Io e/o la carta… (nuove speculazioni su un lusso dei poveri)

It is presented here an extensive excerpt from an interview by Jacques Derrida about paper – translated for the first time into Italian by Donata Meneghelli – which was originally published in the journal “Les Cahiers de médiologie’” in 1997. In this long conversation with Marc Guillaume and Daniel Bougnoux, Derrida, starting from a historicisation of the object and phenomenon (paper delimits a segment in the history of civilisation, both very long and very short, and is on the verge of waning, under the impact of digital media or, to use his lexicon, of “retreating”), enucleates with lucidity and passion the many values and meanings of paper as a support for writing. His insights range from a retrospective perspective – that is, in the light of the technological transformations that are substituting paper with multimedia digital supports – that enables the previously unnoticed multimedia potential of paper to be grasped après coup, to its virtues (but also its limits, in the dream of what Derrida calls “an absolute memory”) as tool for preserving and transmitting of an archive, to the relationships of paper with the law, identity, the possibility for the individual to be a legal subject, or – again – to the opposition between the space of the page and the space of the book. Consistent with his philosophical assumptions, Derrida, is also willing to face and to take into account the materiality of his object of investigation.