Nothing separates them, not content distinguishes them. But there is a nothing between them that does not appear as such, and which is decisive. It is the question of this nothing that interests me (36).
Derrida's figure of the nothing reminds me of two texts in particular (although Derrida himself doubtlessly sees many more traces in this word) -- I think first of Wallace Stevens' "The Snowman," which was the first poem that I did not understand when I first read it. After the class discussion in the Modernist American Poetry class for which I read the poem, I had a new appreciation for the depth of the poem -- depth that existed underneath such a transparent surface. I have come back, retraced, my steps to this poem of late. For me, the nothingness is always bound up in the listener, and the listener is a figure, at its most basic, of the other. Stevens' listener in the snow enables me to imagine a relationship between the self and other where (noticeably, a place that is not here) the pleasurable pain of encounter does not necessitate a defensive response.
Still, it's rather an odd choice.
I often think -- why does a Victorianist who studies women writers more often than not always come back to a twentieth century American insurance salesman/poet?
One has calculate as far as possible, but the incalculable happens [arrive]: it is the other, and singularity, and chance, without one's being able to one's part [part]; the parting [patage: distribution] between reason and its other, tnhe calculable and the incalculable, the necessary and the aleatory, is without example; it does not obey a logic of distinction, it is not a parting of two parts. (61)
I have gotten nowhere -- I meant to go somewhere else entirely.