Important Terms

deconstruction: not capitalized- for it is not a proper name but an event that takes place during close reading of a text; as Terry Eagleton says, "...the critical operation by which oppositions can be partly undermined...to show how texts come to embarass their own systems of logic;..."
 * Aporia: the "symptomatic" points or impasses of meaning-- where the text is contradictory.
 * "Generalized text" and "Undecidability": the suggestion that all texts are continuously in flux of signification or meaning. Implies through structuralism that there is nothing outside of language to control, limit, or direct signification. He argues even with context, the signs and therefore meaning in a text are inherently unstable and may refer to an infinite amount of things.
 * Hinge (brisure): the idea of an permeable border, especially between the two disciplines of study founded on "writing"(Philosophy and Art History). Compare/contrast with parergon.
 * Trace ("arche" (origin)- writing): Derrida's concept constituting the origin of speech and writing. A relationship of presence and absence in a text or artwork.
 * Differance: addressing the inherent instability of language, signifying how meaning in language is always different and deferred. A writing is a signifier that someone wrote it--but it is a play between presence and absence for one cannot write as they experience (which is why speech is held in such high priviledge), writing for Derrida but be speakable and therefore the paradox challenges the traditional notions of "truth" and "being."
 * Parergon: frame; on the discourse on the value of an artwork in Truth and Painting, is an argument focused on the frame which divides the artwork (ergon) from the other (par = beside, "beside the artwork"), defining the work by creating an inside and outside. Yet this division is not solid: it acts as a hinge between the intrinsic and extrinsic-- separating but not isolating.
 * ekphrasis: the verbal desciption of an artwork
 * blindness: any interpretation of an artwork which comes out of perception. Writing and artworks are modes of representation NOT influenced by perception but simply a trace of the presence-absence.
 * trait: a common feature born out of repetition "which never reveals itself because it marks the difference between the forms or the contents of the appearing." ( Truth in Painting 1978)