With regard to your first comment, there are two points to make – certainly from a poststructuralist perspective writing was never much like speech at all: graphemes and phonemes are perhaps just two bound series, communicating between themselves by some quasi-mystical differential process. Yet I wouldn’t take this point of view for granted, giving the extensive tradition (even up to Saussure) of viewing writing as an inessential supplement or perverse simulacrum of speech. The second point is somewhat implicit, but perhaps poorly drawn-out in the last paragraph of this post: mechanical writing (stylus, typewriter, linotype – but not block/offset printing or digital typesetting) is ‘like’ speech in that the writer ‘fixes’ the text as soon as it is written. In order to change this sort of spoken or written text, you have to ’strike it out,’ by going back and changing words that still remain ’said.’ In digital writing, by contrast, the writing remains poised between the virtual and the actual, to be endlessly revised until such point as it is ‘literally actualized’ – ie. when I push the ’submit comment’ button below this little text box. Writing digitally is even less like speech than ever, because I – the ‘author’ – am no longer shackled to a continuous process of actualization.

As for the second bit, this is a considerably meatier question. This post is a preliminary to a paper I am writing on Poe, Lacan, Derrida, and Deleuze, trying to sift out the similarities and differences between the two french ‘De’s (specific texts – purloined letter, L’s seminar on such, Derrida’s ‘facteur de la vérité,’ the D&R passage on Lacan and virtual objects). I believe that the D/G critique of psychoanalysis expressed in the above quote from ‘Interpretation of Utterances’ is fairly similar (at least in effect) to Derrida’s argument in ‘La facteur de la vérité’ that ‘Psychoanalysis finds itself’ in texts (la psychanalyse se trouve) instead of ‘finding’ and questioning the textuality in texts (the proper deconstructive approach). Likewise, Deleuze’s early affinity with structuralism and Lacan (later broken) speaks to a common element within Deleuze’s and Lacan’s critiques of Freud. These are merely jumping-off points, really. This paper will call for a much more thorough investigation of the very significant differences between all three, as well as some close attention to the Poe tale itself which is often kind of lost in these analyses.

Any case. Thanks for the comment! I love writing these kinds of posts and responses – they help to focus my thought so much.

It’s interesting to see Deleuze being thought through the linguistic interface, particularly with Derrida. It’s a while since I spent any time with the derrida, though I still have fond memories…and I’m always nervous of the connections, though they are definitely there. I think you are probably on the right track with the idea, however, that what is central is the movements of actualisation. To a large extent these are what I take Deleuze to refer to my ’spatio-temporal dynamisms’ and there is a strong connections between these and the Kantian schemata, that peculiarly obscure (i think Heidegger says something along these lines) and vital moments in the critical philosophy. I’m less sure of the idea that Deleuze critiques Freud for the same reasons as Lacan and Derrida – what excatly would those reasons be, I wasn’t entirely clear from the quote preceding, no doubt due merely to a ‘first encounter’ (with your blog) confusion?