paul-denicola-literature-pure-mediality

The interpenetration of elements is important in both Benjamin’s and Deleuze and
Guattari’s worldviews. From both perspectives, there is no death as stasis, as final end. In
fact, in neither case is the world modeled on entropic becoming.
1.4 Derrida and the “Death of the Signified”:
In continuing to trace the evolution of the philosophy of language from structuralism to
the postmodern, one cannot fail to visit the contributions of Jacques Derrida. To begin
with, his work is steeped in a view of language which embraces the perspective of
relationality between form and function found previously in Nietzsche, Benjamin, as well
as Deleuze and Guattari. This infinite relationality, the transgression of instrumental
language, is what Derrida has come to refer to as the absence of the “transcendental
signified.” His text, Signature Event Context, begins by re-examining the possibility of
meaning in light of a non-instrumental language:
I have been constrained to predetermined communication as a vehicle, a means of
transport or transitional medium of a meaning, and moreover a unified meaning. If
communication possessed several meanings and if this plurality should prove to
be irreducible, it would not be justifiable to define communication a priori as the
transmission of a meaning. The meaning or contents of the semantic message
would thus be transmitted, communicated, by different means, by more powerful
technical mediations, over a far greater distance, but still within a medium that
remains fundamentally continuous and self-identical, a homogenous element
through which the unity and wholeness of meaning would not be affected in its
essence (1-2).
13