There is nothing inside the text6
Violently inscribing within the text that which attempted to govern it from without.7
(Jacques Derrida)
Here we return to the non-being of Plotinus, which may be the nothing of nihilism. This nothing can be compared to the nothing outside the Derridian text. It is Derrida's hope that 'différance produces what it forbids, makes possible the very thing that it makes impossible'.8 We could not wish for a more 'modern' statement which encapsulates the dissolution of the something making the nothing generate as something. There are at least four ways of approaching this Derridian-Neoplatonic nothing (a nothing deeply indebted to Lacan, Sartre, and Heidegger, if not to Husserl, Hegel, Schelling, Kant, Spinoza and Descartes).9
First of all, for Derrida, we know there is 'nothing outside the text', just as for Plotinus there is 'a' non-being outside being,10 the 'One' beyond being. Second, this means there is 'a text outside the nothing', just as for Plotinus the 'text' of nous comes from the non-being of the One. So, in an analogous sense, Derrida's text comes from the nothing, for without this nothing language could not say anything. Third, there is a 'nothing within the text'. This nothingness is the result of the text actually being; for being is a mode less than non-being, since the text, or Intelligence, which has come from 'the One', exists in an inferior manner to the non-actual referent. There is a nothingness in the text because the text itself does not exist in a true manner, viz., beyond-being; the text is 'not' to the degree that it has (signifying) being. We can see this in Derrida's economy of différance, for there any existent must reside within the shadow of infinite difference and deferral. This means that an existent is in opposition to the truth of this infinity when it says 'I am'.11 Fourth, there is a 'text inside the nothing'. If there is nothing outside the text then we can conceive this as an exteriority surrounding the text. In this way to say that there is 'nothing outside the text' is to say that the text is within this nothing which surrounds it. The text outside the nothing is the text within the nothing. This being the case every text is permeated with nothingness, for this nothing is outside the text and this text is inside the nothing. In this way we can see both that language says nothing and that thought thinks nothing. The Derridian text is without being. Consequently, it remains as nothing (which is the nothingness within every text).12 In Of Grammatology, Derrida says that 'the outside is the inside'.13 I take this to mean that the nothing, which resides outside, comes within every text because every text actually says nothing. I shall return to Derrida's relation to language below. First I wish to argue that Derrida's 'text' displays similarities with Spinoza as well as Plotinus.
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