“Who inscribes Whom?”: Blood, Ink, and Deconstruction

Abstract

If, in Ancient Greece “injustice” took the shape of a tattooed woman, Adikia, and if, according to Derrida, “deconstruction is justice,” or in other words, Dike, could we speak—following this tradition—of a deconstructive or Derridean tattoo? The Derridean corpus has a fair share of tattoos in its body, some external, as citations of other tattoos or tattooed bodies, and others internal, describing its own limbs, like the columns of Glas. In face of the key principle of visibility through the invisibility of our digital age, the blood and ink of the tattoo are perhaps the deconstructive answer, or at least an intimation of a response to the blindness of our inscriptions. These body and corpus’ inscriptions (words and images, paper and skin on multiple surfaces or screens) will not reaffirm any border (that has never been the desire of the tattooed tribes). However, they might restructure them, turning them into Deleuzian and Guattarian lines of flight “between the national and the global, and even between the earth and the extraterrestrial, the world and the universe” (Paper Machine 57), reproducing them through multiple ink inseminations, instead of limiting the surfaces; in Derridean words, making a plurality of substrates of every desire for (a) khôra.