On Spivak’s preface for Of Grammatology

I’m finally getting around to reading Spivak’s translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology, and I’m highly impressed by the clarity and complexity with which she manages to tackle this most difficult of literary theorists.

I’ve always been intrigued by the way in which a writer, to some extent, deconstructs his/her own creation while simultaneously creating it. Or, that failing, deconstructs his/her creation in the process of editing—laying bare, in the best circumstances, those contradictions or moments of failure within a piece that demand further examination, and in which reconciliation with the remainder of the text seems never fully possible. I’ve always felt that these actions are somehow linked to the influence our unconscious has on work. For me, these unconscious drives are often what “propels” a piece forward, causing seemingly unrelated images, moments, and ideas to suddenly appear, cryptically linked, on the same page. Spivak’s summary of this process is helpful to my own understanding of this phenomenon:

“As we recall, at the time that a stimulus is received, it goes either into the perceptual system or into the Unconscious and produces a permanent trace. That particular trace might be energized into consciousness…long afterward…but it never comes up as such; in fact, as Derrida argues, following Freud, the trace [die Bahnung] is primary. There is no “thing” there in the Unconscious but simply the possibility for this particular path to be energized. When the track is opened up, and we have the après coup perception of the originary trace, the impulse in the Unconscious is not exhausted. Unconscious impulses are indestructible” (Of Grammatology, lxxxi-lxxxii).

I’m fascinated by the phrase “the possibility for this particular path to be energized.” For me, it’s one of the clearest articulations of how the writing process occurs—-by entering a creative space, we open this possibility “after the fact,” and are given the chance to place on paper not an experience, not an accurate representation of an experience, but the “trace” of some distant experience, of which the impulse to communicate, to come forth, is as necessary as life and death for the artist.