Log24

https://www.parrhesiajournal.org/
parrhesia03/parrhesia03_blackburne.pdf

Parrhesia  No. 3 • 2007 • 22–32

(Up) Against the (In) Between: Interstitial Spatiality
in Genet and Derrida

by Clare Blackburne

Blackburne — www.parrhesiajournal.org 24 —

"The excessive notion of espacement  as the resurgent spatiality of that which is supposedly ‘without space’ (most notably, writing), alerts us to the highly dynamic nature of the interstice – a movement whose discontinuous and ‘aberrant’ nature requires further analysis."

Blackburne — www.parrhesiajournal.org 25 —

"Espacement  also evokes the ambiguous figure of the interstice, and is related to the equally complex derridean notions of chora , différance , the trace and the supplement. Derrida’s reading of the Platonic chora  in Chora L Works  (a series of discussions with the architect Peter Eisenman) as something which defies the logics of non-contradiction and binarity, implies the internal heterogeneity and instability of all structures, neither ‘sensible’ nor ‘intelligible’ but a third genus which escapes conceptual capture.²⁵ Crucially, chora , spacing, dissemination and différance  are highly dynamic concepts, involving hybridity, an ongoing ‘corruption’ of categories, and a ‘bastard reasoning.’²⁶ Derrida identification of différance  in Margins of  Philosophy , as an ‘unappropriable excess’ that operates through spacing as ‘the becoming-space of time or the becoming-time of space,’²⁷ chimes with his description of chora  as an ‘unidentifiable excess’ that is ‘the spacing which is the condition for everything to take place,’ opening up the interval as the plurivocity of writing in defiance of ‘origin’ and ‘essence.’²⁸  In this unfolding of différance , spacing  ‘insinuates  into  presence an  interval,’²⁹ again alerting us to the crucial role of the interstice in deconstruction, and, as Derrida observes  in Positions ,  its  impact  as  ‘a movement,  a  displacement  that  indicates  an  irreducible alterity’: ‘Spacing is the impossibility for an identity to be closed on itself, on the inside of its proper interiority, or on its coincidence with itself. The irreducibility of spacing is the irreducibility of the other.’³⁰"

25. Quoted in Jeffrey Kipnis and Thomas Leeser, eds., 
Chora L Works. Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman  
(New York: The Monacelli Press, 1997), 15.

26. Ibid, 25.

27. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy.
(Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1982), 6 and 13.

28. Derrida, Chora L Works , 19 and 10.

29. Ibid, 203.

30. Derrida, Positions , 94.