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‘Let us Italicise’James Ramsey Wallen aa PhD candidate in Literature at the University of California ,Santa CruzPublished online: 25 Mar 2013.

To cite this article: James Ramsey Wallen (2013) ‘Let us Italicise’, European Journal of EnglishStudies, 17:1, 41-53, DOI: 10.1080/13825577.2012.755001

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James Ramsey Wallen

‘LET US ITALICISE’

Blurring form and content in Derrida

This essay examines the abundant emphasising through italics that goes on in Derrida’swork and its English translations and argues that the use of italics can be seen to reiteratesome of Derrida’s major theoretical concepts on the level of literary practice. The paper isdivided into three sections, preceded by an introduction that expounds the importance ofemphasis in Derrida’s writing and on the history of the use of the italic font in general.The first section, ‘Italics-as-Supplement’, offers a general theory of italics as a mode ofsignification peculiar to print and raises the question of just what the verb ‘italicise’ mightentail. The second section, ‘Italics-as-Trace’, focuses on the use of italics in Derrida’sprose and the notion of authorial investment that any italic implies. The third section,‘Italics-as-Spectre’, examines how Derrida uses italics to condition our readings of thetexts that he himself cites.

Keywords Derrida; emphasis; italics; italicising; supplement; trace; spectre;recursivity

Introduction

In Gayatri Spivak’s translation of Of Grammatology, there is a moment – in fact thereare two of them – when Jacques Derrida prefaces a long quotation of Rousseau withthe playful imperative, ‘Let us italicise’ (Derrida, 1976: 202, 278).1 Although theFrench ‘Soulignons’ literally means ‘let us underline’ (but also ‘let us emphasise’ or‘let us stress’), one could certainly say it is as if Derrida had written ‘Let us italicise’,since ‘italicising’ is indeed what occurs in both the French and English texts. Whileunderlining will be discussed later in this essay, Derrida’s manipulation of emphasisthrough the visual display of italics is my primary focus. To the best of my knowledge,the closest Derrida ever comes to a rigorous investigation of his own use oftypographic emphasis is this passing parenthetical question from Limited Inc.:

Je souligne donc certains mots ou fragments de mots (que se passe-t-il quand onsouligne dans une citation, certains fragments de mots? Est-ce encore « citer »,« utiliser », « mentionner »?).2

(Derrida, 1990: 40, my italics)

Although unfortunately Derrida does not pursue this line of thought, the abundant useof italics that occurs throughout his work constitutes an integral part of his writings,

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of his readings, and of his attempts (in Of Grammatology and elsewhere) to collapse thedistinction between the two. Indeed, there could hardly be a more tangible exampleof blurring the line between reading and writing than including and marking the text ofanother writer. Italics in this case represent an inscription of the act of reading, anaction at once voyeuristic and performative; they change the text while leaving thelanguage of the text intact. Throughout Derrida’s work italics offer abundantexamples of what Katharine Hayles terms ‘recursive symmetry’ or ‘the same formrepeated . . . across different length scales’ (Hayles, 1991: 10). In Derrida’sdeconstruction of the reading/writing binary, for instance, the argument that headvances through his use of language is recursively reiterated on another scale throughhis use of print.3 By using italics to emphasise certain elements of the texts he cites,Derrida makes legible his readings of these texts and demonstrates how any reading isa writing – a mental transcription of the meaning one discovers/creates through one’sinteraction with a text.

Apart from blurring the distinction between reading and writing, italics can alsobe seen to reiterate such key Derridean concepts as spectrality, the supplement, thetrace, and play. On the most basic level, italics are a form of playing with typeface, andDerrida himself uses the phrase ‘playing with italics’ to describe the process of writingon a word processor (2005: 26). When considering the play italicisation entails,however, one should keep in mind that italics inevitably serve both to open and torepress the proliferation of meaning in any given sentence. To illustrate this, we mightplay with Derrida’s maxim: ‘Blindness to the supplement is the law’ (1976: 149).4 In thesentence as Derrida gives it to us, the phrase ‘Blindness to the supplement’ is opened up,impregnated with a special significance. Our attention is directed towards the far-reaching implications of this phrase, to the fact that we can never understand itsprecise meaning because it seeks to relate our relationship to something that ‘has nosense and is given to no intuition’ (149). ‘Blindness to the supplement is the law’ impliesan insight that must by definition remain somewhat inaccessible, a concept toocomplex to be fully encapsulated in a phrase and too expansive to be parsed intocomponent parts or enumerated into a list of potential implications.

Yet if italics here serve to ‘open up’ the phrase ‘Blindness to the supplement’, theysimultaneously work to repress some of the ways in which the sentence as a wholemight be read. If one were to re-italicise the sentence to read ‘Blindness to thesupplement is the law’, for example, the italicisation of law alone might imply that thisblindness was an externally imposed commandment that one might transgress. Itwould be difficult and, in the context of intention, probably misguided to performsuch a reading of the sentence as italicised by Derrida. In Derrida’s version, somepotentially significant possibilities of the word ‘law’ are de-emphasised and repressedthrough the emphasis placed on the opening phrase.

The potentially sterilising effects of italics are also observable in italicised phrases.In ‘Blindness to the supplement is the law’, for instance, the potential significance of theitalicised the (‘Blindness to the supplement’) is dissipated into the mix of the italicisedphrase. The same is true in the case of the italicised sentence. The italicised sentenceassumes a similar relationship to its surrounding paragraph as the italicised word doesto its surrounding sentence. In this case, the meaning of the sentence as a whole isopened up at the expense of the specific words that comprise it. In this way, the playof italicisation shapes and delimits the ways in which readers are invited to play with

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meaning and provides a recursive illustration of Derrida’s assertion (1988: 149–50)that ‘[o]nce there is the exercise of force in the determination and imposition ofmeaning, and first of all in the stabilizing determination of a context, it is inevitablethat there be some form of repression’. Italicisation, as an ‘exercise of force in thedetermination and imposition of meaning’, conditions the rules by which we play andestablishes contexts and precedents that indicate which words/phrases/sentences weshould play with, and how much.

In some cases, Derrida’s italics can be seen to exemplify not only concepts hepropounds but also concepts and practices that he is attempting to problematise andeven denounce. Specifically, Derrida’s italics at times betray a certain proprietorial or,to use his own word, ‘prioprietorial’5 relationship to the texts he cites, particularlywhen those texts are his own. At the same time, Derrida’s italics can threaten toreintroduce presence, or rather a desire for presence, into his writing . . . mostnotably the presence of Derrida as reader.

There is in fact a historical connection between the invention of italic font and thedesire for authorial presence. Italic print was first stamped onto paper in 1501 Veniceby the press of Aldus Manutius, a printer who wanted a typeface that could be moreeasily condensed onto the printed page. Manutius used his new font to put out largenumbers of inexpensive, compact, portable books ‘intended to be personalpossessions and to popularize classical Greek and Latin authors and Italian poets aspart of the Humanist movement’ (Finkelstein and McCleery, 2005: 48). For the firsttime, travellers could buy affordable collections of Horace or Juvenal that could bestowed in their saddlebags, and non-scholars were empowered to develop moreintimate relationships with the authors of antiquity. Moreover, the Aldine italic wassupposedly intended to imitate the vernacular cursive handwriting of its day – there iseven a tradition, likely apocryphal, that it was specifically designed ‘to imitate thehandwriting of Petrarch’ (Updike, 1962: 128) – and thereby to cultivate a moreinformal interaction with the printed page.

Italic font was thus designed from its conception to evoke an aesthetics ofpresence through its resemblance to handwritten manuscripts. (And what present-daybook-lover has not felt a twinge of pleasure on viewing a handwritten document froma favourite author, a sense that one is somehow closer to that author by having readwords written in his or her ‘own hand’?) As it gradually ceased to be printed on itsown and came to be used in concert with Roman type, italic font served a variety ofuses though it was not until the end of the eighteenth century that italics began to beused to convey emphasis in novels and in treatises on public speaking. Since that time,italic font has often been used to overcome some of the supposed shortcomings of thewritten word that Rousseau posits in his Essay on the Origin of Languages (c.1750) –most notably its lack of any marks to convey passion or irony.

One of the most sustained and original uses that Derrida makes of italics is in‘Faith and Knowledge’ (‘Foi et savoir’), a paper originally given at a conference on‘La Religion’ held on the island of Capri. The first part of the paper is entitled (andwritten in) ‘Italiques’, which Derrida describes as a way of indicating his physicalpresence on Capri and of potentially symbolising ‘tout ce qui peut incliner – a l’ecart, auregard du romain en generale. Penser « religion », c’est penser le « romain ». Cela ne se fera nidans Rome ni trop loin hors de Rome’ (Derrida, 1996: 12).6 The second half, written inthe catacombs of Rome itself, is of course in Roman font.7 Since the essay argues that

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Enlightenment thinking is ultimately inseparable from what Derrida calls‘christianisme’, one could say that by calling attention to the relationship betweenRoman and italic font – typefaces pointing to Catholic and Humanist printingtraditions, respectively – Derrida’s text recursively echoes the co-dependent faith/knowledge distinction that, Derrida claims, has become a constitutive feature ofChristianity itself. The first half of ‘Faith and Knowledge’ also implicitly explores thefact that Roman font within italics serves an analogous but not quite identical functionto italics within Roman font. At the same time, the fact that Derrida increasinglymakes use of bold typeface in ‘Faith and Knowledge’ suggests that italics can no longerserve quite the same function after they have been utilised as the ‘standard’ font for thefirst part of the essay. One might even point to Derrida’s ‘Caprian italics’ as arecursive illustration of how italics are used to demarcate the presence of a ‘foreign’language within a text, cases in which italics can be seen as ‘pointing towards’ theparent text’s momentarily absent mother tongue.

Even the more problematic consequences of Derrida’s italics can themselves beread as further examples of recursivity, rebellious exemplifications of Derrida’s axiomthat ‘the writer writes in a language and in a logic whose proper system, laws and lifehis discourse by definition cannot dominate absolutely’ (Derrida, 1976: 158). Onecannot write in a literary language – mathematics might be a different story – withoutengaging in some potentially presence-affirming rhetoric, and this is true whether ornot one wishes to be read in a presence-affirming fashion. Similarly, the rules ofacademic discourse demand at least occasional assertions of propriety (my italics –J.W.), even if one takes great care to saturate such assertions with irony. Thus, evenif some ostensibly banished authorial practices manage to sneak their way back intoDerrida’s writing via his use of italics, the irrepressible persistence of these practicesalso serves to recursively echo his assertion that reading/writing can never completelyfree itself from the language of metaphysics, nor close its borders absolutely to therhetoric of presence and propriety.

Italics-as-supplement

The Derridean concept that best represents both italics themselves and the act ofitalicisation is the supplement. Italics are a supplement to and of the printed word: theycan at once signify and ‘fill-in-for’ an absent vocal inflection, an underline, or amoment of intense reading. Like Derrida’s supplement, italic font is both addition andsubstitution: ‘It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; ifit fills [comble], it is as if one fills a void’ (Derrida, 1976: 145). Derrida’s use of thesomewhat untranslatable ‘combler’ is significant here: the italic-as-supplement not only‘fills in’ for what it signifies, it also ‘makes good’ on the deficits of the written wordthat Rousseau posited regarding passion and irony, and satisfies the writer’s desire foradditional means to convey investment. Italics indicate an absence, at the very leastthe absence of whatever normal or ‘standard’ font they are being used to supplement;as-supplement, italic font can only function in the absence of what it supplements, andthrough its difference from what it is added to.

Thinking the italic-as-supplement is especially helpful in trying to clarify some ofthe connections between italic font and presence I am making in this essay. Since

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many of Derrida’s texts were originally given as lectures or presented at colloquia, itis important not to overlook the status of his italics as stand-ins for his absent vocalinflections, for the voice of Derrida and the audible investments it would be making werehe reading these words aloud. Thus, another way in which italics exemplifysupplementarity is by signifying ‘the impossibility and therefore the desire of purepresence’ (Derrida, 1976: 244), the pure presence of an author’s act of reading or anauthor’s investment in a word.

If an italicised word can be understood to represent some authorial investment ofpassion, irony, or emphasis within a written word, it should also be understood tosignify the impossibility of imposing onto ink and paper the corresponding vocalinflections through which one might attempt to convey such investments in speech.The ability of italics to function as a stand-in for vocal inflections, and vice versa, thusprovides a powerful recursive illustration of the structure of supplementarity itself.Like a signature, which supplements the (absent) voice of someone whose former-having-been-present it attests to, the condition of possibility that allows italics to standin for vocal inflections is precisely ‘the condition of their impossibility, of theimpossibility of their rigorous purity’ (Derrida, 1988: 20). The impossibility ofmaking vocal inflections present on a printed page thus in fact enables their effectivesupplementation by italics, which function in this case by making us more acutelyaware of the absence of sound.

Another intriguing aspect of the italic-as-supplement is its relationship to print.Ironically, since it was originally designed to resemble handwriting, italic font cannotbe inscribed by hand but only through the intervention of a word-processor and/orprinter. Yet italics are frequently used to supplement handwritten underlines, and onecould argue that they function better in this role than printed underlines. Onhandwritten and typewritten manuscripts, the authorial investments that italics conveyare usually indicated through underlining, and when one looks at such manuscriptsthis investment may even be reinforced by a mental image of the writer pressing pento paper, expressing his or her mental investment in the word via the physicalinvestment of additional ink. The printed underline inspires no such image, andindeed its resemblance to the handwritten underline can make it seem that muchmore sterile and mechanical, a reminder of what has been sacrificed to the processedword and the loss of intimacy that accompanies technology’s progress.8 Even moreinteresting in my view is the greater appeal that italics seem to have not only for anaesthetics of presence but also for an aesthetics of differance. If italics are better able toconvey the sense of investment that handwritten underlines appeal to, it isparadoxically because they are less suggestive of the ideality of the thing theysupplement. The printed underline, as a mimetic imitation of the handwrittenunderline, implies the existence of some fully present thing (some thing full ofpresence) that it can ‘only’ approximate. Italics, conversely, do not imitate thehandwritten underline mimetically but instead imitate its effects by signifying theimpossibility of its presence. Whereas the printed underline reinforces the notion of someideal presence that it can only approximate, italics affirm and reinforce approximationitself as ‘the being-chain of a textual chain, the structure of substitution’ in which ‘theindefinite process of supplementarity has always already infiltrated presence’ (Derrida,1976: 163). This is not to suggest that the printed underline is not also a supplement(it certainly is), or even that italics are somehow more of a supplement than printed

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underlines; yet while both italic font and printed underlines function as supplements,the italic-as-supplement is far less suspicious of its own supplementarity and thusseems better equipped to play within ‘the abyss (the indefinite multiplication) ofrepresentation’ that is ‘the structural necessity’ of writing in its most expansiveDerridean sense (163). In supplementing the handwritten underline, italics embraceand recursively echo the process of supplementarity and play of differance that,according to Derrida, enable both italics and language in general to function.

Italics-as-trace

When we come across an italicised word, there is a sense that something has beeninvested in this word, that the author has bestowed some added endowment upon itthat remains inexplicit but that nonetheless lingers. Exactly what was invested in thisword we do not know, but we feel compelled to search for it and to discover whatwas at stake in the original act of italicisation. With italics, as with Derrida’s trace, the‘impossibility of reanimating absolutely the manifest evidence of an originary presence[in this case that of the author] refers us therefore to an absolute past’, in this case themoment of italicisation (Derrida, 1976: 66). Furthermore, like the trace, italicssignify ‘not only the disappearance of origin’ but also ‘that the origin did not evendisappear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by a nonorigin, the trace,which thus becomes the origin of the origin’ (61). If an italicised word points to thetrace of some authorial investment, it also represents the impossibility of such aninvestment, of actually congealing some personal significance within a written word.An italicised word, simply by virtue of its font, is never in itself more passionate,ironic, emphatic, etc., than a word that is not italicised. A writer may certainly investsomething in an italicised word, it is an everyday occurrence, but that investment willnever, can never, be present within the word itself. Italics prompt a reader toreconstruct the intentions of an italiciser and, in so doing, to (re)invest the wordthrough the act of reading with what could never actually be present in it.

Precisely because of their injunction to re-invest, to reconstruct the intentions of aprimary investor, italics provide an excellent opportunity for clarifying Derrida’sposition regarding ‘reading for intention’. Derrida takes great pains in Limited Inc. andelsewhere to reiterate that within the programme of reading he espouses ‘the categoryof intention will not disappear; it will have its place’ (1988: 18).9 Indeed, attentivenessto the context of intention, so long as one recognises it to be one context amongothers, seems to be a requirement for most readings that Derrida would acknowledge asbeing ‘on the right track [sur la bonne voie]’ (146). This seems particularly true whenone is dealing with italics, as when Derrida criticises Spivak in ‘Marx & Sons’ (1999:223) for suggesting that he ‘had advised against repoliticising, precisely at the point where Iemphatically call for the exact opposite!’ Here one would be hard-pressed to justify readingDerrida’s italics as signifying an ironic disavowal of his italicised statement. Indeed,such a reading might ‘suppose a bad (that’s right: bad, not good) and feeble reading ofnumerous texts, first of all mine’ (Derrida, 1988: 146). If we as readers are to make aninformed and responsible (re)investment in the italicised portion of Derrida’s responseto Spivak, we would doubtless do better to reconstruct his investment as somethingmore akin to passion, frustration, annoyance, etc.

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Yet if italics here point to our responsibility as readers to consider intentionalitywhile reading a text, they also provide an example of the potential dangers of suchreadings. For while I might plausibly invest the previously quoted passage with thefrustration I believe Derrida intended to convey, I also run the risk of recognising in‘Derrida’s intention’ a hermeneutic telos: something that ‘orients and organizes themovement and the possibility of a fulfilment, realization, and actualization in aplenitude that would be present to and identical with itself’ (Derrida, 1988: 56). Theitalic-as-trace offers the illusion of a ‘psychic imprint’ through which one might fullyreappropriate an original authorial investment as presence (1976: 96). As-trace, italicsappeal to our desire to ‘solve’ the mystery of intention once and for all, to make andeven feel this investment with/as Derrida and, by means of this Gnostic initiation, torecover ‘the author’ as full presence. There is an aesthetics of presence that Derrida’sdiscourse cannot fully uproot, and if the italic-as-trace is the origin of the origin – of areader’s originary reconstruction of an author’s original investment – it is also thething that arouses our desire for that origin, for the recovery of that origin as fullpresence.

Now, none of this is to say that the ‘psychic imprint’ suggested by italic font, noreven the desire for presence that it can provoke, should necessarily pose a problem forDerrida. Indeed, if one takes seriously the idea of ‘Grammatology as a PositiveScience’ (1976: 74), i.e. the assertion that behind deconstruction lies an affirmation of‘the absence of the transcendental signified as limitlessness of play’ (50), then onewould think that such an affirmation should be accompanied not simply by a denial of‘the origin’ – of its ‘reality’ in any pure, self-present and spatially or temporallylocatable sense – but equally by a rejection of one’s desire for that origin, for the paththat would lead us back to the Garden. To overcome this desire one must first beconfronted with it, with its possibility, if only in order to disavow it. The italic-as-trace confronts us with an absence of certainty that can always be thought ‘negativelyas catastrophe, or affirmatively as play’ (294); faced with this absence, the reader isforced (consciously or not) to affirm the framework of his or her own desire: whetheran aesthetics of presence or of differance, a gateway to an enlightened plenitude or arevelling in the playful possibilities of undecidability. One can attempt to think italicsas a playground in which several shades of (re)investment are possible, even plausible.Alternatively, one can attempt to know italics, to track these enigmatically investedwill-o’-the-wisps to their lair of unadulterated authorial presence, a goal whosetantalising possibility italics will never cease to suggest and whose desirability they willnever lose the potential to inspire.

Italics-as-spectre

If the italics in Derrida’s own prose point to investments made by Derrida the writer,then the more ‘parasitic’ italics imposed on the texts he cites would seem to markinvestments made by Derrida the reader.10 Like Derrida’s spectres, these italicsrepresent ‘a paradoxical incorporation, the becoming-body’ of a reading, of aninheritance that we ourselves are now enjoined to inherit in turn (Derrida, 1994: 6).And while it is still certainly possible to think of these parasitic italics as trace-like,pointing us to an absent presence, there is also something about them that is

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profoundly spectral, suggesting the return [revenant] of haunting spirits, spirits of areader (Derrida) and ‘his’ readings, spirits confronting us with our duty as inheritorseven as they condition the manner in which we inherit (6).11

Parasitic italics ‘haunt’ the texts that Derrida cites and present us with injunctionsthat mediate our inheritance of these texts, in this case injunctions to read in a certainway and thereby to accept our inheritance as a call ‘to responsibility. An inheritance isalways the reaffirmation of a debt, but a critical, selective, and filtering affirmation’(1994: 91–2). Derrida’s parasitic italics demonstrate what such ‘a critical, selective,and filtering affirmation’ might look like, since the italic-as-spectre is able tocommunicate its injunctions only by assuming

une apparence de chair, dans un espace de visibilite invisible. . . Une fois l’idee oula pensee (Gedanke) detachees de leur substrat, on engendre du fantome en leurdonnant du corps. Non pas en revenant au corps vivant dont sont arrachees les ideesou les pensees, mais en incarnant ces dernieres dans un autre corps artefactuel, uncorps prothetique.12

(1993: 202–3)

The italic-as-spectre signifies that some injunction is haunting a word or phrase, andserves as the ‘prosthetic body’ in which this injunction is incorporated even as it enjoinsus to ‘filter, sift, criticize’ and ‘sort out several possibles that inhabit the sameinjunction’ (1994: 16). Certain significant words in Rousseau, Saussure, Searle, Marx,and even Derrida’s own texts are visibly haunted by Derrida’s readings of them, andthis visibility calls us to the task of inheriting these words responsibly (i.e. critically),together with the (con)texts in which we receive them.

The most traditional way that Derrida uses parasitic italics is to highlightimportant aspects of his doubling readings. In Of Grammatology, for instance, whilesummarising the textual controversy surrounding the composition of Rousseau’s Essayon the Origin of Languages (i.e. whether the Essay was written before or after the SecondDiscourse), Derrida (1976: 245) uses italics to emphasise the key opposition (i.e.whether pity is ‘natural’ or ‘aroused’) that will haunt his doubling reading to come. Inquoting Rousseau, Derrida italicises words and sentences that support his readings,thereby prompting his readers to give these fragments extra weight and empoweringRousseau’s own words to rebut (for example) Jean Starobinski’s assertion that the ideasof pity in the Essay and in the Second Discourse are incompatible. Here, italics do not somuch drastically modify our inheritance of Rousseau’s text as they enable Rousseau’stext to better withstand the inattentive readings that previous inheritors of the Essay mayhave bequeathed to us. These parasitic italics clarify and amplify what Derrida believesto be Rousseau’s intended message, much like the Derrida of Limited Inc. and Marx &Sons will later use italics to redress what he feels to be inattentive readings of his owntexts ‘Signature, Event, Context’ (Derrida, 1988) and Specters of Marx.

A more ‘signature’ use that Derrida makes of parasitic italics is to highlight valuejudgments inherent in the rhetoric employed by his chosen authors, as in thisquotation of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics from Of Grammatology:

« Darmesteter prevoit le jour o�u l’on prononcera meme les deux lettres finales devingt, veritable monstruosite orthographique. Ces deformations phoniques appartien-

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nent bien a la langue, seulement elles ne resultent pas de son jeu naturel; elles sontdues a un facteur qui lui est etranger. . . » (p. 54. Nous soulignons).13

(Derrida, 1967: 62)

In this passage, Derrida’s italics raise spectres of questions that he has asked only apage before, questions that now haunt our reading of the passage above:

Where is the evil? one will perhaps ask. And what has been invested in the ‘livingword,’ that makes such aggressions of writing intolerable? . . . What prohibitionhas just been transgressed? Where is the sacrilege? Why should the mother tonguebe protected from the operation of writing?

(Derrida, 1976: 41)

By italicising Saussure’s text so as to ‘make visible’ the rhetoric of orthographicaggression/transgression it employs, Derrida shows us what he is reading for and howhe is reading it, enjoining us too to read Saussure with Derrida’s questions in mind.Derrida’s parasitic italics thus mediate our inheritance of Saussure’s text via the‘becoming-body’ of Derrida’s own critical inheritance of it.

Inheritance, of course, is always mediated. It is filtered through past generations,assessed and allotted by present executors, and adopted and utilised with an eye to futureheirs. But what is being inherited here? At what point does the passage above cease to bepart of Saussure’s legacy and become part of Derrida’s? Is Derrida here the executor ofSaussure’s estate, or merely our predecessor in a chain of inheritance? Certainly, there isa sense in which any quotation becomes the ‘property’ of the text that has appropriated it,but there also truly does seem to be more of an ‘external influence’ at work in aparasitically italicised passage like the one above than in a quotation that is presented ‘asis’, or even in a quotation that has been italicised in an attempt to convey a doublingreading. Here, what is presented as a quotation seems to be less a record of Saussure’swriting than of the palimpsestic writing that Derrida performs as a reader. It is less aquotation than a snapshot: evidence of Derrida caught in the act of palimpsesting.Ultimately, what we are inheriting here seems to be Derrida’s style of inheritance.

This becomes even clearer later in Of Grammatology, as Derrida again and againparasitically italicises key passages in Rousseau that he claims describe supplementaritywhile attempting to describe origin, passages in which ‘Rousseau says it withoutwishing to say it’ (1976: 200). By using italics to highlight Rousseau’s frequent use of theconditional tense in his description of ‘the ideal of the language of origin’ (1976: 243),Derrida gives body to the reading process that leads him to claim (Derrida, 1967:346) that ‘Le temps de cette langue est la limite instable, inaccessible, mythique,entre ce deja et ce pas-encore: temps de la langue naissante . . . Ni avant ni apresl’origine.’14 Here, Derrida uses italics to filter our inheritance of Rousseau through hisown insight that Rousseau’s ‘desire for origin’ is constantly betrayed by the ‘syntaxwithout origin’ in which his words are situated (346). Thus, even while concedingDerrida’s claim (161) that ‘something irreducibly Rousseauist is captured’ in hisreadings of Rousseau, one could equally claim that something irreducibly Derridean iscaptured in his italicisations of Rousseau.

Derrida’s parasitic italics take a more potentially problematic turn when oneconsiders questions of propriety. What, for instance, are we to make of Derrida’s

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need to continually clarify which italics are ‘his’, e.g. ‘[My emphasis – J.D.]’ (1988:54). In one sense of course this is simply responsible scholarship, but it also impliesthat these words take on a different meaning depending on who has italicised them, towhom these italics belong, and thus that our thinking about the why of an italic must betempered by some knowledge of a who. Since we have already discussed theimportance of considering intention when reading italics, this ‘owning up’ of theparasitic italiciser could be seen merely as a strategic decision allowing us to betterunderstand the context of intentionality in which particular italics are situated. Yethow to reconcile this with Derrida’s avowed refusal to ‘accept the distinction betweenstrategical decision and metaphysical presupposition’ (93)? Must the ability to thinkintention necessarily lead to the recognition of a subject in whom that intentionconsciously originated, a resurrection of the author as unbroken ‘I’?15

Still more problematic is the undeniable ‘prioprietoriality’ that Derrida displayswhen italicising his own texts. To cite one example, while criticising Tom Lewis in‘Marx & Sons’ (1999: 236) for implying that ‘I [Derrida] considered the problem ofclasses to be outdated or irrelevant’, Derrida parasitically italicises a lengthy passagefrom his own Specters of Marx (237):

I believe that an interest in what the concept of class struggle aimed at, an interest inanalyzing conflicts in social forces, is still absolutely indispensable. [Once again, I amunderscoring these words today, in 1998; is the sentence sufficiently clear and un-ambiguous?]

While the frustration that Derrida expresses here is understandable, it is accompaniedby a suggestion that the Derrida of 1998 feels he has a right to offer a ‘clear andunambiguous’ reading of ‘his’ text from 1993. In these two sentences Derrida assertshimself as dual Hamlet, King and Prince, overthrown and passed over, returning asspectre and responding to his own injunction to set right an academic community thatis ‘out of joint’. But the question remains: are writers the rightful heirs of their owntexts? Are there times when one is justified in being ‘prioprietorial’? These arequestions that Derrida, to the best of my knowledge, does not really address,questions that remain to be spoken to, perhaps awaiting some ambitious Fortinbraswith the desire and the stomach to legislate such matters.

Conclusion

My intention in problematising Derrida’s use of italics here at the end has not been to‘accuse’ Derrida but rather to remain faithful to the task of critical reading that hehimself espoused, in this case by attempting to highlight ‘a certain relationship,unperceived by [Derrida], between what he commands and what he does notcommand’ in his use of italics (Derrida, 1976: 158). As a final illustration of this, letus return to the phrase ‘Let us italicise’ (Soulignons-le). The use of the first personplural, the ‘editorial we’, is unquestionably a commonplace within academicdiscourse. Yet the casual irony with which Derrida offers this phrase cannot entirelysuppress a certain grammatical logic, a logic that can summon to mind an image ofDerrida strolling hand-in-hand with his reader through the targeted text, a rhetorically

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implicit suggestion that the emphasis we are about to find is not already inscribed butwill somehow be created jointly in the reading to come. There is an aesthetics ofpresence that Derrida cannot eliminate from his text, a certain coercive pleasure weget from the feeling that we are reading with/as Derrida, that he is witnessing ourreading as we are witnessing his. This is perhaps even truer today, in 2012, not onlybecause Derrida is dead but because he has become Derrida. Derrida, particularly theyoung Derrida of Of Grammatology, cannot control the desire to canonise him.

‘Let us italicise’. A host of Derridean preoccupations haunt this phrase, as theyhaunt its unusual means of delivery, the italic itself, reverberating in this Aldineaccoutrement of the processed word that recursively expresses the play of differancethat allows it to express, seductively conditioning readers through the visible presence ofthe italic and the visible absence of the italiciser; offering a trace of authorialinvestment and a testament to its impossibility; the spectre of a critical spirit, a call toarms directed at one’s inheritors and one’s fellow inheritors; the becoming-body of areading that has been and a reading that is yet to come; the covenant of a once andfuture Reader; a supplement to voice, to handwriting, and to Times New Roman. It isat once an impossible command and a command to play with possibilities.

Notes

1 For the French ‘Soulignons-le’, see Derrida, 1967: 288, 394.2 I shall therefore underline certain words or word-fragments (what happens when, in

a citation, certain word-fragments are underlined? Does it still constitute a case of‘‘citing’’, of ‘‘using’’, or ‘‘mentioning’’?’ (Derrida, 1988: 40). Again, althoughSamuel Weber translates souligner as ‘underline’, italicising is what actually occurs inboth the French and English texts. Except when marked as ‘my italics’, all italicisingin quoted texts in this article comes from Derrida.

3 I should note that my own use of italics in this essay aspires to a certain recursivity ofits own, an aspiration not entirely devoid of irony.

4 ‘L’aveuglement au supplement est la loi’ (1967: 214). The fact that Derrida does notitalicise the opening ‘L’ in the French text points to a linguistic difference that hashelped shape italic usage in the Francophone and Anglophone worlds, respectively.Since in French, unlike English, abstract nouns are preceded by articles, thesignificance of the italicised ‘the’ (e.g. the law) in English does not quite transferover into French, where in fact one can emphasise an abstract noun by separating itfrom its article via italics, as Derrida does here. I point this out as but one exampleof the idiosyncratic factors that necessarily condition the use of italics in a givenlanguage, time, and place. One could doubtless point to a number of similardifferences in italic usage between any two languages employing Latin alphabets.

5 The term is from ‘Marx & Sons’, Derrida’s response to the nine other essays inGhostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. Derridaendorses his coinage as ‘lay[ing] claim not only to property, but also to priority,which is even more likely to provoke a smile’ (1999: 222).

6 ‘everything that can incline – at a certain remove from the Roman in general. To think‘‘religion’’ is to think the ‘‘Roman’’. This can be done neither in Rome nor too far fromRome’ (1998: 4).

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7 Although he does not reflect on this himself, Derrida’s use of italics in ‘Faith andKnowledge’ further appeals to and problematises the relationship of italics topresence through the fact that his italics can be read as referring to at least threeseparate physical presents/presences, since Capri is at once where Derrida wrote the‘Italiques’ section, where he delivered the paper, and where the conference was held.

8 This of course assumes the framework of an aesthetics of presence, as a Futurist orTechnophile might well consider a printed underline to be a vast improvement overa handwritten one, a triumph over the maddening inexactitude of the human handthrough the achievement of perfect straightness, pure and unbroken.

9 Derrida quotes this passage twice during his response to Searle (1990: 104, 105), andin fact the second time he italicises it.

10 I will be using ‘parasitic’ to designate italics imposed on citations, although it shouldbe acknowledged that all italics are parasitic insofar as none could ever ‘take place’without a ‘standard’ font to be italicised.

11 If the italic-as-spectre seems difficult to differentiate from the italic-as-trace, itshould be remembered that Derrida himself asserts (1999: 268) that ‘the effort tothink the trace is inseparable, and has from the outset been literally . . . indissociablefrom an effort to think spectrality’. It might even be misleading to characterise thespectre and the trace as ‘separate’ concepts, and more accurate to describe thespectre as a mode of the trace or a way of thinking how the trace manifests itself.For the purposes of organising this paper, thinking parasitic italics through theconcept of the spectre provides a convenient way of differentiating their recursiveaspects from those of Derrida’s other italics, although this differentiation should beconsidered neither neat nor tidy in its own right.

12 ‘an appearance of flesh, in a space of invisible visibility . . . Once ideas or thoughts(Gedanke) are detached from their substratum, one engenders some ghost by givingthem a body. Not by returning to the living body from which ideas and thoughts havebeen torn loose, but by incarnating the latter in another artificial body, a prostheticbody’ (1994: 126).

13 ‘Darmesteter foresees the day when even the last two letters of vingt ‘‘twenty’’ willbe pronounced – truly an orthographic monstrosity. Such phonic deformations belongto language but do not stem from its natural functioning. They are due to an externalinfluence. . . . (p. 54; italics added)’ (1976: 42).

14 ‘The time of that language is the unstable, inaccessible, mythic limit between thatalready and this not-yet: time of a language being born, just as there was a time for‘society being born’. Neither before nor after the origin’ (1976: 244).

15 Thinking the italic-as-spectre might offer one way out of this dilemma, since onedefining characteristic of spectres is that ‘there must be more than one of them’ (1994:13).

References

Derrida, Jacques (1967). De la grammatologie. Paris: Les Editions Minuit.Derrida, Jacques (1976). Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins UP.Derrida, Jacques (1988). Limited Inc. Trans. Samuel Weber. Evanston, IL: Northwestern

UP.Derrida, Jacques (1990). Limited Inc. Paris: Editions Galilee.

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Derrida, Jacques (1993). Spectres de Marx. Paris: Editions Galilee.Derrida, Jacques (1994). Specters of Marx. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge.Derrida, Jacques (1996). ‘Foi et savoir: les deux sources de la « religion » aux limites de la

simple raison.’ La Religion: Seminaire de Capri sous le direction de Jacques Derrida etGianni Vattimo. Ed. T. Marchaisse. Paris: Editions du Seuil. 9–86.

Derrida, Jacques (1998). ‘Faith and Knowledge : The Two Sources of ‘‘Religion’’ at theLimits of Reason Alone.’ Trans. Samuel Weber. Religion. Eds Jacques Derrida andGianni Vattimo. Stanford: Stanford UP. 1–78.

Derrida, Jacques (1999). Marx & Sons. Trans. G.M. Goshgarian. Ghostly Demarcations: ASymposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. Ed. M. Sprinker. London: Verso.213–69.

Derrida, Jacques (2002). Marx & Sons. Paris: Editions Galilee.Derrida, Jacques (2005). Paper Machine. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford

UP.Finkelstein, David and McCleery, Alistair (2005). An Introduction to Book History. New

York: Routledge.Hayles, Katherine, ed. (1991). Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science.

Chicago: U of Chicago P.Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1986). Essay on the Origin of Languages. Trans. John Moran.

Chicago: U of Chicago P.Saussure, Ferdinand de (2003). Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Roy Harris. Eds Charles

Balley and Albert Sechehaye. Chicago: Open Court.Updike, Daniel (1962). Printing Types: Their History, Form, and Use. Cambridge: The

Belknap Press of Harvard UP.

James Ramsey Wallen is a PhD candidate in Literature at the University of California,

Santa Cruz. Postal Address: UC Santa Cruz, Literature Department, 1156 High St., Santa

Cruz, CA, 95064-1077, USA. E-mail: jwallen@ucsc.edu

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