ABSTRACT
Literature is seemingly excluded from answering the most basic of questions, because it never gets beyond its own textuality, is not concerned with determining the 'essence' or 'truth' of objects outside itself. The analysis, and possible breakdown, of this traditional framework would have to have as its focus the possibility of the presence of truth in science and its non-presence in literature. The philosophical gesture which devalues writing, because speech always implies presence, can be construed as the principle common to all metaphysics, the system that always prefers presence to non-presence. The disappearance of an origin implied in this enlarged conception of writing, also entails an enlarging of the concept of repetition. It is by now apparent that for Jacques Derrida words with irreducibly double meanings connected to textuality, have a certain privilege. The old name for textuality, 'literature', is then the possibility of science, as it is the possibility of science's objects – being, in time and space.
