Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Works by Jacques Derrida Cited
- Series Editor's Preface
- Introduction: Watchwords
- 1 “Tape-Recorded Surprise”: Derrida Interviewed
- 2 “Bartleby,” or Decision: A Note on Allegory
- 3 Urgent Translation
- 4 Coming to the Beginning
- 5 To Follow
- 6 La Morsure
- 7 “One day someone …”
- 8 The Affect of America
- 9 From Now On
- 10 Stunned: Derrida on Film
- 11 Aller à la ligne
- 12 Composition Displacement
- 13 The Ear, Who?
- 14 To Do Justice to “Rousseau,” Irreducibly
- 15 The Deconstitution of Psychoanalysis
- 16 The Philosopher, As Such, and the Death Penalty
- Epitaph
- Index
Epitaph
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Works by Jacques Derrida Cited
- Series Editor's Preface
- Introduction: Watchwords
- 1 “Tape-Recorded Surprise”: Derrida Interviewed
- 2 “Bartleby,” or Decision: A Note on Allegory
- 3 Urgent Translation
- 4 Coming to the Beginning
- 5 To Follow
- 6 La Morsure
- 7 “One day someone …”
- 8 The Affect of America
- 9 From Now On
- 10 Stunned: Derrida on Film
- 11 Aller à la ligne
- 12 Composition Displacement
- 13 The Ear, Who?
- 14 To Do Justice to “Rousseau,” Irreducibly
- 15 The Deconstitution of Psychoanalysis
- 16 The Philosopher, As Such, and the Death Penalty
- Epitaph
- Index
Summary
“A New Wave: Scientists Write on Water,” reads the Web post headline announcing a “breakthrough” technology:
A new technology allows researchers to write on water. The AMOEBA (Advanced Multiple Organized Experimental Basin), a circular tank created by Mitsui Engineering at their Akishima laboratory, is able to form letters with standing waves. This remarkable display device consists of fifty waterwave generators surrounding a cylindrical tank five feet wide and a foot deep. The wave generators move vertically to produce cylindrical waves. These “pixels” are about four inches in diameter and one and a half inches in height; these form lines and shapes. The AMOEBA device can form all of the roman alphabet, as well as some kanji characters. Each letter takes about fifteen seconds to produce; Akishima Labs expects to sell the device to amusement parks in a package that combines acoustics, lighting and fountain technology.
Writ large on this remarkable device is the thoroughly prosaic ambition that produced it: to literalize the figure of writing on water by giving it form as literal writing (in letters or characters) on the substance of actual H20. More precisely, it is the essentially anti-poetic ambition to close the gap in figuration, to reduce to zero the space that floats the metaphor and carries it virtually wherever experience can leave a trace of its own erasure. One senses that driving the AMOEBA machine is a furiously futile protest against the figure's immemorial value as a reminder of the archive's finitude, its erosion and disintegration-for, along with fire, water is the written archive's greatest enemy.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- To FollowThe Wake of Jacques Derrida, pp. 194 - 198Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010