ABSTRACT
In his 1998 paper, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, Derrida introduces de
Man’s notion of the atemporality of history by marking a difference between a
time and a history set out in terms of progression and regression, assuming a
constituted continuity, and a time and a history, to be set out in terms of break
points, and of what has come to be called ‘event’:
We must also keep in view a certain concept of history, of the historicity of
history, so as to trace its intersection with this logic of the textual event as
material inscription. When it is a matter of this structure of the text, the
concept of historicity will no longer be regulated by the scheme of pro-
gression or of regression, thus by a scheme of teleological process, but
rather by that of the event, or occurrence, thus by the singularity of the ‘one
time only’. The value of occurrence links historicity not to time as is usually
thought, nor to the temporal process but, according to de Man, to power,
to the language of power and to language as power. Hence the necessity of
taking into account performativity, which defines precisely the power of
language and power as language, the excess of the language of power or of the
power of language over constative or cognitive language.
