Reviewing Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology, I stumbled upon this passage:
"But language cannot be truly born except by the disruption and fracture of that happy plenitude, in the very instant that this instantaneity is wrested from its fictive immediacy and put back into movement. It serves as an absolute reference point for him who wishes to measure and describe difference within discourse. One cannot do it without referring to the limit, always already crossed, of an undivided language, where the proper-infinitve-present is so welded to itself that it cannot even appear in the opposition of the proper noun and the verb in the infinitive present.
Language in its entirety, then, plunges into that breach between the proper and the common nouns (leading to pronoun and adjective), between the infinitive present and the multiplicity of modes and tenses. All language will substitute itself for that living self-presence of the proper, which, as language, already supplanted things in themselves. Language adds itself to presence and supplants it, defers it within the indestructible desire to rejoin it.
Articulation is the dangerous supplement of fictive instantaneity and of the good speech: of full pleasure [jouissance], for presence is always determined by pleasure by Rosseau. The present is always the present of a pleasure; and pleasure is always a receiving of presence. What dislocates presence introduces differance and delay, spacing between desire and pleasure. Articulated language, knowledge and work, the anxious research of learning, are nothing but the spacing between two pleasures. "We desire knowledge only because we wish to enjoy" (Second Discourse, p. 143 [p. 171]). And in the Art of Enjoyment, that aphorism which speaks the symbolic restitution of the presence supplied in the past of the verb: "Saying to myself, I enjoyed, I still enjoy." The great project of The Confessions, was it not also to "enjoy [once more]...when I desire it" (p. 585) [p. 607]?" (280).
Certainly, this passage addresses the mark, limit and measure, joy--but in the literate sense. The question of the finitude of Being as being contained within the mark--the articulation, utterance, (ap)promixation--of Being itself has been further developed by Bernard Stiegler. Such finitude, such a "mark," also indicates limits. And yet the relation between Being and language is more than that; it is about presence (in the service of otherwise absence), memory--it is about the desire and compulsion to retain a certain presence (as articulated by Derrida's examination of verb tenses and nouns above). We understand presence as a certain joy (or the potential of it). Being is not only marked (off, as such, and necessarily so: finitude, limits, the instantiation of Being, as such, in its necessary articulation), but the mark which brings forth Being is also the mark that we (Being as we are) maintain to preserve a sense of not only Tradition, but also of presence. It is to maintain the Tradition of Being--and, as such, a Becoming, also (see: the stamp of Being on Becoming; the stamp of Becoming on Being)--in which we find a joy. Derrida said he never fully escaped metaphysics, and perhaps this is why: our desire for presence-ing, for the be-here-now--supplemented by language as need be, the same technic (language) that makes such a possibility available to us in the first place--seems primary and irreducible.
The question, then: how do we shift this useful and perhaps end-limit concept of literate being/becoming into the epoch of Electracy? Can we still use differance in the age of Electracy, and if so, how; and if not, what would be its equivalent? Indeed, the concept of absence/presence has been complicated and compounded by the introduction of digital and internet technologies. Moreover, the very notion of language and literacy has been disrupted. What is the "grammar/syntax" of Electracy, if there is one?
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