Talking Heads: Violence and Desire in Dumas père’s (Post-)Terrorist Society

In her analysis of La Dissémination, Carolyn Dean claims that according to Jacques Derrida, the “presence of reading and writing–the presence, in other words, of civilization itself-requires, paradoxically, an absence, a wound” (42). Derrida writes that the “‘operation’ of reading/writing goes by way of ‘the blade of a red knife“‘ (Dissemination 301). The image of a severed head generates multiple cuts in Philippe Sollers’s textual machine, upon which Derrida is commenting:

I saw the head, severed but still alive, the mouth open upon the only word that cannot be pronounced or captured …. I, in my turn, was entirely able to relive the scene … The drumroll that finally covers this voice before the blade that has dispatched the organ of this voice into the basket, not without the head’s having been brandished as proof of a sacrilegious, dirt- ied reduction. (Numbers, quoted in Dissemination 302)