Here, Kafka has left us only this final trace of himself, in that he has provided no other than this “writing under erasure,” this sign whose existence is itself denied, and that only in the very name of which its signifier becomes meaningless. Writing under erasure is, for Kafka, the writing of the self, the signifier of nothingness, an empty autobiography. Kafka gives us nothing other than a trace, an image at once void, the image of an absence. This delimitation, which is, according to Blanchot, “a different reading of the whole”, is to have been realized, or at least represented, in the act of writing as such: (the act of writing under erasure). This, then, is the act of writing under erasure. (Lacan’s ‘déférencement’)
The primary or initial process is that which remains outside the ‘writing’, that is, that which is unmediated by ‘writing’; it is the unmediatedness which ‘writing’ attempts to ‘erase’ or ‘reterritorialize’. The secondary process is thus that which does in fact result from the ‘erasure’, the actual ‘writing’ that ‘remains’ as well, as in a specific textual corpus. Both are necessary and co-extensive in writing’s topos, with the difference between them lying in the degree of their co-extensiveness, and in the manner in which each ‘remains’ or ‘is written in itself’.
- Thus, ‘writing’ consists of: (1) a delimitation, a sign delimited from the unmediated, which is, (2) the primary process, whereby (3) ‘writing’ is sublated by a secondary process of mediation, as the immediate result of the process, which (4) is co-extensive with itself. This means that ‘writing’ is not merely a mode of activity, but rather a delimited space or an enclosed space of a specific kind.
There can be no ‘erasure of difference’ which is not simultaneously a difference between difference and erasure. Such an aporia is not produced out of nowhere, rather it is the byproduct of the development of modern thought. The subject that is called upon to name this aporia is Hegel and Kant, whom we find in a curious position, as if under the spell of modernity. We encounter the same aporia in all attempts at the ‘closure’ of a discourse as long as they are based on the ‘closure’ of a discursive sign.
The very category of a ‘science’ can be defined as the capacity of a ‘science’ to produce its own critique, and, from what has been said so far, it can be argued that philosophy in the strict sense, as the most fundamental science, does not have the capability of taking the measure of the crisis of metaphysics.