Signature event context
There is an argument from Derrida that goes roughly like this: the meaning of a text is stabilised by its context, but to the extent that its context is itself textualised this stabilisation is contingent on something that is itself only contingently stable. Context-dependency is contingency on context: a context makes something depend on it by touching on that thing, circumscribing it, constraining what it can be and do. Texts “out of context” are texts out of touch: they are able to mean something other than what their prior context constrained them to mean.
Derrida is interested, in “Signature Event Context” particularly, in something he calls the “iterability” of textual morsels or “graphemes”, their ability to lose touch with one context and be retouched in another. Iterability is contingency given time, the “accident of birth” of a grapheme’s inscription in some context considered as one in a series of accidents. In “Signature Event Context”, Derrida focuses particular attention on the “signature” as the inscription that ties together a text, a signatory and a moment in time. The place where the signature appears is a place where multiple contexts overlap and reinforce each other: discursive, biographical and historical. But it is also a place of “dehiscence and demarcation” where the signature itself, inasmuch as it too is a grapheme or morsel of text, is able to become detached from the very contextual conjuncture it seals and signifies.
The name “grapheme” suggests a textual unit, something that can be moved around in one piece from context to context, so that iterability might seem like the detachability of atoms from larger molecular assemblages, their ability to circulate within the general field of matter (considered as an arrangement of atoms in the void). In speaking of “dehiscence and demarcation”, however, Derrida indicates that the iterability of a “graphic mark” may entail the opening out of its structure, the partition and redistribution of the unitary identity its former context had secured. What vouchsafes the unitary identity of a signature is precisely its repeatability: the fact that my signature is the recognisably “the same” each time it is written. At the same time, a signature has an “internal” structure, being composed of strokes and flourishes, which can certainly be decomposed (as, for example, a forger practicing the strokes of my signature might concentrate first on the arc of the initial “D”). So Derrida is not elaborating an atoms-in-the-void theory of textual matter, but an account of textual multiplicity in which composition and localisation are intimately connected. A textual “atom” in this account is an “atom” on account of being where it is in some structure for which it is an atom; that is, a structure within which its own structure is not discernible.
(Interestingly enough, in “Signsponge” Derrida considers an example in which the signature of a text is not “atomic”, a unitary mark placed at the edge of the text, but rather a sort of generic multiplicity diagonally distributed throughout the text).