paul-denicola-literature-pure-mediality

“Who could still be captivated by the thousand years of chatter about the
meaning of good and evil when it turns out that they are not constants at all but
functional values…”
-Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
“One could say that when at the moment I am writing, the receiver may be absent from
my field of present perception. But is not this absence merely a distant presence, one
which is delayed or which, in one form or another, is idealized in its representation?
This does not seem to be the case, or at least this distance, divergence, delay, this
diferral [difference] must be capable of being carried to a certain absoluteness of
absence if the structure of writing, assuming that writing exists, is to constitute itself.”
Moving Towards Pure Mediality
2.1 Deconstructing the Teleological Perspective
19
-Derrida, Dissemination
In this chapter, I will explore some of the philosophical moves that are related to what I
claim in my thesis constitutes Kafka’s writing, namely, a text of pure immanence and a
kind of self-referentiality. This will involve a look at selected figures that prepare the
way towards Pure Mediality. In this section, I will also briefly summarize what is
involved in the teleological approach to the world.
Within traditional metaphysics, human life is commonly seen as a sequence of events,
radically contingent, leading toward an end. Human beings maintain the idea that the
sum total of life events inevitably leads towards a sense of stable presence, permanence
or being. Particular actions are not seen in their unique singularity, but rather as part of a