effacement of the sign, reversing, displacing, and dismantling it, to “reconstruct what is always already inscribed,” writing by erasure as writing as tracing. Here, reading the blank is as important, if not more so, than reading the text itself. The space on the page signifies as a trace of the source text, of that which is not there, and as a signifying structure in its own right. As Derrida suggests, “spacing is not a simple negativity of a lacuna but rather the emergence of the mark.” Or, as Dworkin puts it, “rather than decrease the signifying ability of the text by making portions of the print illegible, [...] erasures merely replace one set of signs with another equally significant set.”

If, as Derrida explains, writing is always a structure of signs under erasure, “a gesture effacing the presence of a thing and yet keeping it legible [...] always already inhabited by the trace of another sign which never appears as such,” then the examples of writing by erasure discussed in this chapter become an essence of what writing in general in fact represents. Turning into an exaggerated form of a Barthesian tissue of quotations, writing by erasure enables writers to openly acknowledge the layers of influence embedded in any act of writing, refuting the Romantic notions of genius. When read in line with Derrida’s concept, the designation of the original texts turns into a nucleus of a plethora of possible new meanings, replacing the provisional closure embedded in the familiar notions of a literary work, fixed in the materiality of print and the inherent limitations of a bound, complete volume. A commitment to questioning the origins of texts— and hence their originality---allows for a shift in the approach to the relationship between the source text and its iteration. When understood as an expression of Derrida’s *sous rature*, “the relationship between the reinscribed text and the so-called original text is not that of patency and latency, but rather the relationship between the two palimpsests.” Or, as Derrida puts it, “reading [and writing] resembles those X-ray pictures which discover, under the epidermis of the last painting, another hidden picture: of the same painter or another painter, no matter.” Moving away from the finite nature of writing, authorship, and originality in copyright terms, in writing erasure, as in composition *sous rature*, “all conclusions,” Spivak writes, “are genuinely provisional and therefore inconclusive, [...] all origins are similarly unoriginal.” As such erasure as a creative technique can be seen as an extension of the statement, a manifestation of Goldsmith’s uncreative writing as an expression of the open, provisional, and infinite nature of language play that Derrida advocates. This is a language that, in a form of an erasure of now canonized text, “bears with itself the necessity of its own critique,” as Derrida contends, “a discourse which borrows from a heritage the resources necessary for the deconstruction of that heritage itself.” The same sense of unoriginality that does not imply a lack of originality in aesthetic terms but only a removal from an origin of a work or a text— from its author---reverberates here and in my discussion of iteration in Chapter 1. As a project committed to a reconceptualization of the value