Writing and Its Discontents

Abstract

This essay dismantles the humanist fiction of writing as transparent subjectivity, exposing it instead as an agonistic field where power, discipline, and insurgency converge. Following Paul Ricoeur’s formulation of reading as “rewriting the text” (The Rule of Metaphor 144), it theorizes interpretation as a political operation—at once a polemical exercise and an exegetic inquiry—that simultaneously consolidates and fractures authority. Writing emerges not as representation but as violent inscription: a technology that constitutes subjects through regimes of control while harboring latent possibilities for their undoing.

            The argument stages a critical encounter between theorists who articulate writing’s constitutive paradoxes. Roland Barthes’s dissolution of the Author (Image-Music-Text 148) and Michel Foucault’s dual critique—which examines both the disciplinary scriptural economy (Discipline and Punish 194– 228) and the author-function as discursive regulator (“What Is an Author?” 113–38)—reveals writing’s coercive machinery. Jacques Derrida’s différance (Of Grammatology 25–27) and Julia Kristeva’s intertextuality (Desire in Language 36–39) expose its inherent subversions, while Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s account of colonial epistemic violence (“Can the Subaltern Speak?” 271–313) and Barbara Johnson’s discursive aporias (“Writing” 39–49) complete this dialectic.

            Through Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, the essay reframes writing as civilization’s double bind: a repressive system that generates meaning through exclusion yet secretes the toxins of its own destabilization. This tension acquires new virulence in algorithmic text production, where writing’s foundational contradictions—Foucault’s discipline, Derrida’s deferral, and Spivak’s ethical impossibility—are reconfigured within digital apparatuses.