ABSTRACT
Painting inscribes, signs, itself as the erotic undoing of signs as we know them, and in this undoing takes us through signs, as we saw in the discussion of writing, to differance, to their possibility in the trace:
no element can function as a sign without reference to another element which itself is not simply present. This inter-weaving results in each 'element' - phoneme or grapheme - being constituted on the basis of the trace within it of the other elements in the chain or system. This interweaving, this textile, is the text produced only in the transformation of another text. Nothing neither among the elements, nor within the system, is anywhere simply present or absent. There are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces (Derrida, 1981, p.26).
