I Don’t Mean to Write a Prologue

In Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, there resides a chapter titled “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing”. It interrogates the ‘book’ as a historical object, a spatial succession where the pen acts as a kind of travel agency — lingering in the gaps between pages, the margins of lines, and the threshold of the blinds. It traces the binary opposition between writer and reader, and the ways in which writing is transmitted, stored, and retrieved. Derrida explores how imagination and words reach their existential limits, their speech preserved in the silent turning of pages — inked in letters, alphabets, and numbers.

I do not perceive myself as the subject of this inquiry. There is the persistent fact that time continues to turn its own pages, and that I cannot surpass its limits — unless MacTaggart’s theories truly prove that time travel is possible. In The Paradoxes of Time Travel, David Lewis writes that everything on this planet possesses a ‘personal time’, simultaneous with ‘external time’ and all others, until one enters the vicinity of a time traveller. Do I live in chronos or kairos? Do I follow a linear succession, my feet pacing from left to right in the Western tradition, or moving vertically with my Chinese habits? Or do I leap from one word to another, as kairos depicts?

Pages turn even without the physical act of turning. I remember what you once wrote, though I leave it unnamed. To write is a game of visual encounter; to speak is a game of breath. I no longer require a voice to capture meaning, only patterns, structures, and lines. These forms are never static; they appear to follow rules, yet those are merely societal confines. In truth, no rule can truly hold. Knowledge lacks the power to ‘arrest’ an object. What, then, can? Perhaps the final painting is merely a visible testament to the ‘mad solitary machine’ churning within the artistic act.

A representation captures only a fragment of the whole. Description is never sufficient to address expression; they exist in instinctively different ‘grammars’, as Wittgenstein observed. If you never knew ‘cake’ existed, the phonetic /keɪk/ would be hollow, and the sequence c-a-k-e meaningless. Yet, even if you have tasted a slice, your ‘cake’ is forever lost in translation. You might conjure a strawberry sponge from your own epistemological store, while my cake tastes of mango. This is the melancholy of language and image: two paths that never quite meet, forever seeking bridges across the gap.

“The history of writing should turn back toward the origin of historicity.”

— Jacques Derrida

Though attributed to Wittgenstein’s spirit, this provocation demands a choice: shall I retreat a few steps or fast-forward to the very possibility of writing? If we are to map the history of potentiality — of what might be written — then traditional archaeology, with its dust and trowels, can no longer intervene. We find ourselves instead at a crossroads: is this a philosophy of history, or a history of philosophy?

In Giorgio Agamben’s The Signature of All Things, he invokes the archē — the primal element of early Greek thought. It is a first principle; a beginning that refuses to be ‘archaic’ or relegated to the ancient past. It concerns not only what has been but, more crucially, what has not yet happened. Kant suggested that every philosopher builds upon the ruins of another, famously noting that “one cannot learn philosophy because it is not yet given.” If so, then archaeology is truly a science of ruins — a field of knowledge born of destruction.

As Agamben notes, ruinology deals with objects that do not constitute an empirically present whole. Such a whole remains intact only if it is never reached; it serves not as a destination, but as guidance. To dispel is to evoke. This is the mission: to evoke by expelling. One must die to be reborn, mirroring the mortality of man and the linear, decaying nature of life.

Ravaged. One hopes that a destruction of time might yet yield something refined — a fine wine, perhaps, with brie and cheddar alongside. I shall stay astray in a secluded cave where no one can find. We share a slice; then, you will think I am kind.