Reading Notes on Derrida, "The Law of Genre"

Reading Notes on Derrida, "The Law of Genre"

"Genres are not to be mixed": a limit is drawn, norms and interdictions...

"As soon as genre announces itself, one must respect a norm...one must not risk impurity."

Suppose that it were impossible not to mix genres...if there were, lodged within the heart of the law itself, a principle of contamination?

What is at stake is exemplarity and its whole enigma

the law of the law of genre is...a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy.

The history of genre-theory is strewn with....outlines that inform and deform reality...that claim to discover a natural "system"...based on an opposition between nature and history

the law of abounding, of excess, the law of participation without membership, of contamination...the limitless field of general textuality

The trait common to classes of classes is the identifiable recurrence of a common trait by which one recognises...membership in a class....a code should provide an identifiable trait..authorizing us to determine...whether a given text belong to this genre

there is no genreless text...yet such participation never amounts to belonging...because of the trait of participation itself

This axiom of non-closure or non-fulfillment enfolds within itself the condition for the possibility and the impossibility of taxonomy