Derrida and Kristeva Play Sollers’ Numbers (A Gamer’s Mode d’emploi)

Jacques Derrida’s influential essay “Dissemination” (1969) offers a detailed commentary and subtle response to Philippe Sollers’ novel Numbers (1968), which he calls a “textual machine.” Elaborating some of her most fascinating concepts, Julia Kristeva’s essay on Numbers “Engendering the Formula” appears almost simultaneously with Derrida’s text. In terms of dialogical contiguities but also in terms of irreducible specificities, this unique crossing of perspectives is indicative of the 1960s intellectual efforts to surmount the technocratic pressures on the humanities. Addressing the novel and the essays as an “ensemble” – as different replays of a quasi “video game” – the present study foregrounds the performative aspects of the three authors’ formidable artistic and theoretical encounter. Their employment of quotation, numerology and levels of meaning are approached through their intertextual play with each other as well as, among other things, Dante’s work, Kabbalah, and I ching, the Chinese Book of Changes. In the face of the unprecedented flattening and automatization of language we are facing today, the Numbers exchange provides a powerful vindication of writing as a supernumerary and multi-dimensional non-linear process.