Timothy Morton:
I use the term re-mark after Jacques Derrida’s analysis of how paintings differ (or not) from written texts. How can you tell that a squiggle is a letter and not just a dash of paint? [56] This is a genuine problem. You enter a classroom. The blackboard is scrawled with writing. But as you come closer, you see that the writing is actually not writing at all, but the half-erased chalk marks that may or may not have been writing at some point.
Any mark, argues Derrida, depends upon at least one other thing.
This could be as simple as an indescribable surface, or a system of what counts as a meaningful mark. For there to be a difference that makes a difference there must be at least one other object that the mark can’t explain, re-marking the mark. Marks can’t make themselves mean all by themselves. If they could, then meaning could indeed be reduced to a pure structuralist system of relations. Since they can’t, then the “first mark” is always going to be uncertain, in particular because it’s strictly secondary to the inscribable surface (or whatever) on which it takes places. There must be some aperture at the beginning of any system, in order for it to be a system—some irreducible uncertainty. Some kind of magic, some kind of illusion that may or may not be the beginning of something.
M.H. Ducey:
If both sender and receiver were entirely present when the mark was inscribed, and they were thereby present to themselves –since, by hypothesis here, being present and being present-to-oneself are considered to be equivalent– how could they even be distinguished from one another? [when one writes a note to one's neighbor] the note is precisely designed to make up for the possible absences and it therefore implies them, and they leave their mark on the mark. They remark the mark in advance. Curiously, this re-mark constitutes part of the mark itself. And this remark is inseparable from the structure of iterability.
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Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, tr. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 54, 104, 205, 208, 222, 253
The book is online: here
For further readings on the re-mark check for instance the passage we read: p 47 - 49
