SPEECH AND WRITING: THE APORIA

The anxieties expressed in this double exergue are those of a writing construed in the simple sense of ‘sensitive’ information intended for dissemination to a very small circle of hand-picked initiates. This pairing is partly intended to show how little has changed in this regard in the twenty-five centuries that have elapsed since the cultural assimilation of writing in Socratic Greece. Written in the 1990s, James Ellroy's American Tabloid is a factional account of the covert operations that surrounded the assassination of John F. Kennedy. This time span – 1959 to November 1963 – saw the composition and publication of Totalité et Infini, and the ‘completion’ of Derrida's monumental review essay ‘Violence et métaphysique: Essai sur la pensée d'Emmanuel Levinas’ – a response which in its perspicuity, detail and length is both unprecedented in the history of written discourse and raises the genres of both ‘essay’ and ‘review’ to an inconceivable, literally vertiginous height – for publication in two consecutive 1964 issues of the Revue de métaphysique et moral.