What pen would the late Jacques Derrida endorse?
Maybe this one, from www.go-pen.com. The fountain pen has been around for a hundred years at least with little to no changes. Now, a group of smart people invented a biometric pen that works on any surface, doesn’t leave any marks but remembers your hand moves as you write, converts your handwriting into text and stores the information digitally. Like a Stylus pen but only portable and surface-neutral. Although I’ve always thought of Derrida’s arche-ecriture as a whimsical invention of a French philosopher, technology is capable of materializing his writing fantasies.
Dan Ng | 13-Jan-08 at 4:54 am | Permalink
A pen - an instrument of thought projection - that watches you instead? An output device subverted into an input device?
Yeah, Derrida would approve.
German Dziebel | 13-Jan-08 at 10:13 am | Permalink
Cool interpretation, Dan. Right on the mark. A little thing like that can inspire a storm of thoughts from an ex-academic like me, all the way to the role of anthropology among other disciplines centered around its ability to observe reality through participation.
In philosophy the anthropological turn started with Heidegger who gleaned from Husserl the idea of a “return to things” and of “objective reality”/ontology as a memory of human actions as they unfold in history. Derrida read Heidegger and concluded that “there’s no reality outiside of the realm of play[writing],” meaning that all thoughts are self-descriptions.