This is the most deconstructionist thing that has ever happened: Screenshot from the official White House release of the president's remarks on the tragic shootings over the weekend in El Paso and Dayton and not, as I'm sure you have heard, in that other Ohio city:
Sous rature is a strategic philosophical device originally developed by Martin Heidegger. Usually translated as 'under erasure', it involves the crossing out of a word within a text, but allowing it to remain legible and in place. Used extensively by Jacques Derrida, it signifies that a word is "inadequate yet necessary";[1] that a particular signifier is not wholly suitable for the concept it represents, but must be used as the constraints of our language offer nothing better.
In the philosophy of deconstruction, sous rature has been described as the typographical expression that seeks to identify sites within texts where key terms and concepts may be paradoxical or self-undermining, rendering their meaning undecidable.[2][3] To extend this notion, deconstruction and the practice of sous rature also seek to demonstrate that meaning is derived from difference, not by reference to a pre-existing notion or freestanding idea.[4]But which, in the last analysis, are we looking at here, in the rature of "in Toledo"? Is it really "inadequate yet necessary"? or is it more "paradoxical or self-undermining"?
