Iterability

For a written mark to be writing at all, it must remain legible when its author is absent—gone from the room, dead, or as Jacques Derrida pushed the argument, never existing behind the mark in the first place. A mark that could only be understood in the living presence of its author would not be a usable mark; so the capacity to function in the author’s absence is built into writing from the start, as a structural requirement and not an unfortunate accident. Derrida named this capacity iterability—the mark’s ability to be repeated, cited, transplanted into contexts its author never imagined, understood when the producer is permanently gone. And he argued that iterability is not peculiar to writing in the narrow sense: spoken words are equally iterable, equally citable, equally capable of being repeated in the speaker’s absence and understood when the speaker is dead. The capacity to function without the author is not a