Event , Iterability , and Justice Practiced in the Sense of Law : A Derridean Reading of Arthur Miller ’ s The Crucible

This paper aims to investigate Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in terms of Derridean critical terms, particularly event, iterability, and justice. Furthermore, through this close reading, the text is scrutinised considering concepts of undecidability, identity, and alterity. Most assuredly, core to body of this Miller’s masterpiece is the Salem witch trials. Firstly, it is demonstrated how this play’s account of witch trials could be considered an event, in Derridean terms, and how the concept of iterability would function within the text. This will result in re-echoing of the same event through many epochs in a variety of voices. Secondly, this paper scrutinises the text to identify how human constructed institutions avoid what Derrida calls play of structure by assuming centres and logos in themselves and presuming whatever tries to question them as the other. This is depicted by Miller through juxtaposing religion and magic and showing how they react towards each other throughout the play. Inevitably, the discussion of identity and alterity (a term under the influence of Derrida) is to follow next to show how identity (as the culture that shapes it) is different from itself and, ergo, has no pure origin of its own. Lastly, this study examines the practice of law specifically in the court scene of the play to show how justice and law are perceived and to conclude that the role of undecidability is crucial to the process of decision taking in the court if any degree of justice should very like to be possible.


INTRODUCTION
Miller's The Crucible has been the research target of numerous world researchers, but it seems that hardly any research has been done from the Derridean outlook.Indeed, this study is a new and challenging critical analysis to Miller's Crucible, which may crystallise logo centric blind spots.In its approach, this paper presents a literature review of the studies that have been conducted on The Crucible by perusing through a selective set of academic papers and books.Then, the research questions regarding the objective of this study and the significance of the answers to them are next to follow.
Upon the first reading, particularly with a historically aware mind, this play appears to be a detailed and partially fictionalised dramatization of a historical occurrence.An event that had been deeply contemplated by writers before Miller, Nathaniel Hawthorne is an outstanding instance in this regard.He was a descendent of John Hathorne; a man responsible for the procedure of the trials.Later, Nathaniel even changed his last name to object to the heinousness of his ancestor's crime.Most notably, in his novel, The Scarlet Letter and short story, Young Goodman Brown, Hawthorne examined and analysed the impact of the trials on the generations after the event and the ramifications of the extreme Puritan doctrine.This kind of reading achieves one particular outcome, that by itself may be considered very obvious, and it is as Bloom (2010, p. 13) puts it: …, many audiences and critics felt that the play, with a plot focused on the Salem witch trials of the late 1600s, was an analogy for the McCarthy investigations that were going on at the time.Some of the same issues, such as mass hysteria and unchecked power, were at the forefront of both historical events.
Two notions of mass hysteria and unchecked power, if considered to be related to the structures of their own, are of crucial importance to this study since they are apt contexts for a Derridean examination.Considering what motivated the occurrence of the specific history at hand here, examining the concept of witch craft is of interest for literary scholars as it is used as guise to gain some more personal and simultaneously vile motivations.In this case, John Hale, both as a historical figure and character of the play, asserts that, "in many of these cases there had been antecedent personal quarrels, and so occasions of revenge".(Bloom 2010, p. 50), this may pose the question how Miller has demonstrated these personal vices in his account of the witch trials.Perhaps of the most protruding example is the way Miller has raised "Abigail's age and lowered John Proctor's to make an affair between them believable" (p.14).Another point of interest is the decision of making John Proctor more or less central to the conflict.As Bently says, "he [Proctor] belongs to the right social class, per-forms manual labour, and has the appropriate dash of scepticism and pragmatism" (William J. &McGill, Jr. 1981, p. 260).Inquiries as such are aimed at the historical accuracy of the play and justification of deviation from the reality if any historical anomaly is to be found.
Another affiliation in studying this play, and also others with the same features of socio-political orientation is to consider an ethnic origin for the wok.According to O. Pagan (2008, p. 90): "here I intend to read some of Miller's best-known plays in relation to recent literary scholarship that problematizes attempts to link works of literature, including dramatic literature, to specific ethnic origins."Although helpful to consider and scrutinise ethnic contexts and religious affiliations in the body of the play, this approach may result in a rigid study of cultural torrents more suitable even for post-colonial studies.Whereas this calls for a sense of closure for Miller's play, this Derridean reading could offer a more open to discuss scale regarding ethnicity and culture.
Tackling another reading in which again some sort of centres are considered and debated, is among those scholarly work that undertake to read some of Miller's plays together so as to demonstrate a cooperating whole centre to which is a death of God theme.According to Raymond H. Reno (1969, p. 1069) They amount, in other words, to pieces of a single sprawling drama treating a single ambitious theme.Since they have their own immediate occasions and preoccupations, the unifying theme is, of course, only intermittently evident, just as the total work itself is discernible only at a certain distance and prospect.These, however, are provided by After the Fall, which discloses twenty years of dramatic activity as taking the shape of a vast work dealing with the death of God.
Plays that Reno has discussed are Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and as mentioned After the Fall.The collection of these plays and act of reading as a meta-play whole can also contribute to the previous concern of ethnicity and religious identity.
Strictly speaking, whenever there is a debate to consider God's role in a discourse, perhaps it is not to hypothesise that this sort of debate entails with it and has in itself a discussion of judgment (moral crisis and seeking of vindication as well).As Collins (1982, p. 121)

puts it
In The Crucible, Miller turns from a society in which there are not God-given absolutes to one in which the presence of God, or the devil, permeates the very air the characters breathe.Although the major thrust of the play is an indictment of a suspicious theocracy, the underlying movement is of one man's search for vindication in the sight of God and himself.
As conclusive and well proved as it is, the discussion of judgment, in this case theocratic one is reduced to be identified as a result of morality code or Puritanism code.However, the fact that at some point each corner of the play reeks with a sense of presence or none-presence of God or Satan is indeed fortuitous to this argument at hand.

THE ISSUE
An aberration, then a mass hysteria accompanied by machinations of personal revenge can lead only to establishing many structures in which many social, political, or religious entities considering their own existence to be superior or at the centre possessing an authority so as to judge the wicked and the righteous.This is where centres are self-allegedly established and create their own myths (and later on logos).The aim here is to define this play as an event reechoing not only issues above in a particular historical period but applicable and readable in the epochs to follow.Then, this study undertakes a path of identifying problematic contexts through analysing the lines and the context of the play to finally reach the cataclysmic point of judging in the court scene.This task would also need a good deal of analysing the concept of identity (religious kind in particular) and examining the context of culture within which the "fortress" of theocracy is keeping itself intact and invulnerable to any possible damage or "crack" caused by uncontrollable play of structure.The confrontation between witch craft or pagan ritual and religious rituals regarding the issue of credibility of them is where a Puritan society allows itself to treat what is harmful to it as the other and a must-be-eradicated enemy.Therefore, violence comes to the scene as the final solution as it always has been introduced to history as such.A Derridean reading could act as an intervention to avoid any violence decided by self-authenticated logos.As Mashhadi Heidar and Zamzia comment, "Due to its anti foundationalist nature, deconstruction generally disagrees with assuming any kind of 'centre' for texts and their meaning."(p.108)

RESEARCH QUESTIONS
In order to examine the issues mentioned in the text of Miller's play, the following questions are posed and dealt with to provide the significant outcomes: 1. How does the play begin with a pharmakonic augmentation that makes it an Event? 2. How is the iterability identified in this text?3. How is Enforceability of justice treated in Derridean terms in this play?4. How is the rigidity of the illegitimately legitimised logos traced? 5. What is offered by this Derridean reading of the play?
According to Lodge (2000), a structure always monitors, organises, and if necessary reorders its centre with only the help of its alleged-centre.This centre is nothing out of the structure but integral to it.Ergo, this panoptical authority of the centre is only an illusion accepted by the structure only to preserve its authority over the compartments.First and foremost, the structure of the constitutions in the play must be examined to show what the centres are and later on logos, thereafter, reading in Derridean terms would help to demonstrate the claims and hypotheses to be valid.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY
Who is the master of a language?Or even to make it more Derridean, who is the master of a text?We all are born in a predetermined context of a language and a culture.Allegedly, this gives us legitimacy in relation to these two.This has been a prevailing opinion since the dawn of the modern civilisations.Derrida (1998, p. 63) contradicts this idea: In spite of appearances, this exceptional situation is, at the same time, certainly exemplary of a universal structure; it represents or reflects a type of originary "alienation" that institutes every language as a language of the other: the impossible property of a language.
If The Crucible is read in this sense, to challenge the self-created authorities not to level the differences, the fortress of monopoly will collapse.In this sense, even a judge, a priest, or a pure Puritan is alienated from the very context s/he is born in.To paraphrase Derrida (1998), in this context of non-ownership over a culture, a religion, or language it is possible to look for ghosts of ideologies, for self-legitimised centres.Where differences are recognised, where this fact is recognized that within a culture or religion there is no unity but fragmentation and alienation, there it is possible to witness how there is no need to pose forcibility of violence in order to achieve a phantom of justice.For this, forcibility is only what closes the play of structure and fortifies the autonomist monopoly.
This Derridean reading has the potency to contribute to a vogue of reading Miller's works that intends to emancipate the text from monophonic interpretation.Therefore, more than studies on identity, style, historical credibility and accuracy, and colonialism will be provided.In fact, the present study deals with much of the concerns of those studies.As an instance, the question of the relation between the historical background of the play and Miller's concerns for his contemporary historical milieu is examined through the significance of terms such as event and iterability.
In an epoch as troubled and violent as ours, a reconsideration of firmly legitimised ideologies (logos), whether religious, political, constitutional, ethnic, national or social that have proved to be potent and responsible for the great destruction recently could serve in providing intellectual understandings of our situation, and indeed, to improve upon it for a possible future of peace in the world and tolerance in facing different ideas.Hitherto, both Derrida and Miller's ideas on religious issues would be more than helpful since they both call for polyphonic stand points when come to the religion, law, and justice (these ideas must remove the shackles from the limbs of mankind not add to the burdens and sufferings).This has been tried by not only using Derridean terms as methods of reading but also by considering Miller and Derrida as two critical thinkers.

SIGN, STRUCTURE AND PHARMAKON
Not unlike the path of Derrida that began in 1966 delivering his paper Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, it seems proper to start the discussion with the elaboration of some of the concepts introduced by Derrida in his paper.Derrida narrates an anecdote from Barthes's The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, that of Guy de Maupassant.He hated the Eiffel Tower, yet he had his lunch at the top of the Tower restaurant of the Eiffel on a daily base.In the answer to the enquiries of this paradox, he would say it was the only place upon which if he looked the sky, he did not have to behold the presence of the Tower, quite amusing of an anecdote of course.Back to the discussion at hand, as the Tower, each centre (sign) entails a subsequent presence invariable as that of the Being (essence, subject, etc.) and of the transcendent (God, man, etc.).Before the 'rapture' that Derrida perceived as an event, in the concept of structure there were just the substitutions of these centres one after the other while a central presence was always absent from the structurality of structure.This and the fact that the word sign is always determined and closed-off in its denotations and connotations lead to one inevitable paradox "that the metaphysical reduction of the sign needed the opposition it was reducing.The opposition is systematic with the reduction" (Lodge 2000, p. 92).To borrow from a system of metaphysics entails with itself the whole of that metaphysics.This is where Derrida attacks Levi-Strauss, who attempts to reduce this concept of sign (by extension of course Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger are also under this attack).
Since the concept of sign can be expanded to any other concept, these concepts, ideal, pure bodies are what Derrida is concerned with in his Rhetoric of Drugs to start discussing the notion of pharmakon: Again we find a desire to reconstitute what you just called the "ideal body," the "perfect body."But you mentioned this speaking from the user's point of view, from the other side of the problem; if we can so call it (for you see how this opposition remains problematic).Those "products" otherwise considered as dangerous and unnatural are often considered fit for the liberation of this same "ideal" or "perfect body" from social oppression, suppression and repression, or from the reactive violence which constricts originary forces or desire, and indeed constricts the "primary processes."And this is the same naturalistic metaphysics that in order to restore a "prior" body --we could almost say prior to the fall (Derrida 1995, p.244).
Hitherto, there can be no pure body.These phantoms of pure, ideal bodies have in themselves both the threat and the cure to their integrity.If a drug is to restore an ideal purity, so that purity entails a contamination in itself that necessitates the drug in the first place.Furthermore, these pure bodies seek a state of restoration and integrity through practising what exactly is considered to a contamination to them: using force and violence to restore a sense of democracy, using oppression and exploitation to restore an ideal of faith.Therefore, Derrida suggests we examine various contexts of history, politics, and so on to find these alleged pure bodies and see through their incoherence.

METHOD
The research attempts to provide a close reading of Miller's The Crucible in terms of critical concepts entailed to and influenced by the works of Jacques Derrida.Firstly, the main concern is to demonstrate how Miller's account of a historical occurrence could be read as an event through elaboration on the terms iterability and iteration.To achieve this, excerpts from the play are analysed under the light of the other Derridean critical terms.In each excerpt, it has been attempted to identify a specific tendency to a particular term in the interest of academia.Additionally, the whole argument is supposed to move in a direction that despite the fragmented nature of excerpts analysis, the whole body designates a wellwrought causality and a coherent description.To do so, the discussion starts with references to the ideas of pharmakon and alterity in the text of the play, and then move towards reaching a connection between these two and the concepts in the content of the play as law, religiosity, justice, and undecidability.As the last but not the least, this paper provides some suggestions regarding the terms justice and religion.
In the interest of precision and conciseness, the concentration would be more on the conversing of the following characters: 1. Reverend Samuel Parris: a widower, concerned with his reputation than the misery of his allegedly haunted daughter 2. Abigail Williams: Parris's seventeen year old orphaned niece, has been working for Proctor and allegedly has had an affair with ham 3. Thomas Putnam: fifty, the oldest son of the town's richest man, vindictive, an example of evil, and believing himself superior, vengeful 4. John Proctor: perhaps the only free-minded, respected, strong Salem farmer, the main protagonist, yet plagued with guilt over a secret 5. Reverend John Hale: forty, from a nearby town, and the supposed authority on witchcraft.6. Tituba: a native of Barbados, the slave in the Parris household THE CRUCIBLE AS AN EVENT Speaking on behalf of the classic ontology, an event is what exists out of the text giving the text its sense of historicity.It is filled with the sense of presence.Each time we speak of it there would be a sense of artifactuality to follow the narration, to be a part of the architectonic set of manifestations of the event.The play itself is believed to be an artifactuality of a historical event, therefore a narration of an architectonic system.The witch trials were bound to spatiotemporal dimensions.Regarding studies conducted to relate Arthur Miller's spatiotemporal milieu (McCarthyism), and even his identity and personal life, to the content and significance of the play, one can even more deduce the eventness of both the play and the history behind it.According to Deleuze:…Each event is the smallest time…because it is divided into proximate past am imminent future…but it is also the longest time…because it is endlessly subdivided… (1990, p.63).It would seem that the play could be divided as an endless chain of the pasts and the futures.
Since the very beginning of The Crucible, the ailment of Betty is traced back to an occurrence in the forest: Parris, pressed, turns on her: And what shall I say to them?That my daughter and my niece I discovered dancing like heathen in the forest?Abigail: Uncle, we did dance; let you tell them I confessed it -and I'll be whipped if I must be.But they're speakin' of witch-craft.Betty's not witched.Parris: Abigail, I cannot go before the congregation when I know you have not opened with me.What did you do with her in the forest?(Miller 1952, p. 10) There is an obligation bestowed ironically upon Parris as the religious authority of the people to appear before the crowd and pose his stance against the acts of witchcraft.Yet, he cannot, since there is the trace of abomination at the very threshold of his house.Pharmakonic implications aside, he will not be able to react to all mishaps unless he conjures the very event of 'the forest'.
It was that event that had triggered the growth of the abomination under the Reverend's roof: Parris: Now then, in the midst of such disruption, my own household is discovered to be the very center of some obscene practice.Abominations are done in the forest… Miller (1952, p. 11).
Like the very historical events behind the composition of the play (the witch trials literally and the McCarthyism figuratively), the origin and also outcome of the plot is based on an event, yet, according to Derrida: that which occurs, and thereby occurs only once, for the first and last time, is always something more or less than its possibility.One can endlessly talk about its possibility without even coming close to the thing itself in its coming (1997, p. 18).
It is as the text is haunted by a conjured entity that is neither presence nor absence.This being said, the way is paved now to discuss what allows this event to be read and read again or to be written about.

THE CRUCIBLE AND ITERABILITY
A set of signifiers: that is what shapes any observation of any concept, to make it even Derridean, event the concepts are shaped as such.Language speaks us and what is language itself other than a play of differentiation and supplementation.According to Wolfreys (2004), what lies at the heart of iterability is not mere flow of repetitive arrays.It has, in its core, an alterability that moves beyond the repetitions, and perhaps even, that idea itself about which all repetitions are made.
Let the idea of witch craft be taken as a concept that comes to being only through a repetitive set of patterns (let them be movements, gestures, or re-arranged items in sense of a haunted Being possessing the-beyond-natural power and authority).Firstly, it is fortuitous if we consider Harris's observation of what is considered to be practising of witch craft: Parris, pointing at Betty: You call this sport?She lowers her eyes.He pleads: Abigail, if you know something that may help the doctor, for God's sake tell it to me.She is silent.I saw Tituba waving her arms over the fire when I came on you.Why was she doing that?And I heard a screeching and gibberish coming from her mouth.She were swaying like a dumb beast over that fire!Abigail: She always sings her Barbados songs, and we dance.Parris: I cannot blink what I saw, Abigail, for my enemies will not blink it.I saw a dress lying on the grass.(Miller 1952, p. 11) Parris has no affiliation or affinity with the notion of witch craft for all the audience (the reader) knows.What he perceives is a repetition reeking of alterability.Ontologically speaking, he must not be able to infer any conclusions declaring the felony of the 'dance'.Furthermore, one must object that what is considered odd, unusual, or eccentric is menacing and potential of causing harm, so it is to be considered the other, to be eradicated to set the ideal pure state back in its place.Additionally speaking of the extraordinary, is the history of religions deprived of any act beyond the kin of man's mind, both witch craft and theocracy are contaminated with this sense of the unreal.This is only the surface.In this regard, the following is much more than helpful: It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual "element" as well as between the "elements," because it splits each element while constituting it because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilling presence: it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence or the (simple or dialectical) opposition of presence and absence, upon which opposition the idea of permanence depends (Derrida 1988, p. 53).
What compels Parris to react against the dance in the forest, accordingly, is more than a mere reduction of signifiers to a dangerous identity and then an act of disavowal or dismissal in the name of identifying an 'Other' menacing the pure ideal body of theocracy.
Inferring a semi-conclusion to this part, that code of alterability cannot be separated from an event.It is through this that the ghostly presence/non-presence and absence/nonabsence are acting.Parris and Miller both witness a dance in the heart of the forest.While Parris infers the idea that the dance contaminates first his authority, of that he believes to be pure, and the source of his alleged authority, to that none is allowed to do a crack; Miller is to perceive the dance and, unlike Parris, not to close off the magnificent play of the signs of the dance.

EXCLUSION OF THE OTHER AND INCLUDING SELF-LEGITIMIZED LOGOS
We have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us."God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him (John 4:16)".God is speaking onto men.Meanwhile the Man of God is talking at, and not to, a God's child: Tituba, already taking a step backward: My Betty be hearty soon?Parris: Out of here!Tituba, backing to the door: My Betty not goin' die... (Miller, 1952, p. 8) There is no need for any further explanation: the line is drawn, that farther, and no less or more; Tituba is the other.So exiled is Tituba in her physical presence that she cannot love, since she is not born to the alleged native pure Puritanism, therefore, the acquisition for her is impossible.The whole incomplete utterances of Tituba throughout the play do support the way she is being treated.The more she is forced into exile, the more the power of a panoptic being moves to be in amplitude.This being will even harrow her feelings and decides whether she is allowed to express any of their hearty forms.Thereby, Christianity is made an exception superior over the ancient African religions which are excluded as the other-birth of logos control and preserve the ever-existing structurality of the structures of the religions.
Discussing the concept of the other, according to Wolfreys (2004), what lies behind the rather tangible, dialectic or binary notions of the other, is the exteriority of alterity in an absolute sense.This absolute exteriority gives way to an abysmal breach in the structure, for "in the very heart of the relationship with the other that characterizes our social life, alterity appears as a nonreciprocal relationship" (Levinas 1987, p. 83).The relationship between the other and what is considered to be the same cannot be based on a reciprocal either-or discourse.
Just to pile on more complexities, Mrs. Ann Putnam in an act of depression, asks Tituba to do whatever is necessary even in the name of conjuring the dead and practising the extra-humane to solve the mystery of her children dying one after the other.This is not Tituba demanding the act of witch craft for a purpose; this is someone in the interiority of a Puritan society who demands so: Mrs. Putnam: Reverend Parris, I have laid seven babies un-baptized in the earth.Believe me, sir, you never saw more hearty babies born, And yet, each would wither in my arms the very night of their birth.I have spoke nothin', but my heart has clamored intimations.And now, this year, my Ruth, my only -I see her turning strange.A secret child she has become this year, and shrivels like a sucking mouth were pullin' on her life too.And so I thought to send her to your Tituba -Parris: To Tituba!What may Tituba -?Mrs. Putnam: Tituba knows how to speak to the dead, Mr. Parris.(Miller 1952, p. 15) Interestingly, wherever there is a discussion over or a narration of the acts and consequences of witch craft (such as flying kids, talking to/at the dead, unnatural, heathen, dances, etc.), the first objection is that these acts are sacrileges, sins condemned by Lord.No single person points out the impossibility of the acts.Whatever the occurrences are, there is no direct evidence of their happening but just narratives one after the other.There are events tell-able through their inner, text-based codes of iterability leading, inevitably, to a strong tendency to put up a structure with an either-or authority vindicating the virtuous (what accords its structurality) and the vice (that is to say the others).Although alterity demonstrates that it is not a binary to be easily achieved but an upheaval like crack in the structure, examining the concept of justice Denying Proctor his name is denying him an identity supposed to be pure at least in its relation to its origin: Christianity.Discussing identity in relation to itself is as absurd as discussing culture and relating it to an only origin.What is in the servitude of an identity to the greater good of it cannot be identical to itself, as the same is true for the culture (Derrida, 1992)."A culture never has a single origin" (Derrida 1992, p.10).The very scene that augments the upheaval of the play, the court scene, has a seed of great potency.It is where all the attempts are focused on bringing back the health to a troubled fortress.Of which Hale said earlier: theology, sir, is a fortress; no crack in a fortress maybe accounted small (Miller, 1952, p. 67).The cost is madness.Law of the court is remained faithful to some centres created and self-legitimised in the past.This is exactly where that one could claim that the decision has already been made.What is only desirable to achieve is to practise a force to see the decision done The word "enforceability" recalls us therefore to the letter.It literally reminds us that there is no law that does not imply in itself, a priori, in the analytic structure of its concept, the possibility of being "enforced," applied by force (Derrida 2002, p. 233).This, by no means, is a decision but a decision only to when, where, and how to enforce the ramification of an-already-been made decisive decision.If the theocracy is ever to be emancipated from a negative identity and violent forcibility, the path of undecidability should be taken for; according to Derrida (2002) the scale of undecidability is a discursive one allowing a polyphonic genealogy to be possible as opposed to Mono-genealogy of inflexible, yet fragile structure that had already taken all the decision.

CONCLUSION
This study has attempted firstly to identify the Derridean concepts in the play that make the reading as intervention possible (as Derrida puts it).Core to the argument of the research is to reach a suggestion through the process of its close reading to treat the notions of justice and law in/on a scale that emancipates from any mono authoritative voice.To get rid of the illegitimately legitimised logos through the process of de-'Force-zing' the identity of law is to reveal the nonexistence of a fragile structure.Like any other decisions that are desired to be taken out of free will, not forces imposed by logos, sentences in the courts of law such as those in this play must be taken through the process of undecidability; for as Derrida points out, the possibility of justice cannot exist only and in the structure of law.In dealing with religious varieties using a force-cored system of jurisdiction would only pile on violence and loss.In this regard, constant exclusion of the other to a self-alleged pure body not only is a myth but also an illegitimate enforcer breeder.This examination is the beginning to reach that desired scale.On the other hand, iterability, as the codex to text, makes it possible to read an event through many forms despite the loss of the chronologic origins.This is what that gives the opportunity to grasp the event-ness of this Miller's work.Finally, it is possible to read and consider Social Constitutions as Cracks not Fortresses, which help to reveal the play of structures not to close them off so as to prevent questioning a mono-ontological system of enforceability.
Emancipations that have been made by a Derridean reading in the text of The Crucible may not just remain in a work of literature.The crack that both Miller and Derrida made in the nonexistent, brutal structurality of violent prejudices of human-made institutions is exactly the emancipator that can liberate the texts of human history from such mythical partialities that are only at work for the reason that they are perceived as unshakeable logos.
and law is what that concludes what this otherness making process may result in.DENYING THE CRACK IN THE STRUCTURE (OF THEOCRACY): JUDGEMENT IN THE SENSE OF IMPURE IDENTITY Witchcraft removes the authority of Puritanism; thereby the alleged structure fails to employ a centre to make up for this loss.This will reveal the alterity of the text of puritanism.To get the concrete form, alterity tries to reflect itself through any process that entails the exclusion of the other Proctor, with a cry of his whole soul: Because it is my name!Because I cannot have another in my life!Because I lie and sign myself to lies!Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang!How may I live without my name?I have given you my soul; leave me my name!(Miller 1952, p. 143)