XX

"Derrida has further developed this chiasmic structure in two essays on Maurice Blanchot: "The Law of the Genre" and "Living On: Border Lines." This development is intimately linked to a close reading of Blanchot's La Folie du jour. In these two essays Derrida ties the chiasmic reversal to a movement of invagination, thus demonstrating his continued concern with the unthought of "totality." Chiasmic invagination is a movement that constitutes and deconstitutes the border, the limit of a closure. As Derrida has pointed out in "The Retrait of Metaphor," a border and a limit are understood in metaphysics as a circular limit bordering a homogeneous field. Regarding the representation of metaphysics as one metaphysics, he writes that the "representation of a linear and circular closure surrounding a homogeneous s[ace is, precisely, . . . and auto-representation of philosophy in its onto-encyclopedic logic." Because of the twisted figure of the chiasmic invagination, the apparently outer edge of an enclosure "makes no sign beyond itself, toward what is utterly other, without becoming double or dual, without making itself be 'represented,' refolded, superposed, re-marked within the enclosure, at least in what the structure produces as an effect of interiority." In short, it is the structure according to which a border, which is always seemingly the limit of an interiority set off against an exteriority, cannot but re-mark and reapply that reference to the outer within its interiority, between its center and its circumference.

What is an invagination? It is, writes Derrida, :The inward refolding of la gaine [sheath, girdle], the inverted reapplication fo the outer edge to the inside of a form where the outside opens a pocket." Where such invagination occurs, it is impossible to settle upon the limits of the border. As a result, the edge of a form turns out to be a fold within the form. [. . . ] What consequently becomes clear is the following: since a border encloses an interiority only if this border refers to its outer other, and since this reference to the other cannot but be inscribed within the interiority, not only do borders acquire an extremely twisted structure, but the interiority, the very space where the relationship of the form to itself takes place, appears to be at the same time the gathering space of the double invagination that crosses out the identity of the form.

Rudolphe Gasché, Introduction to Readings In Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger, by Andrzej Warminski. p. xx.