• 1 In writing itself and in language itself, this opposition, according to Derrida, takes the form of (...)
• 2 Let us recall that the role of writing as a pharmakon, an artificial “booster” of memory, was of co (...)

3In his numerous studies and dissertations, the author of Voice and Phenomenon referred to the most eminent representatives of thought (not only philosophical) to prove that they had dealt extensively with the question of writing and its opposition to voice.¹ In the context of the relation of writing to memory, he recalled Plato and invoked the category of pharmakon – often used by scholars – meaning a drug which, if used in excess, can intensify a disease or cause another condition, no less dangerous than the one it removes.² It seems, however, that it would be difficult to find a better compendium of knowledge on the multiple cultural, anthropological and philosophical entanglements of writing (and the act of writing itself) than the works of the eminent French postmodernist. Even a cursory recollection (recalling from memory, aided by writing…) of his oeuvre makes it possible to distinguish those fields for which the issue of writing/voice (as well as the opposition between phonetic and ideographic writing, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs) turned out to be crucial: these are anthropology (with its precursors, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau), philosophy, psychology (with particular reference to psychoanalysis and especially the work of Freud), religion (possibly theology) and religious studies, history, political science, ethnology, linguistics. It was from the latter (and, above all, from the founder of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure) that Derrida drew – according to his own testimony – the idea of ​​distinctive features, differences, as elements constituting language, which led him (via Martin Heidegger, as the discoverer of the distinction between being and existence, fundamental for ontology) to the famous concept of différance, constitutive difference (which is itself different from the common concept of difference), which is the “vanishing” ground of all identity and all being.

• 3 As one of the most famous passages in Derrida's work puts it: “I shall therefore speak of the lette (...)

4A sign of the otherness of this peculiar “primordial difference” is the change in the spelling of the French word difference – Derrida's writes it as differánce (in French pronounced exactly the same as the original), which focuses the viewer's attention on the “pure” letter (‘a’) as the retreating substrate of speech/writing.³

• 4 The Banasiak's translation of Derrida`s differánce („różnicość”) is a neologism made up of two word (...)
• 5 In modern… physics (as well as in computer science), this style of thinking finds support (not enti (...)

5How can this substrate (ground, background) be interpreted, how can the “voiceless” letter emerging from it be read? The controversy of two Polish translations of the word, rendered either as “różnia” (in the translation by Joanna Skoczylas, later accepted by other eminent translators) or as “różnicość” (in the translation by Bogdan Banasiak), seems to reflect these possibilities well (divided, of course, as is always the case with Derrida…). Both propositions are appropriate, revealing two aspects of the word differánce and the Derridean intention that accompanies it like a shadow: its fading into the background, in silence and lack of expression (“różnia” is “różnica” devoid of the letter ‘c’) and, on the other hand, the differentiating hyperactivity of that which (from the point of view of an “object-oriented” ontology, which recognises only that which is ‘being’) objectively “does not exist”⁴ (nothingness, which constantly differentiates and is thus the most active, though most difficult to perceive, element of so-called reality – including that which is “object-oriented”).⁵

• 6 See J. Derrida, Ostrogi. Style Nietzschego [Spurs. Nietzsche's Styles], transl. by B. Banasiak, Gda (...)
• 7 It seems that this very metaphor best summarises Derrida's interpretation of G.W.F. Hegel 's semiol (...)

6But what is the relationship of these issues to writing, notation, inscription, initials, glosses and the thirtieth issue of the yearly “Inscription”? Well, one of the truths of Derrida's reflections is that the background is crucial to their existence – not only the physical (or virtual) existence of a sheet of paper, a screen, a tablet, a rough stone, masonry, the wall of a building or, finally, the recordable surface of earth, but also the interaction of the writing tool (from a stick to a virtual pen or finger-sensitive keyboard) with their “exterior”, the immeasurably wide “margin”. It can be the time and space of the physical Universe, the past, present and future (as temporal modi of the record's existence), the unconscious in relation to consciousness, the individual in relation to society, the “living” presence in relation to the actuality of the trace, the “spirit” in relation to “matter”, the tombstone (also in the gigantic form of an Egyptian pyramid) concealing the now absent life as its own sense. It seems that according to Derrida – and he develops his views in constant interference with the “great absentees” of cultural and scientific history (his stylos, like Nietzsche's, had at least two blades⁶) – just as every sign implies a human body in an already “non-human” or virtual form (like the suitably crafted mummy of a pharaoh in an Egyptian pyramid⁷), so the material ‘body of the sign’ represents some kind of promise of the restoration of what is past: if not in the form of the Parousia, then in the form of an ever-renewed hope for meaning that is created by human beings, but comes to us from outside the “human world”. This “pre-human” and “post-human” sense of writing has much in common with Derrida's notion of a depersonalised and masked unconscious as a continuous flow of meaning, a measureless “ocean of communication”, hidden in the substratum of ‘human reality’ and constituting the widest context for the emergence of the sign (also in the form of inscription, notation, gloss…). After all, is it not precisely the evocation of it, an approach towards it, that Humanists are engaged in, and is it not that what we, the Authors and Editors of “Inscription”, care about?

• 8 In Poland, the event marking the rise of literary scholars' interest in these areas of writing was (...)
• 9 J.S. Bystroń, Napisy. Drobiazgi tradycyjne [Inscriptions. Traditional trivia], Warsaw 1927 (printou (...)
• 10 J. Maciejewski, Literatura okolicznościowa…, pp. 3–4.

7Occasional and applied literature, which has been the main research area of the texts published in the yearly “Inscription” for the last three decades, belongs to this type of literature, which came to the attention of science relatively late in the twentieth century, and was initially represented by sociologists and anthropologists rather than literary scholars.⁸ In the interwar period, occasional inscriptions on buildings or trees as a cultural phenomenon fascinated Jan Stanisław Bystroń, which he expressed in an article entitled Napisy. Drobiazgi tradycyjne [Inscriptions. Traditional trivia] from 1927 – a title which was referred to by Janusz Maciejewski, the originator and founder of the yearly “Napis” in 1994.⁹ These literary phenomena, located both outside the realm of fiction and folklore, are often distinguished by the characteristics mentioned by Maciejewski, such as ephemerality, popularity and anonymity.¹⁰ These texts are created out of the need of the moment or for a utilitarian purpose, they are splatters of everyday life, a record of spontaneous reactions to social or political events, a registration of behaviour and customs recorded in genre-specific, “unbeautiful” works.

• 11 D. Naborowski, Poezje [Poems], ed. by J. Dürr-Durski, Warszawa 1961, p. 158.

12In order to close our issue with a theme worthy of the topic, it is appropriate to use a Baroque motto – a concise line from Daniel Naborowski's poem Krótkość żywota [Shortness of Life]: “Sound, shadow, smoke, wind, flash, voice, point, human life is famous”¹¹. However, a somewhat perverse reversal of this melancholic vision of the microscopic, irretrievably dissipating traces of an individual's existence can be proposed. All that remains is a crumb of testimony – but this crumb can become the seed from which a story will grow.