ABSTRACT
Writing about the place of the preface in the Hegelian philosophical system, Derrida wonders what it would be like if Hegel had only written prefaces, or if all his prefaces had been published in a single volume like Henry James’s The Art of the Novel. In a moment of explicit Shandyism, Derrida further daydreams1 that the preface to the Greater Logic somehow appears in media res, complicating our sense of the logic’s beginnings, and disrupting its apparently serene progress. Prefaces signal the contingency and written-ness of the philosophical system, but the Hegelian system apparently dismisses these facts in favour of a sense of what Derrida calls a logic of autoinsemination. Such a system is what it is, prior to its setting down: it engenders itself. According to this understanding of philosophy, the writing of this system is merely an accident, and the need for its writing (with all such a needwould imply, i.e. the incompleteness of any ‘autoinsemination’, requiring as it does supplementation) is explained away, writing imagined to be just empirical husk, as Derrida puts it. So, Derrida continues, ‘Hegel never investigates in terms of writing the living circulation of discourse. He never interrogates the exteriority, or the repetitive autonomy, of that textual remainder constituted for example by a preface, even while it is semantically sublated within the encyclopedic logic.’2
The preface is strictly supplementary, but as is well known any supplement has a dual quality in Derrida’s work, being both an unnecessary addition and something that is necessary to fill a gaping hole in that which wants to be whole and fully present. According to the Hegelian system, a preface is an unnecessary remainder once the necessary philosophical work is gathered up by the dialectic. It is, however, also that whichwill always remain, a spectrality always there to be read, and something that guarantees readability. That is to say that contingency, surprise, and a certain kind of embeddedness are what enable any form of system that might wish to disclaim them, and they remain obscurely present within any such system. To argue this is to say more than that autobiography is always present in theory. It is also not quite to argue that theories are autobiographical, whatever their pretensions to universality: that would be too simple, misleading, and rather irresponsible in important ways.
Indeed, the very qualities of writing that so trouble philosophy have similar effects on autobiography, and it is this similarity that is so important to a consideration of the connections between autobiography and theory, especially perhaps postcolonial theory.
