Spectres of Paper: Writing, Digitization, and the End(s) of the Book

Tadeusz Rachwał

Abstract

This paper has been inspired by Jacques Derrida’s statement revealing that his philosophical writings were mostly devoted to paper. “I have the impression,” he said, “(the impression!—what a word, already) that I have never had any other subject basically, paper, paper, paper” (Derrida, 2005, p. 41). My paper addresses this thrice repeated noun as a name not so much of a material object on which we scribble, but as a space between the spirit and the letter, a space which turns out to be ineradicable even at the time of paper’s alleged eradication in the e-textual age, which may be called a fin de livre culture. This end of the book, I argue, is a highly provisional declaration of the beginning of a paperless era of digitized media, which are not quite capable of eradicating various traces and spectres of paper haunting their own theorizations.