"Every discourse, even a poetic or oracular sentence, carries with it a system of rules for producing analogous things and thus an outline of methodology"
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Derrida is needling the fantasy that language can ever be pure event: a lyric burst, a mystical pronouncement, a sentence that arrives untouched by the workaday machinery of rules. Even the most “poetic or oracular” line, he insists, smuggles in a toolkit for making more of itself. To speak is not just to express; it’s to model a way of producing further speech that will feel “analogous” enough to count as related, legible, repeatable. The sentence is a template.
The subtext is a quiet provocation aimed at two romantic myths at once: the poet as singular genius and the philosopher as neutral method-giver. Derrida collapses their difference. The oracle’s authority depends on form as much as on content; its riddling cadence, its sanctioned ambiguity, teaches an audience how to interpret future riddles. Likewise, the poem’s “freedom” is never free of conventions it both borrows and bends. What looks like a one-off revelation is also instruction: here is how to read, how to continue, how to imitate without admitting you’re imitating.
Contextually, this sits inside Derrida’s broader argument about iterability and the inescapability of structure: meaning doesn’t live in a sealed interior intention; it survives by being repeatable across situations, and repeatability implies rules. Calling that an “outline of methodology” is sly: he’s not praising method so much as showing it’s unavoidable. Even anti-method becomes a method the moment it can be recognized, taught, and reproduced. That’s Derrida’s edge: he treats spontaneity as a genre with its own grammar.
The subtext is a quiet provocation aimed at two romantic myths at once: the poet as singular genius and the philosopher as neutral method-giver. Derrida collapses their difference. The oracle’s authority depends on form as much as on content; its riddling cadence, its sanctioned ambiguity, teaches an audience how to interpret future riddles. Likewise, the poem’s “freedom” is never free of conventions it both borrows and bends. What looks like a one-off revelation is also instruction: here is how to read, how to continue, how to imitate without admitting you’re imitating.
Contextually, this sits inside Derrida’s broader argument about iterability and the inescapability of structure: meaning doesn’t live in a sealed interior intention; it survives by being repeatable across situations, and repeatability implies rules. Calling that an “outline of methodology” is sly: he’s not praising method so much as showing it’s unavoidable. Even anti-method becomes a method the moment it can be recognized, taught, and reproduced. That’s Derrida’s edge: he treats spontaneity as a genre with its own grammar.
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| Topic | Deep |
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