In order to be what it ‘is’, a text is an essentially vitiated, impure, open, haunted thing, consisting of traces and traces of traces: no text is purely present, nor was there some purely present text in the past.

There are always differences, tensions, paradoxes between what a text says (or what an author wants to say, or thinks s/he is saying) and what a text does.

A text always remains in crucial ways ‘imperceptible’.

A text is a ‘fabric of traces’ governed by a logic of the ‘nonpresent remainder’, by what thus figures the impossibility of pure presence, the impossibility of absolute plenitude of meaning or intention.