Kuloco, Macherey

“Il n’y a pas de hors-texte.” –Derrida

Although this is not a quote from Macherey, I found this quote from our syllabus to pertain to all the questions I asked myself while reading from A Theory of Literary Production. A serious pet peeve of mine is when someone contradicts themselves. I had a hard time in Philosophy class and encountered the same problems when reading Macherey.
The first encounter I had with Macherey’s contradiction was with the idea of the text being self-sufficient. On page 16 he states, “Yet it remains obvious that although the work is self-sufficient it does not contain or engender its own theory; it does not know itself.” I understood him to go on to explain that even though there are pieces missing, the text itself is complete and critical thinking should not be done to try and bring the problems of the text to life or add to it in any way. However, three paragraphs later, he states that: “Thus, the book is not self-sufficient; it is necessarily accompanied by a certain absence, without which it would not exist.” I understood his explanation of this absence to be the silence, which he believes completes the thoughts stated in the text.
This relates back to the Derrida quote, translated: “There is nothing outside of the text,” because it is in complete opposition to Macherey’s second point about the text not being enough. The reading quotes Freud in saying that: “in order to say anything, there are other things which must not be said.” This is also in complete opposition to what we were taught in the past. I understand that the critic is supposed to question the text but not add to it, however, there seems to be a fine line between right and wrong in this case.
The other main contradiction I found was the quote on page 17: “Silence reveals speech—unless it is speech that reveals the silence.” Besides the fact that it also contradicts what Derrida has stated, I have to question how we, as critical readers of any text, can learn from what is there if we don’t question what the silence is saying or even question the speech that we are assessing. Macherey’s answer was, from page 19, “The error belongs as much with the one who reveals it as it does with the one who asks the first questions—the critic.” However, even though we, as critical readers of all different texts, are told not to fill in the gaps, I would have to question if we would live in the same world today if throughout history no thinker questioned what he read or what was never written down.