The place of the text

Here is a wonderful quote from Dissemination that recasts the logic of that infamous phrase from Of Grammatology, "il n'y a pas de hors-texte" ("there is,"--in the sense of the Heideggerian es gibt--"nothing outside the text") quite clearly and quite creatively--displaying, we should note, that almost unbelievable genius of Derrida for coming up with ways to say nothing and everything at the same time:

If there is nothing outside the text, this implies, with the transformation of the concept of text in general, that the text is no longer the snug airtight inside of an interiority or an identity-to-itself... but rather a different placement of the effects of opening and closing.

-Dissemination, "Outwork," 36

In other words, the text "is" (one must only suppose its existence, or rather continually ask the question of whether it exists as such or not in elaborating its structure and its effects) a different placement (or displacement) of what allows for a different placement (a displacement). The "effects of opening and closing" are the effects of text: a text, on the one hand, opens up a field beyond itself of what it does not enclose or what it will soon enclose--that is, opens itself up to its referent, the "reality" or signified that "exists" outside itself--and, on the other hand, closes itself off from that referent which it opens up. In other words, the text "is," normally, what allows for a "different placement"--that is, "is" normally conceived as consistently reaffirming the opposition between difference and its opposite, identity, in its instantiation: text exhibits the effects of identity in exhibiting closure from the referent and (therefore or in contrast) allows for difference in exhibiting openness to a referent, to the outside. If text "is" for Derrida, in contrast to this normal "concept of the text in general," a "different placement of the effects of opening and closing," then it "is" not a repetition of the same opposition or binary. It "is" a repetition with a difference: in other words, a different placement of this difference, of this different ability for placement, for opening and closing the text with respect to the referent. This is why we said that text, when this concept suffers "transformation," "is" or "has its existence as" the different placement of what allows for a different placement. Indeed, the text "is" the displacement of this very ability for that very displacement of displacement to "be."