Last weekend saw the passing of French philosopher Jacques Derrida; father of the critical strategy known as deconstruction. While there have been numerous interpretations and applications of deconstruction within many areas of activity, at this moment I would like to share a personal reverie rather than engage in bad philosophy.
Upon arriving in New York, one of my frequent haunts was the comparative literature section in St. Mark’s Bookshop. When I first flipped through Derrida’s Of Grammatology, I landed on a footnote for the section on the rebus which had great resonance in my junior designer soul. In this note, I saw the origins of our typophilia, particular assesments of various fonts, and other ‘phantasies’ of composition. I also recognized in it a certain correspondence with my own approach to the Sacred Mysteries of Layout.
Appropriately for a book on deconstruction, it was a quotation; written not by Derrida, but the Austrian psychoanalyst Melanie Klein.
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For Fritz, when he was writing, the lines meant roads, and the letters ride on motor-bicycles — on the pen — upon them. For instance, ‘i’ and ‘e’ ride together on a motor-bicycle that is usually driven by the ‘i’ and they love one another with a tenderness quite unknown in the real world. Because they always ride with one another they become so alike that there is hardly any difference between them, for the beginning and the end — he was talking of the small Latin alphabet — of ‘i’ and ‘e’ are the same, the Gothic letter ‘i’ and ‘e’ he explained that they also ride on a motor-bicycle, and that is is only a difference like another make of bicycle that the ‘e’ has a little box instead of the hole in the Latin ‘e’. The ‘i’s are skillful, distinguished and clever, have many pointed weapons, and live in caves, between which, however, there are also mountains, gardens and harbours. They represent the penis, and their path coitus. On the other hand, the ‘l’s are represented as stupid, clumsy, lazy and dirty. They live in caves under the earth. In ‘L’-town dirt and paper gather in the streets, in the little ‘filthy’ houses they mix with water a dyestuff brought in ‘i’-land and drink and sell this as wine. they cannot walk properly and cannot dig because they hold the spade upside down, etc. It became evident that the ‘l’s represented faeces. Numerous phantasies were concerned with other letters also. Thus, instead of the double ‘s’, he always wrote only one, until a phantasy afforded the explanation and solution of this inhibition. The one ‘s’ was himself, the other his father. They were to embark together on a motor-boat, for the pen was also a boat, the copy-book a lake. The ‘s’ that was himself got into the boat that belonged to the other ‘s’ and sailed away in it quickly upon the lake. This was the reason why he did not write the two ‘s’s’ together. His frequent use of ordinary ‘s’ in place of a long one proved to be determined by the fact that the part of the long ‘s’ that was thus left out was for him as though one were to take away a person’s nose.’ This mistake proved to be determined by the castration-father and disappeared after this interpretation.
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There is a French verb (almost spelled the same), dérider, which can translate to ‘to cheer up’. Often, when I overhear someone speak of ‘deconstructing typography’, I think of this passage and smile.
Or, to use some beginner French in making a pun, je me dérrida.
h e r e , , ,
no
h e a r
har d
s...h...a...r...e...d
where are we now?
hear
here
where
there
.
.
.
.
r
i
p
d e a r
Jacques
On Oct.15.2004 at 09:44 AM