". . . in pointing out a single thematic nucleus or a single guiding thesis, it would cancel out the textual displacement that is at work "here." (Here? Where? The question of the here and now is explicitly enacted in dissemination.) Indeed, if such a thing were justifiable, we would have to assert right now that one of the theses -- there is more than one -- inscribed within dissemination is precisely the impossibility of reducing a text as such to its effects of meaning, content, thesis, or theme. Not the impossibility, perhaps, since it is commonly done, but the resistance - we shall call it the restance -- of a sort of writing that can neither adapt nor adopt such a reduction."
[Translator's note: The word restance, coined from the verb rester (to remain), means "the fact or act of remaining or of being left over."] From Barbara Johnson's translation of Jacques Derrida's Dissemination.
It is impossible to reduce a text to one meaning, content, thesis, or theme. Knowing this, you might as well invent your own.
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