Derrida, la carta e noi: una postfazione

Commenting on Derrida’s interview Paper and me, the essay, as a kind of foreword, aims to highlight three main aspects. First, the place that paper, with the layered multiplicity of uses and values that characterises it, the investments it has been subjected to, occupies within the framework of a general reflection on media, supports and the typographic unconscious. Second, the links between the Derridian meditation on paper and some main questions at the core of his thought, such as the archive, memory, and the order of the book. Lastly, it is important to highlight the gaze that Derrida casts on paper in 1997, that is, at the beginning of the so-called digital revolution, a gaze marked by a kind of double temporal focus, the uncertainties of the (his) present and the possibility of already viewing paper retrospectively, from the standpoint of a ‘perfect future’, to detect unperceived virtualities. And superimposed to it, there is also the gaze that we – now, in 2024, when that revolution would be said to be accomplished – cast on paper through Derrida’s words and on those same words, in a multifaceted interplay of historical perspectives.