ABSTRACT

Words like “inscription,” “self,” “writing,” and “identity” are central to the humanities. Unfortunately, they are also theoretically complex, and some might say, politically charged. After decades of critique of the subject, rebuke of idealism, and anti-Cartesian strictures against the self-constitution of thought, the self obstinately refuses to give up the ghost. It hesitates, like Hamlet, between being and seeming, but it remains on stage. In refusing the presence of meaning, an illusion that Derrida called logocentrism, deconstruction centrifuged it throughout the entire system of language, a system constituted by differences and deferments. In this way, writing, or rather ecriture, embraced the totality of deferments and of relations, played out in the endless chain of signifiers that make inscription happen. A further twist on the creation of identity through the act of life writing is the emergence of the market-driven paradigm that Laurie McNeill calls “Anne Franking.”.