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Books

Textual Intercourse

John Green reviews Dissemination by Jacques Derrida (translated by Barbara Johnson).

“This (therefore) will not have been a book”
Jacques Derrida

It is with a sense of some irony that I must write this review, since the thrust of Derrida’s argument in Dissemination is that books are not selfenclosed entities that can be examined in isolation. By their very nature they refer us to all manner of parallel, contiguous and tangential texts, genres and discourses. All writing is intertextual as a result of the proliferation of meaning beyond what is explicit in the text. We could not read Dissemination without already having read, having already understood. If it were the only book in the universe, if the words therein appeared nowhere else, then we would be unable to read it.

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