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... consigns the memory of his mother to the bottom of this book (1993: 22) and wonders why, but then proceeds on a different connection. I would argue that reconstruct-ion connects my understanding of hypertext to feminism and Derrida by reinterpreting the binary code 0 as the feminine, which is always bottom but not last. She is the base upon which the number 1 rests and she provides the trace that enables 1 (the masculine) to define himself in difference to the other. She is closer to God, I would argue, because she bridges the gap between positive and negative numbers between the abstract and the concrete.
She is not the nothing that might invite a feminist critique of Derrida's writing on the undecidability of woman (Fuss 1989: 13). When Derrida says there is no one place for woman (cited in Fuss 1989: 14) I do not read this as a negative statement that Diana Fuss associates so readily with the slippage into there is no place for woman (ibid. ). In my reconstruct-ion of binary codes there is no 1 place for woman precisely because there is no 0 place for man. The title I link, therefore I am in this paper is much more than a flippant allusion to Ren Descartes. The act of making links in a hyper textual space is an act of reconstruct-ion that counters post-modern cynical warnings about the dangers of immersion and subsequent loss of identity in cyberspace.
It is an active and aggressive reading of texts that enables and demonstrates deconstruction and invites the reader to engage in an equally active form of reconstruct-ion. Bringing this discussion back to Derrida and the circular theme that I wish to explore in this paper, hypertext provides an ideal visual and experiential model to demonstrate some of these concepts. Circularity in terms of the Purloined Letter relates to the circulation of the letter within a particular paradigm a psychoanalytic one. To quote Derrida The letter[the] place of the signifier is found in the place where During and the psychoanalyst expect to find it: on the immense body of a woman, between the legs of the fireplace. Such is its proper place, the terminus of its circular itinerary. It is returned to the sender (Post Card 1987: 440).
If I attempt to read Derrida's writing on the Purloined Letter in a different paradigm, for example, within my binary definition of 0 and 1 as coterminous figures, then Derrida's words have a different meaning to the links I might otherwise feel compelled (obliged) to make in a psychoanalytic paradigm. The Real in hypertext has infinite possibilities and is not limited by a psychoanalytical notion of the Real that depends on the figure of Woman as representative of castration. Derrida's concept of sous rate problematises knowing the Real as anything more than the trace, difference, already and the history that these terms relate to in any particular operation. Western metaphysical systems of thought rely on causality, that is, an original event that causes things to be the way they are. There is an implied notion of active / passive that accompanies any presumed division between an event before and after. There are links that I can make here between oh that describes a number or a letter in the alphabet.
The oh that means zero in my binary schema is supplemented way beyond nothing using Derrida's thought. If there can be no a priori in the logic of difference, then this makes Womans position a priori as the castrated Other, somewhat untenable. It also makes my argument about the coterminous existence of 0 and 1 as equal and dependent on each other in computer language, less of an abstract link than when first introduced to this exploration. The transcendental signifier of the phallus in Lacanian theory is an attempt to halt the erosion of meaning, the slippage of the signifier. I would argue that Circumfession, exposes the tenuous position of the phallus, which is so readily linked in psychoanalytic discourse to the visibility of the penis. No matter how hard Derrida tries to make the memory of his circumcision a consciously painful and traumatic experience, the figure of his mothers visibly decomposing body returns as a gesture to out-gesture Derrida.
The abject Mother, or the Mother as abjection, preoccupies Circumfession and is repeated in repeatedly graphic detail, throughout the text. It is this repeated and circular narrative that evades a finite temporal logic, which arguably highlights the Real (history) in Derrida's text. The Mother as the site of abjection erupts and interrupts Derrida's focus on the phallus. She highlights the impossibility of woman as foreclosure, as the absolute knowing of the Other because she is present, not absent, but replete with holes in her flesh. She is the embodiment of love that preoccupies Derrida in the moment of writing and not love in a moment of loss, because although she no longer recognises him, she is visibly still alive.
I link, therefore I am in the lived-experience of making links, I think in terms of presence and of being in that moment. Whether or not Derrida intended his text to connect with feminism or hypertext is secondary to the feminist purposes of reconstruct-ion that I want to make with his work. I see her naked all the time now, the bedsores opening afresh, both hips, the sacrum [] the death of my mother (1993: 206). The dying mother in a state of abjection suggests to me the possibility of experiencing a sense of I am.
Through blood, prayers and tears (ibid. : 20), Derrida is linked to his mother; her abject body is not I but at the same time it is the origin of I. Esther Georgette Safar Derrida embodied and expelled Jacques Derrida into the world and they were connected by a link (cord) for as long as it took to sever the link that conjoined their bloods. It is conceivable that circumcision is a re-enactment of the severing from the mother, which enables the son to take his proper name from the father. It is the name that is at stake in Circumfession, the lost name of Elijah. The mark of circumcision bears the trace of simulated castration and the imaginary presence of blood that cannot be recalled.
Blood, God, the mother and Derrida's nostalgia for something that is lost is presented in Circumfession as a reconstruct-ion of what is always lost - the link that binds the mother and son or daughter - return to the womb (ibid. : 150). It is the link that remains as a trace and informs the idea of I link, therefore I am. It is the impossibility of Derrida writing his autobiography because an uncircumcised text does not link to a proper name to the recognition of an author or a structure that can only try to say what it means and mean what it says. It fails to confess the blood of the living mother and the trace of blood that cannot be recalled from Derrida's circumcision. In bringing this paper to a conclusion, I want to return to the beginning and clarify how hypertext has altered my perception of Jacques Derrida's writing. My computers electronic memory can retain the trace of every hyper textual manoeuvre that I choose to make.
It allows the text to fold back on itself and enables a fragmentation of the text that no longer adheres to an ordering principle or sequence that is founded on a teleological conception of origins and a final goal. Hypertext disturbs the text and demonstrates Derrida's ideas on the fallacious nature of foundations, the ideological construction of binary oppositions that seek to elevate one term and thus function as a mythical ordering principle that seeks to structure the universe as we can know it. Pace Bennington, I would argue that the convergence of hypertext and critical theory is a useful pedagogical tool that assists students in learning Derrida (1993: 315). As I hope I have demonstrated, it also offers possibilities for the reconstruct-ion of feminism, that is, a way to restore in imagination the place of woman in discourse, epistemology and culture.
What remains at the end of this circular paper is the excess that evades this text the always already before the beginning of this paper, which will always already remain at the end of this paper.
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