For the signature is an articulation on the threshold. It exists outside the text but its

resonances can be found within it. It is, as Peggy Kamuf has noted, "the mark of an

articulation at the border of life and letters, body and language" (39). Moreover, the

signature pulls in both directions, "appropriating the text under the sign of the name,

expropriating the name into the play of the text" (Kamuf 13).

 But how exactly would the detective move between these spaces? How does he

proceed from one clue to the next if indeed clues were to be discovered in signatures?

Common names have a tendency to proliferate; therefore, detection would not amount to

a one-to-one correspondence between names and their meanings. As the reporter

Thompson concludes near the end of Citizen Kane, when he cannot find a singular,

satisfying solution to "Rosebud": "I don't think any [single] word can explain a man's

life." In thinking about the detective as a historian, Julian Lethbridge suggests that the

method here is what one would use while doing a crossword puzzle: "one must begin

somewhere, but in the logic of the solution there is no starting point; each answer offers a

growing confirmation of others" (104). The investigation in the following section does

not proceed (chrono)logically either. Instead, since there are multiple entrances into the

text, there are also multiple investigations that fold onto each other. Therefore, there will

be many conclusions. "Writing," Foucault has argued, "unfolds like a game that

inevitably moves beyond its own rules and finally leaves them behind" (116). The writing

of the signature experiment similarly unfolds like a game, until its rules are left behind.

The signateurist method, Ray points out, is a "readymade research technique-in

Derrida's words, 'what can be done with a dictionary"' (Andy Hardy 194).