"No out-of-text" Or the reading that opens up between the margins

Abstract

In the interview “Reading the unreadable”, Derrida tells us that “a text is a point of resistance”. This paper attempts to show how the formula «there is no outside-text», far from its seeming closure, opens a caesura sliding the possibility of thinking the reading experience in another way. As Freud, who forged his studies on the psychic apparatus analysing resistance as a starting point —that counter-force to psychism confronting the analysis’ procedures and processes—, Derrida tries to think the reading experience demanded by that counter-force making, simultaneously, the text to be illegible and legible. There, in the text’s margins, we grove around in the unavoidable epoché of what is either seeable or fore-seeable, foreigners to the phenomenality of meaning. The reading time to which Derrida confronts us is a demand to think ourselves outside of any purpose and teleology, registering its powers in the order of the unpredictable, of the immeasurable.