5. To risk frivolity in order to escape the spirals of life, the wheels of fortune. But then to return again in the next life, by way of a text.

The Archeology of the Frivolous

-- Jacque Derrida

(pp132-133) As we have noted, the degree, the gradual difference ruins the identical proposition by dislocating the is. But at the same time the degree makes the identical proposition possible by giving it a synthetic value which advance knowledge and prohibits frivolity...the gap or deviation of time (repetition and absence of the perceptual present to itself) opens the representative vector-ing within both the sign and the idea. The operation of supplying -- the concept and the word reappear regularly -- is interpreted as representation. Now the sign's vacancy -- a frivolous one -- the suspension of its relation with the object, intervenes before the sign. Or rather, the sign announces itself before the sign: already on the threshold of generalization or abstraction, that is, as early as this process of extending, sense which permits taking a sign "figuratively," inscribes metaphor in the poetic origin of language, and rules the dictionary of synonyms. A "stretched" sense always risks being empty, floating, slackened in its relation with the object...What is said by extension is always said improperly.

(pp134-135) On the one hand, frivolity could be thought to come from need through desire: desire opens the direction of the object, produces the supplying sign which can always work to no effect, by means of vacancy, disposability, extension. More especially since, by itself alone, as an orientation without intrinsic force, desire is essentially slight, thin and inconsistent, inconstant.

On the other hand, and conversely, need in itself is frivolous. Need without desire is blind. It has no object, is identical to itself, enclosed in itself, tautological and autistic. Of stone. By relating need to an object, desire would mobilize it, moralize it, subject it to the law, fix it in an order.

But to remain content with such an opposition of desire and need, however chiasmatic it may be, is to forget that with the human order (the second first -- metaphysics as humanism), with language, the arbitrary sign, commerce in general, the chiasmus bends with a supplementary deflection: the need to desire.

This need, which is not a desire, does not belong to nature. Or if it does belong to nature -- to man's -- it is as the ability to acquire...

No longer is desire the relation with the object, but the object of need. No longer is desire a direction, but an end. An end without end bending need into a kind of flight. This escape sweeps away the origin, system, destiny, and time of need (an exempt word and a concept without identity).

The moment the statue awakens, it likewise sets to work to reduce the gap. Stone [Pierre] beginning to produce -- in order (not) to become again what it will have been, contrary to the frivolous distraction -- the headstrong identities of signs, other frivolities: the fear of a Medusa, legitimacy itself.