baffles the process of appearing, by dislocating any orderly time at the centre of the present. The present is no longer a mother-form around which are gathered and differentiated the future (present) and the past (present). What is marked in this hymen between the future (desire) and the present (fulfillment), between the capacity and the act, etc, is only a series of temporal differences without any central present, without a present of which the past and future would be but modifications. Can we then go on speaking about time, tenses, and temporal differences?’ 220 – and this sets up ‘pure medium of fiction’

D: the hymen’s operations cause ‘the displacement withouth reversal of Platonism and its heritage. This displacement is always an effect of language or writing, and never simply the dialectical overturning of a concept (signified).’ 222

‘What counts here is the between, the in-between-ness of the hymen’. 

Then entre becomes antre 222 – cave, grotto [recess] – also antara, cleft, cave, which also signifies INTERVAL 

Then hymen ‘only takes place when it doesn’t take place, when nothing really happens…’ 223

And it’s right here (at this ‘fold’) that D locates M’s ‘pure medium of fiction’ 224 – hymen is pure medium of fiction

‘What takes place is only the entre, the place, the spacing, which is nothing

But hymen isn’t just negative: ‘At the edge of being, the medium of the hymen never becomes a mere mediation or work of the negative; it outwits and undoes all ontologies, all philosophemes, all manner of dialectics. It outwits them and – as a cloth, a tissue, a medium again – it envelops them, turns them over, and inscribes them.’ 226 ‘This nonpenetration, this nonperpetration (which is not simply negative but stands between the two), this suspense in the antre of per-penetration, is, says Mallarmé, “perpetual”.’ 226 – this is how Mime sets up a ‘pure medium of fiction’

 ‘hymen’ is not a thing in-and-of-itself, but about the between-ness – so it belongs to same category as supplement, différance etc 230

Mimique ‘could be read as a sort of handbook of literature’ 231 – ‘Not only because the metaphor of writing comes up so often (“a phantom… white as a yet unwritten page”)… but because the necessity of that metaphor, which nothing escapes, makes it something other than a particular figure among others. What is produced is an absolute extension of the concepts of writing and reading, of text, of hymen, to the point where nothing of what is can lie beyond them.’ V imp 232

240: ‘The intermission or interim of the hymen does not establish time: neither time as the existence of the concept (Hegel), nor lost time nor time regained, and still less the moment of eternity. No present in truth presents itself there, not even in the form of its self-concealment. What the hymen undoes, outwits, under the rubric of the present (whether temporal or eternal), is the assurance of mastery.’