No relationship at all

“the value of displacement, of transport, etc, is precisely constitutive of the concept of metaphor with which one claims to comprehend the semantic displacement which is brought about from communication as a non-semiotic phenomenon to communication as a semio-linguistic phenomenon.”

Again, even keeping in mind that “Signature, Event, Context” is a seminal piece of work on semiotics, I can’t help but wonder if Derrida is laughing at us behind this screen of absence-nonpresence-possiblepresence(?) words and meanings.

In any case, despite an incredible attempt to hide his point in clutters of ivory-tower language, I thought Derrida’s point in this phrase was quite interesting (once I managed to unpack it). He seems to be pointing out that we can’t view linguistic communication simply as a metaphor for oral or physical communication because that would assume that the metaphor is itself a form of communication. However, because there is still a subjective shakiness in bridging the gap between the metaphorical and literal context of a word, we cannot just assume that such metaphor is concrete and defined.

For me, this raises interesting points on Derrida’s later arguments/examples on the “iterability” of the sign. Obviously, the written word can be placed in any context, giving it whatever new meaning the author so chooses- this is something Derrida points out when he writes, “every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written . . . can be cited, put in quotation marks; in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable.”

It seems then that it is not simply an arbitrary relationship that the signifier has with the signified, but simply no relationship at all. If the bridge between metaphor and literal, even the pure citation of text, is so tenuous and shaky as to have an infinite set of meanings…well, instead of a bridge that just seems like a hole to me. A hole that can be filled with whatever we choose to do with it.

Which is maybe what I just did with my quote.