Where Does a Text Begin? — Epigraphs and the Question of Origin in Contemporary Philosophy

Introduction

Readers often pass quickly over the epigraph. Positioned before the main body of a work, it can appear ornamental, a gesture of erudition rather than a site of argument. Yet in certain strands of contemporary philosophical writing, the epigraph performs a far more consequential role. It ceases to function as scholarly decoration and instead operates as a theoretical threshold that unsettles the very idea of textual self-origin. What looks like a preliminary citation may already be staging the problem the essay will unfold.

Samuel Weber’s “Closure and Exclusion” offers a striking example. The essay opens not with Weber’s own voice but with two others: Wittgenstein, reflecting on rule-following, and Derrida, distinguishing competing interpretations of interpretation. Before a single claim is advanced, the textual space is already shared. The essay begins, one might say, inhabited.

Citation as Authority

Within conventional academic prose, citation tends to support a position that has already been articulated. References authenticate claims, situate arguments within a lineage, and signal methodological responsibility. Authority is summoned after the fact.

When a quotation precedes the argument, however, its function shifts. Rather than reinforcing a statement, it participates in constructing the discursive ground upon which any statement becomes possible. The text no longer appears to emerge from a self-contained origin; it takes shape within an already existing network of voices.

Writing After Others

Weber’s opening gesture quietly exemplifies this displacement. Wittgenstein asks whether there are not cases in which we “make up the rules as we go along” (Wittgenstein, 2009). Derrida, in turn, describes an interpretation that relinquishes the dream of a truth beyond play (Derrida, 1978). Together, these citations introduce contingency where philosophical writing has often sought stability.

What appears external to Weber’s essay proves inseparable from its interior formation. Derrida captures this relation when he observes that “the exterior and interior share a relationship that is… anything but mere externalization” (1976, p. 35). Exteriority does not simply surround a text; it helps constitute it. The epigraph thus marks not an ornamental edge but a structural condition: writing proceeds after others.

Neither Outside nor Inside

The epigraph occupies a peculiar position. It stands before the text yet belongs to it, forming a boundary that is neither fully outside nor entirely within. Such thresholds are philosophically productive, for boundaries do not merely separate; they generate the very distinctions they enforce.

Weber’s title, “Closure and Exclusion,” resonates here. Every closure implies a limit, and every limit produces an outside. By allowing prior voices to shape the entry into his essay, Weber renders that limit visible. The beginning becomes difficult to locate. Does the argument start with Weber, with Wittgenstein, or with Derrida? The question itself begins to lose stability.

Wittgenstein’s remark about improvising rules deepens the effect. If rules can emerge within practice rather than preceding it, then the order governing a text may likewise arise from within its unfolding rather than from an unquestioned foundation. The epigraph enacts this possibility before the essay explicitly addresses it.

Against the Myth of Self-Beginning

To observe this structure is not merely to note the presence of intertextuality. Philosophical writing has long engaged other texts. The shift suggested here is more radical: the origin of the text becomes difficult to isolate. What appears to be a beginning reveals itself as continuation.

Derrida’s well-known claim that there is no “outside-text” points toward this condition (1976). Meaning never occupies a position untouched by mediation; it circulates through iterable forms capable of functioning across contexts. The epigraph does not destabilize an otherwise secure interior. Instead, it shows that the interior was never entirely self-sufficient.

Seen in this light, Weber’s opening does not defer the argument, it initiates it by relinquishing the fiction of solitary authorship. The essay speaks from within a conversation already underway.

Learning to Read Beginnings

Attending to epigraphs alters the practice of reading. What once appeared peripheral begins to look architectonic. The threshold becomes part of the structure it introduces.

Such openings suggest that texts rarely begin where we imagine they do. They emerge within inherited vocabularies, established debates, and circulating concepts. To notice this is not to deny originality but to recognize that thought advances through response rather than isolation.

One might therefore approach the epigraph less as a decorative preface than as an invitation to reconsider the nature of beginnings themselves. By the time the first paragraph arrives, the discourse has already started, and we, as readers, have joined it midstream.

References

Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press.

Derrida, J. (1978). Structure, sign, and play in the discourse of the human sciences. In Writing and difference (A. Bass, Trans., pp. 278–293). University of Chicago Press.

Weber, S. (1978). Closure and exclusion. In Institution and interpretation (pp. XX–XX). University of Minnesota Press.
(Adjust page numbers if needed.)

Wittgenstein, L. (2009). Philosophical investigations (4th ed., G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, & J. Schulte, Trans.). Wiley-Blackwell.