The endless end of the book

Most of my favorite quotes in Derrida’s Paper Machine come from the first full chap­ter, “The Book To Come.” (The title is also the title of a book by Mau­rice Blan­chot, and a chap­ter in that book, which is largely about the poet Stéphane Mal­larmé.) Samples:

A ques­tion trem­bling all over, not only with that which dis­turbs the his­tor­i­cal sense of what we still call a book, but also with what the expres­sion to come might imply—namely more than one thing, at least three things: 

1. That the book as such has—or doesn’t have—a future, now that elec­tronic and vir­tual incor­po­ra­tion, the screen and the key­board, online trans­mis­sion, and numer­i­cal com­po­si­tion seem to be dis­lodg­ing or sup­ple­ment­ing the codex (that gath­er­ing of a pile of pages bound together, the cur­rent form of what we gen­er­ally call a book such that it can be opened, put on a table, or held in the hands). The codex had itself sup­planted the vol­ume, the vol­u­men, the scroll. It had sup­planted it with­out mak­ing it dis­ap­pear, I should stress. For what we are deal­ing with is never replace­ments that put an end to what they replace but rather, if I might use this word today, restruc­tura­tions in which the old­est form sur­vives, and even sur­vives end­lessly, coex­ist­ing with the new form and even com­ing to terms with a new economy—which is also a cal­cu­la­tion in terms of the mar­ket as well as in terms of stor­age, cap­i­tal, and reserves.

2. That if it has a future, the book to come will no longer be what it was. 

3. That we are await­ing or hop­ing for an other book, a book to come that will trans­fig­ure or even res­cue the book from the ship­wreck that is hap­pen­ing at present. 

This — espe­cially the first part — is one of my favorite moves, that of the LONG his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive, cou­pled with that crit­i­cal sen­si­bil­ity, bor­rowed from Fer­di­nand de Saussure’s struc­tural­ist lin­guis­tics, that mul­ti­ple terms coex­ist but change and shift in their rel­a­tive val­ues and sig­nif­i­cance as they jos­tle against one another. Lin­guis­tic change is never a straight sub­sti­tu­tion, but a high-friction acco­mo­da­tion to the new. In fact, so is most cul­tural change — the dis­tinc­tion isn’t between live and dead, or even (entirely) high and low, but between forms that are resid­ual, dom­i­nant, or emerging.

But this posi­tion, which could just make for a tidy defla­tion — we’ve seen all of this before — is joined to an acknowl­edge­ment that what we are expe­ri­enc­ing is a ship­wreck. It’s just not (or at least not only) the ship­wreck we think it is:

Now what is hap­pen­ing today, what looks like being the very form of the book’s to-come, still as the book, is on the one hand, beyond the clo­sure of the book, the dis­rup­tion, the dis­lo­ca­tion, the dis­junc­tion, the dis­sem­i­na­tion with no pos­si­ble gath­er­ing, the irre­versible dis­per­sion of this total codex (not its dis­ap­pear­ance but its mar­gin­al­iza­tion or sec­on­dariza­tion, in ways we will have to come back to); but simul­ta­ne­ously, on the other hand, a con­stant rein­vest­ment in the book project, in the book of the world or the world book, in the absolute book (this is why I also described the end of the book as inter­minable or end­less), the new space of writ­ing and read­ing in elec­tronic writ­ing, trav­el­ing at top speed from one spot on the globe to another, and link­ing together, beyond fron­tiers and copy­rights, not only cit­i­zens of the world on the uni­ver­sal net­work of a poten­tial uni­ver­si­tas, but also any reader as a writer, poten­tial or vir­tual or what­ever. That revives a desire, the same desire. It re-creates the temp­ta­tion that is fig­ured by the World Wide Web as the ubiq­ui­tous Book finally recon­sti­tuted, the book of God, the great book of Nature, or the World Book finally achieved in its onto-theological dream, even though what it does is to repeat the end of
that book as to-come. 

These are two fan­tas­matic lim­its of the book to come, two extreme, final, eschatic fig­ures of the end of the book, the end as death, or the end as telos or achieve­ment. We must take seri­ously these two fan­tasies; what’s more they are what makes writ­ing and read­ing hap­pen. They remain as irre­ducible as the two big ideas of the book, of the book both as the unit of a mate­r­ial sup­port in the world, and as the unity of a work or unit of dis­course (a book in the book). But we should also per­haps wake up to the neces­sity that goes along with these fantasies. 

Two fan­tasies! Both gen­er­a­tive! Both prob­a­bly unavoidable! 

This is why Der­rida is so good.