It is in his book, Philosophie-écrans, du cinéma à la révolution numérique, that Mauro Carbone thematizes the “figure” of the archi-screen. The formulation of this figure derives from Jacques Derrida who, half a century ago in Of Grammatology, defined “archi-writing” as originary différance, preceding all self-identity of different terms. Derrida observed that writing was historically and conceptually repressed by living speech, which engaged him in a strategic reversal of the hierarchy and the generalization of writing in order to make room to undermine the work of repression of the heaviest metaphysical oppositions. By comparing it with archi-writing, we would like to test the figure of the archi-screen that Mauro Carbone proposes. A major question emerges from such a comparison: is the screen in such a historical and conceptual situation that its generalization, under the name of the “archi-screen,” can be substituted for the Derridean generalization of writing so as to deepen or to displace its subversive operation? Does this not, in fact, happen? We thus hope to be able to assess the full dimensions of an operation which, while read only very modestly, permits us nevertheless to glimpse its profound radicality. From writing to the screen, the shift could well be done from reading to seeing, perhaps reinvesting in visibility itself that limit of phenomenality that Derrida recognized as operating in writing, to the point of giving it back its flesh.
