Abstract
Derrida accuses the Western episteme (if we are permitted to generalize) of favoring speech over writing, and prioritizing the presence of Being over its signs. Quran blurs this distinction and, from the outset, problematizes the relation between speech and text. It prompts its listener/reader to recite (’ iqrā’) and it valorizes the text by affirming the nobility of a lord (rabb) who teaches by the pen (ʿallama bil-qalam). Taking into account the post-structuralist dictum ‘language produces the subject’, this paper explores the possibility that if language speaks, rather than the subject, then the Quran, both in the sense of speech and text, is both a language event and language reality. The haunting, unforgettable absence of a subject plunges its listener/reader to become the subject and object of the text, conflating the Divine with the human. And if the sign/verse and divinity are born in the same place and time, then Quran becomes a representation of such a ‘sign/verse’ event. In the Quran, the violence of metaphysics occurs in the crucible of text and its protean forms, including revelation, speech, writing, and hearing. Beyond the event, the Quranic speech persists wrapped in the text, prefiguring as ‘the wrapped one’ (al-muzzamil) and ‘the enfolded one’ (al-mudathir). This aims to evaluate the relevance of Quranic semiotics in shifting the pre-modern emphasis on origin and center to the contemporary preponderance of the endless interpretation of the text. From gathering communities as people of the text (ahl al-kitāb), to contemplating the signs of the heavens and earth, to the passing of night into day, to the turning of individual souls as texts from which they are asked to recite (’ iqrā’ kitābik), every phenomenon can be seen as an inscribed text. The sight of lightning and the flash of Quranic verse occur in the same plane— the plane of the text.
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