7 - auto

Summary

To repeat: the circle coming round upon itself without joining up – the autobiographical auto attracts the a priori threat of this deviation.

First, with regard to the ‘mark’:

The ideal iterability that forms the structure of all marks is that which undoubtedly allows them to be released from any context, to be freed from all determined bonds to its origin, its meaning, or its referent, to emigrate in order to play elsewhere, in whole or in part, another role. I say ‘in whole or in part’ because by means of this essential insignificance the ideality or ideal identity of each mark (which is only a differential function without an ontological basis) can continue to divide itself and to give rise to the proliferation of other ideal identities. This iterability is thus that which allows a mark to be used more than once. It is more than one. It multiplies and divides itself internally. This imprints the capacity for diversion within its very movement. In the destination … there is thus a principle of indetermination, chance, luck, or of destinerring. There is no assured destination precisely because of the mark and the proper name; in other words, because of this insignificance.

(MC, 31/MCh, 16)

Or again:

This is the possibility on which I want to insist: the possibility of extraction and of citational grafting which belongs to the structure of every mark, spoken or written, and which constitutes every mark as writing even before and outside of every horizon of semiolinguistic communication; as writing, that is, as a possibility of functioning cut off, at a certain point, from its ‘original’ meaning and from its belonging to a saturable and constraining context. […]