(8) Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 315-6.
(9) Alain Badiou, “On Subtraction,” in Theoretical Writings, Edited and translated by Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (New York: Continuum, 2004), 103.
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how presence can become non-substantial I turn to a more philosophical discussion of the foregoing inscriptive actions. “All writing,” Jacques Derrida explains, “in order to be what it is, must be able to function in the radical absence of every empirically determined addressee in general. And this absence is not a continuous modification of presence; it is a break in presence…” ( 8 ) This ‘break’ is a “radical destruction” of presence. Presence is not to be conflated with a personal ‘self’, a continuously modified yet permanent substance that is vitally authorised, inwardly preserved and morally whole. Presence is ontologically void; it is a pre-cognitive category that, as I propose, subtracts identity of empirical content. Subtraction, a term unique to Alain Badiou’s terminology, determines “the void of being as such.” ( 9 ) That writing engages subtraction through radical destruction means that the signature expresses a force of negation, a violent break