ABSTRACT
The question of context ‘This is my starting-point’, says Jacques Derrida, ‘no meaning can be determined out of context, but no context permits saturation’.1 What is at issue here, he explains, is not the ‘semantic fertility’ of high canonical literature such as the texts to which he has been referring, P.B.Shelley’s The Triumph of Life and Maurice Blanchot’s L’Arrêt de mort, but rather ‘the structure of the remnant or of iteration’, which applies to every text regardless of its aesthetic, moral, political or religious values.2 Doubtless Derrida could have added more disjunctions-remnant or iteration or parergon or remark or supplement or trace-for he has given this structure many nicknames over the years. One could say without being at all grudging that he has done nothing else but brood upon this structure as it variously conceals and reveals itself in writings that answer the names of ‘law’, ‘literature’, ‘philosophy’, ‘poetry’, ‘psycho-analysis’ or ‘theology’.
