The Margin as Center: Derrida, Self-Authorship, and the Work of Creative Surplus
Deconstruction is the act of noticing what you’ve had to set aside about yourself to stay legible. Derrida developed it in the 1960s from a simple observation: language is alive. It moves. It generates meaning beyond what anyone intended, pointing in directions its speaker never planned. He called this différance — the idea that meaning is never fully settled, always in process, always arriving rather than present.
If language is alive, so is the self. Which makes deconstruction useful as a tool — a way of reading your own practice, your own identity, your own story — to find what’s been working quietly at the edges. Whatever you pushed to the margin to hold your center together is probably doing more work than you think.
Creative surplus lives there. It’s the creativity no one commissioned, the thinking that didn’t fit the brief, the part of you that got filed as extra because there was no obvious place for it. You didn’t suppress it deliberately — you just needed a coherent center, and it didn’t fit there.
The extra thing is usually the main thing
Derrida had a concept for the thing that gets treated as secondary: the supplement. Every system has one — the side project, the thinking that doesn’t fit the job description, the practice that exists in the gap between what you’re paid for and what you can’t stop doing. It gets filed as extra. But it’s usually where a person’s most original thinking lives.
This is what I mean by creative surplus. Not a hobby, not leftover energy — the part of your practice that hasn’t been integrated yet because no one has asked for it yet. The work isn’t to add something new. It’s to recognize what was already structural and has been doing quiet work all along.
Articulation is the value-producing act
Meaning and economic value are the same operation. When you can’t articulate what your work means, you can’t charge for it properly — not because you lack sales skills, but because the meaning itself isn’t finished yet. An idea without language can’t circulate. It stays as felt energy rather than transactable value.
This is why economic articulation is a core part of the work I do. Learning to say what your work is worth isn’t a practical skill bolted onto a creative practice — it’s the act by which the practice becomes real to others. You’re not translating something that already has meaning into commercial terms. You’re completing the meaning.
Creative surplus is always pre-economic before it gets integrated. No one’s asking for it yet means no exchange has formed around it yet. Surplus becomes value through articulation, not through time.
You don’t find your voice. You Tend to it.
The common version of self-authorship assumes there’s a true self already formed and waiting to be expressed. The work is removal — of blocks, of fears, of other people’s expectations.
But there’s no pre-formed self waiting to be expressed. There’s a practice of bringing into language something that doesn’t yet exist in language — and that practice produces the self rather than reveals it. You don’t find your voice. You build it, through the act of speaking.
When someone can’t say what they do, or struggles to articulate why it matters, that’s not a communication problem. The language doesn’t exist yet because the thought doesn’t yet exist in the form language requires. The rehearsal room — the weekly call, the writing session, the conversation that goes sideways in a useful direction — isn’t preparation for self-expression. It’s where the self gets authored.
This is what Thirdness is for. What Men in Progress is for. What the 1:1 work is for. Not to help you find something that was always there — but to build language for what’s becoming.
AI and the irreplaceable trace
AI generates language by averaging across enormous amounts of human writing and removing the friction. It produces fluency without trace — smoothed-out language that came from everywhere and therefore from nowhere in particular.
What it can’t replicate is the specific residue of a particular life. The thinking that could only have come from this person, shaped by this particular history and this particular surplus. When fluent language is free and infinite, what becomes scarce is the language that is genuinely, irreducibly yours. The work that couldn’t have been averaged into existence.
Self-authorship becomes more urgent in an AI moment, not less. The AI Literacy group is a weekly space for working through exactly that.
Further reading:
On Derrida
Of Grammatology (1967) — the foundational text
Writing and Difference (1967) — deconstruction in practice
Margins of Philosophy (1982) — contains the clearest essay on différance
Work with me
Thirdness — weekly group for people with ideas that don’t yet have a home
Critical Business School — year-long program in Brooklyn