Thus we no longer know whether what was always represented as … “supplement,” “sign,” “writing,” or “trace,” “is” not … “older” than presence and the system of truth, older than “history.” Or again, whether it is “older” than sense and the senses: older than the primordial dator intuition, … older than seeing, hearing, and touching … not more “ancient” than what is “primordial.”

the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines … its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event.

Of course, if one defines language in such a way that it is reserved for what we call man, what is there to say? But if one re-inscribes language in a network of possibilities that do not merely encompass it but mark it irreducibly from the inside, everything changes. I am thinking of the mark in general, of the trace, of iterability, of différance. These possibilities or necessities, without which there would be no language, are themselves not only human … I am speaking here of very “concrete” and very “current” problems: the ethics and the politics of the living.