The Truth in Painting
Jacques Derrida
— If police there is (and isn’t there always?) it would here be operating against another police, against another ideological arraignment, and
[…]
— You think people would accept that, that they’d receive it as an explication de texte or as a “close reading”? [In English in the original]
Translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLead
This juxtaposition is meant to suggest that explication de texte is a policing affair. But is it not a jail break?
Let us pause the reversal of this inversion.
First the justification of linking explication de texte to police activity. We read this reply, in sequence, appearing after the close reading remark:
— Everything comes down to one of those reading exercises with magnifying glass which calmly claim to lay down the law, in police fashion indeed.
The policing frames a before and an after. Jail breaking is always after the sentence. There is always room to consider it thus, more or less. Another réplique:
— It can always, more or less calmly, become police-like. It depends how, with a view to what, in what situation it operates. It can also arm you against that other (secret) police which, on the pretext of delivering you from chains of writing and reading (chains which are always, illiterately, reduced to the alphabet), hastily lock you up in a supposed outside of the text […]
Jail break avant la lettre. Jail break before a being-jailed.
And so for day 2525
11.11.2013