Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida

Author:Jacques Derrida
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 1997-08-20T04:00:00+00:00

Enjoyment! Is such a thing made for man? Ah! If I had ever in my life tasted the delights of love even once in their plenitude, I do not imagine that my frail existence would have been sufficient for them, I would have been dead in the act (Confessions, Book VIII).

If one abides by the universal evidence, by the necessary and a priori value of this proposition in the form of a sigh, one must immediately recognize that “cohabitation with women,” hetero-eroticism, can be lived (effectively, really, as one believes it can be said) only through the ability to reserve within itself its own supplementary protection. In other words, between auto-eroticism and hetero-eroticism, there is not a frontier but an economic distribution. It is within this general rule that the differences are mapped out. This is Rousseau’s general rule. And before trying—what I do not pretend to be doing here—to encompass the pure singularity of Rousseau’s economy or his writing, we must carefully raise and articulate between them all the structural or essential necessities on their different levels of generality.

It is from a certain determined representation of “cohabitation with women” that Rousseau had to have recourse throughout his life to that type of dangerous supplement that is called masturbation and that cannot be separated from his activity as a writer. To the end. Thérèse—the Thérèse of whom we can speak, Thérèse in the text, whose name and “life” belong to the writing we read—experienced it at her cost. In Book XII of the Confessions, at the moment when “I must speak without reserve,” the “two reasons combined” of certain “resolutions” is confided to us:

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