The striptease at the dead heart of Douglas Kennedy's Piége nuptial or how to be a bit French around the edges

The nature of the paratext is to lend itself to and to facilitate ambivalence. Its own identity is to be always already double, an emblem of self-alterity. For Gerard Genette, the paratextual elements of a text are those which transform a manuscript into a book, an object to be presented to a reader.¹ Such a privileging of the book as artefact over the text as site of production may seem opposed to a deconstructionist agenda. Indeed, Derrida himself sees the book as a limiting structure; it is the physical constriction of the text: '[A]s I understand it[...] the text is not the book, it is not confined in a volume itself confined to the library.'² For Derrida, then, it is the nature of text to extend beyond itself, into the contextualization provided by the reader; this is how the text seeks out its differentiation from self This positing of the text as always also beyond itself is the very essence of deconstruction, it allows Derrida to declare, for example, that 'there is nothing outside the text [il n'y a pas de hors-texte]', by which he means precisely that 'there is nothing outside context'.³