A Flypaper Machine Without Paper(s) or The Book Not to Come. Derridea...

From very early on, Derrida has held that no text is absolutely identical with itself, except Mallarmé’s Livre irréalisé. While the theoretical implications thereof have been widely discussed ever since, comparably little attention has been paid so far to the fact that there has been an almost silent effectuation going on in the practical, or technical even, realm of digital and online editions of (mostly) literary corpora that have been put into practice over the past few decades so that it seems quite justified to state that the focus of “deconstruction” with respect to its literary dimensions has shifted from academic discussion in university departments to questions of how to develop, test, and realize ways of editing and publishing a “general” text online, thereby transgressing traditional concepts such as work or book and author likewise. In my paper, I present, as a point in case, our own endeavour to establish what we have come to call a social progressive online edition devoted to the Austrian modernist writer and philosopher Robert Musil (1880-1942), whose reputation as a major literary figure of the 20^th century is at par, according to the New York Times, only with Joyce’s and Proust’s. To do so, I highlight formal, or methodological, aspects (such as Musil’s eventual withdrawal from even desiring to complete his novel The Man without Qualities, which thus famously remained unfinished, for the sake of “pure” writing, without the book as an end in itself, as it were) as well as contentual, or topical, aspects (such as a life-long fascination by and interest for the subject of incest, both philosophically and literary) insofar as they are also prominent in Derrida’s writings (e.g. in Paper Machine), trusting that such a comparison facilitates gaining valuable insights on both thinkers.