Literature in Secret: An Impossible Filiation by Jacques Derrida (trans. Adam Kotsko)

“God,” if you'll pardon the expression...

Pardon for not meaning2

Imagine that we left this statement to its fate.

Accept at least that for a time I abandon it thus, alone, also stripped, without goal, errant, indeed erratic: “Pardon for not meaning….” Is this statement a sentence? A sentence of a prayer? A question of which it is still too soon or already too late to know if it will have been only interrupted, deserving or excluding ellipses? “Pardon for not meaning [...].”

Unless I found this improbable phrase one day, unless it found itself, alone, visible and abandoned, exposed to every passerby, inscribed on a blackboard, legible on a wall, or right on a rock, on the surface of a piece of paper or saved on a computer disk. Here is thus the secret of a sentence: “Pardon for not meaning...,” it says.

“Pardon for not meaning...” is now a citation. The interpreter then leans over it. An archaeologist can also wonder if this sentence is complete: “Pardon for not meaning to say...” but what exactly? And to whom? Who, to whom? more..