ABSTRACT
Jacques Derrida's arguments defend the importance of reading — of tarrying with the letters, words, and minute movements of a text. Out of the proliferating directions towards which 'Force et signification' itself points, this chapter takes just three, in order to explore more fully Derrida's thinking of force. First, the essay's emphasis on resisting the teleologism implicit within structuralism rests on and demands a rethinking of the relationship between force and time. Second, Derrida's reading of Rousset discloses an illegitimacy within the imposition of structural laws. Third, the emergence of these questions in the province of literary criticism, rather than in an obviously juridical or philosophical discourse, raises the question of the force of literature or the literary as such. The chapter explores these issues in turn. One of the strangest and most difficult things about Derrida's writing and in a sense its least 'philosophical' aspect, is the way that it credits, entertains, and tarries with impossibility.
