The Minimal Element of Writing

Jacques Derrida claims that the mark constitutes the minimal element of writing — what he calls ‘the irreducible atom’1 at the asemic origin for the metaphysics of meaning itself (be this origin in the biogenetic code of life or the cybernetic code of data). The writing of the mark, the grapheme, underpins the transmission of information, even before the advent of our phonetic language (for which the mark might seem to constitute the written glyph that evolves to capture an uttered sound). Each extant mark refers, beyond itself, to an absent mark, alluding to this absence, again and again, via iteration and recursion, doing so through a series of sequential references, none of which can terminate in a last mark. The meaning of a mark thus finds itself characterized both by a differing across sites of signification and by a deferring across times of signification.2