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Deconstruction:

Deconstruction is one of the several doctrines in contemporary philosophy often loosely held under the
umbrella terms post-structuralism and postmodernism. Jacques Derrida coined the term in the 1960s,
and proved more forthcoming with negative, rather than a pined-for positive, analyses of the school.
Derrida says, deconstruction is a word whose fortunes have disagreeably surprised me. I little thought it
would be credited with such a central role—it has been of service in a certain situation, but it’s never
appeared satisfactory to me. It is not a good word, and not elegant.[1] According to Derrida, “There is
not – one deconstruction, and deconstruction is not a single theory or a single method.” Because it is
used variously to refer to a philosophical position, a theory of reading, and a political strategy, what it
“is” has never been “clear.” Attempts to define deconstruction inevitably presuppose the very notions
that the project of deconstruction has attempted to “problematize,” or throw into question- certain,
referential meaning and the disinterested, “objective” search for knowledge.[2]

Defining deconstruction is an activity that goes against the whole thrust of Derrida’s thought. Derrida
has said that any statement such as “deconstruction is X” or “deconstruction is not-X” automatically
misses the point, which is to say that they are at least false[3]. Once when he was asked, what is
Deconstruction, he himself was loath to define Deconstruction. “What deconstruction is not?
Everything, of course. What is deconstruction? Nothing, of course,” this was his sardonic reply.[4] Not
only is the definition and meaning of deconstruction in dispute between advocates and critics, but also
among proponents. Derrida’s disclaimers present a major obstacle to any attempt, to encapsulate his
thoughts. He tells that deconstruction is neither an analytical nor a critical tool, neither a method, nor an
operation, nor an act performed on text by a subject; that is, rather a term that resists both definition
and translation. To make matters worse, he adds that ‘all sentence of the type “deconstruction is X” or
“deconstruction is not X” miss the point. Which is to say that they are at least false.[5]

Oxford English dictionary defines deconstruction as:

The action of undoing the construction of a thing.

A strategy of critical analysis, directed towards exposing unquestionable metaphysical assumptions and
internal contradictions in philosophical and literary language.[6]

Although the term is often used interchangeably (and loosely) alongside others like ‘post-structuralism’
and ‘postmodernism’, deconstruction differs from these other movements. Unlike post-structuralism, its
sources lie squarely within the tradition of Western philosophical debate about truth, knowledge, logic,
language and representation. Where as post-structuralism follows the linguist Saussure – or its own
version of Saussure – in espousing a radically conventionalist (hence sceptical and relativist) approach to
these issues, deconstruction pursues a more complex and critical path, examining the texts of
philosophy with an eye to their various blindspots and contradictions. Where as postmodernism blithely
declares an end to the typecast ‘Enlightenment’ or ‘modernist’ project of truth-seeking rational enquiry,
deconstruction preserves the critical spirit of Enlightenment thought while questioning its more
dogmatic or complacent habits of belief. It does so primarily through the close reading of philosophical
and other texts and by drawing attention to the moments of ‘aporia’ (unresolved tension or conflict)
that tend to be ignored by mainstream exegetes. Yet this is not to say (as its detractors often do) that
deconstruction is a kind of all-licensing textualist ‘freeplay’ which abandons every last standard of
interpretive fidelity, rigour or truth. At any rate it is a charge that finds no warrant in the writings of
those – Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man chief among them – whose work is discussed below.[7]

Derrida takes the word deconstruction (Originally German word, Destruktion) from the work of Martin
Heidegger. In the summer of 1927, Martin Heidegger delivered a lecture course now published under
the title, Basic Problems of Phenomenology.[8] Given the topic of his lectures, Heidegger appropriately
begins them with a discussion of the nature of philosophy and, particularly of the philosophical
movement called phenomenology. Borrowing creatively from his teacher, Edmund Husserl, Heidegger
says that phenomenology is the name for a method of doing philosophy; he says that the method
includes three steps—reduction, construction, and destruction—and he explains that these three are
mutually pertinent to one another. Construction necessarily involves destruction, he says, and then he
identifies destruction with deconstruction For Derrida, Deconstruction is a strategy of critical
questioning of any and all kinds of religious or political discourses that make dogmatic assumptions.[9]

To name deconstruction as ‘–ism’ is to call it to order, to harness it to familiar, stable, logocentric


notions of what thinking should be. If it is Deconstructionism, then it must be a mode of analysis or
critique; or a method or a project. Derrida has resisted this. Analysis seeks to distinguish simple
undivided elements which can then be treated as originary and explanatory. In its operations on
western Metaphysics, deconstruction resists the move towards simple elements or origins. Critique in
the usual sense implies a stance outside its object. Deconstruction insists on movements across and
between the metaphysical opposites, inside/outside. Method, in Derrida’s view, operates by selecting
out certain terms of a discourse and using them to name something technical or procedural. He
identified this specially in deconstruction in the United states, for example, in aspects of the literary
criticism known as Yale deconstruction. Now as a last resort, can deconstruction be described as a
project..? But as a project, Deconstruction might clear pathways for its movement, but not knowing
entirely where they lead.[10]

Deconstruction often involves a way of reading that concerns itself with decentering—with unmasking
the problematic nature of all centers. According to Derrida, all western thought is based on the idea of
center—an origin, a truth, an ideal Form, a Fixed Point, an Immovable Mover, an essence, a God, a
Presence—which is usually capitalized, and guarantees all meaning. Derrida has taken the
deconstruction of metaphysics, particularly logocentric metaphysics, as his critical target. His early
training in phenomenology led to a wariness of, and a tempered respect for, the desire for presence all
pervasive in Western philosophy: a presence of meaning, being, and knowledge.[11]

According to Derrida, the primary goal of Western philosophy as a discipline, the naming of Truth,
depends on the assumption that words are capable of referring accurately to a transcendent reality
existing outside of language.[12] For instance, for 2000 years much of western culture has been
centered on the idea of Christianity and Christ. And it is the same in other cultures as well. They all have
their own central symbols. The problem with centers for Derrida is that they attempt to exclude. In
doing so they ignore, repress or marginalize others (which becomes the other). In male-dominated
societies, man is central (and the woman is marginalized Other, repressed, ignored, pushed to the
margins).

If there is a culture which has Christ in the center of its icons, then Christians will be central to that
culture, and Buddhist, Muslims, Jews—anybody different—will be in the margins—marginalised—
pushed to the outside. So the longing for a center spawns binary opposites, with one term of the
opposition central and the other marginal. Furthermore, centers want to fix, or freeze the play of binary
opposites.

Thus, the opposition Man/Woman is just one binary opposite. Others are Spirit/Matter; Nature/Culture;
Caucasian/Black; Christian/Pagan. According to Derrida we have no access to reality except through
concepts, codes and categories, and the human mind functions by forming conceptual pairs such as
these. Here one member of the pair (here left), is privileged. The right hand term then becomes
marginalized. Icons with Christ or Buddha or whatever in the center try to tell us that what s in the
center is the only reality. All other views are repressed. Drawing such an icon is an attempt to freeze the
play of opposites between, for example, Christianity/Jews or Christianity/pagan. The Jew and the Pagan
are not even represented in such art. But icons are just one of the social practices that try to freeze the
play of opposites—there are many more—such as advertising, social codes, taboos, conventions,
categories, rituals, etc. But reality and Language are not as simple and singular as icons with a central as
icons with a central, exclusive image in thee middle—they are more like ambiguous figures.

The interesting thing about such figures is that at first we see only one possibility. One possibility is
“central” for a moment. For a moment the figure signifies two faces, but then, because the play of the
system is not arrested, the other view dawns, and the same figure signifies a candle.

But suppose a group seizes power, a group called the Face-ists. (Here, Derrida has deliberately made this
sound like “fascists”). They might draw eyes on the faces. This would be an attempt to freeze or arrest
the free play of differences. But—the figure, in reality, signifies both faces and a candle. In such a
situation, Candle-ist would be marginalized, repressed or even oppressed or persecuted. The image of
the faces becomes privileged member of the other pair, the face, becomes instituted as the Real and the
Good. Derrida says that all Western thought behaves in the same way, forming pairs of binary opposites
in which one member of the pair is privileged, freezing the play of the system, and marginalizing the
other member of the pair.

Thus, Deconstruction is a tactic of decentering, a way of reading, which first makes us aware of the
centrality of the Central term. Then it attempts to subvert the central term so that the marginalized
term can become central. The marginalized term is temporarily overthrows the hierarchy. Suppose you
have a poem such has the following of Haiku:

How mournfully the wind of

Autumn pines

Upon the mountainside as day


Declines.[13]

And suppose that for thousands of years the only correct way of reading the poem is to read “pines” as
a verb—like pining for one’s lost love. But what about the other meaning. “Pines”, in the context of the
sound line, can switch over and becomes a noun: “Pines upon the mountain side.”

Thus, this will be the second move in deconstructing a piece of literature—to subvert the privileged
term by revealing how the repressed, marginalized meaning can as well be central. In this way Derrida
claims that Deconstruction is a political practice, and that one must not passover and neutralize this
phase of subversion too quickly. For this phase of reversal is needed in order to subvert the original
hierarchy of the first term over the second. But eventually, one must realize that this hierarchy is equally
unstable, and surrender to the complete free play of the binary opposites in a non-hierarchical way.

This will be just like a system of triangles in which there is a series of configurations of triangles one after
the other. But each so called present configuration, each group of triangles which seem to be
momentarily present, has emerged out of a prior configuration, and is already dissolving into a future
configuration. And this play goes on endlessly. There is no central configuration that attempts to freeze
the play of the system, no marginal one, no privileged one, no repressed one. According to Derrida all
languages and all the texts are, when deconstructed, like this, and so in human thought, which is always
made up of language. He says we should continuously attempt to see this free play in all our language
and texts—which otherwise will tend towards fixity, institutionalization, centralization and
totalitarianism. For out of anxiety we always feel a need to construct new centers, to associate ourselves
with them, and marginalize those who are different from there central values.

Thus, Derrida first focuses on the binary oppositions within a text—like man/woman. Next it shows how
these opposites are related, how one is central, natural and privileged, the other ignored, repressed and
marginalized. Next it temporarily undoes or subverts the hierarchy to make the text mean the opposite
of what it originally appeared to mean. Then in the last step both terms of the opposition are seen
dancing in the free play of nonhierarchical, non-stable meanings.

Derrida maintains that through three millennia of western Philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle to
Rousseau, Hegel, Husserl and others, philosophers have indeed privileged speech. They claim that voice
is the privileged medium of meaning, This is phonocentricism: the voice is the centre. And Writing is
derivative. If the voice is king, writing is its enemy. Writing is a pernicious threat to the true carrier of
meaning. If writing represents speech, speech is the representative of thought, of sovereign idea, of
ideation, of consciousness itself.

In the chain

Thought——–speech——–writing

Speech lies closest to thought. Spoken words are the symbol of mental experience, and written words
are the symbols of spoken words. Languages are made to be spoken. Writing serves only as a
supplement to speech. The spoken word alone is the object of linguistic study. Writing is a trap. Its
actions are vicious and tyrannical. All its cases are monstrous. Linguistics should put them under
observation in special compartments.

Now question arises, is writing Both Useless and dangerous…? This does not square easily with the social
history of the rise of writing in the west. Sometimes, speech is offered a curious privilege, for example,
law courts rely on writing, but they privilege vocal testimony, when the person is asked to say “I promise
to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” An academic thesis forbidden to cite oral
statements as evidence is brought to its final court, the viva voce the court of the living voice, as “the
argument of my theses is…….” Also the minutes of the committee meeting are written, but are ratified
at the next meeting in speech; the Boss says “I call the secretary to read the minutest of the last
meeting.”

But that is not quiet Derrida’s argument. First, paradoxically, phonocentricism is ‘a history of silence’, a
repression of writing which can scarcely be acknowledged. Secondly, the suppression of writing is
necessary to western philosophy, and all thinking influenced by it. It is crucial to philosophy’s
metaphysical presuppositions.

Metaphysics inquires into aspects of reality which seem to lie beyond the empirically knowable world,
out of reach of scientific methods. Its questions look like the philosophical questions: essential truth,
being and knowing, mind, presence, time and space, causation, free will, belief in god, human
immortality, etc. Are these questions? Empiricists like David Hume, and many positivists, scientific
naturalists, skeptics and others have said NO. But the question persists. To set them up and answer
them, Western metaphysics has looked for foundations:- fundamentals, principles, or a notion of the
centre. These are the groundings for all of its inquiries and statements. This is the drive to ground truth
in a single ultimate point—an ultimate point. Derrida calls this impulse logocentricism. The logos is taken
as the undivided point, the origin. Metaphysics ascribes truth to the logos, along with the origin of truth
in general. Metaphysics in its search for foundations is logocentric.[14]

How are the Foundations laid:

Use Binary oppositions: cast the key terms against their opposites. If the question is being, established
“being” against “non-being”. And so on……presence/absence, mind/body, cause/effect, god/man, etc.

Privilege the first term: it’s is the “groundly” term, the positive term, give it priority. It is the term which
articulates the fundamentals, principles or the center. It’s on the side of logos.

Subordinate the second term: It has to be negative, or the first term can’t be positive. It has to be
deficient, lacking, corrupt, or just derivative. It opposes the logos, it is its enemy; or it dilutes that truth
of truth, attenutates it, bleaches it out.

Set up a procedure: Always move from the first term towards the second.[15]
All metaphysicians proceed from an origin, seen as simple, intact, normal, pure, standard, self-
identical—to treat then of accidents, derivations, complication, deterioration. Hence God before evil,
positive before negative, pure before complex, etc. This is not just one metaphysical gesture among
others; it is the metaphysical exigency, the most constant, profound and potent procedure.[16]

Derrida’s task is to undermine metaphysical thinking—to disrupt its foundations, dislodged its
certitudes, turn aside its quests for an undivided point of origin, the logos. Its major task, Derrida argues
that metaphysics pervades Western thought. Now, if Metaphysics is so pervasive, isn’t Derrida’s own
thinking going to be inhabited by it? Yes – inescapably. So the task is impossible..? Derrida has never
claimed that what he does is possible. He knows that no critique can ever totally escape from what it is
criticizing. Meanwhile, movements can be made…. It is possible to overturn a metaphysical binaries, to
reverse its hierarchy by privileging its second term—for instance, to privilege body not mind, Man not
God, the complex before the simple, absence rather than presence. Derrida does this.[17]

But undecidability disrupts the binary structures of metaphysical thinking. It displaces the “either/or”
structure of oppositions. The undecidable plays all ways, takes no sides. It won’t be fixed down. It leaves
no certainty of privileged foundational term against subordinated second term. The unfixing of this
certainty is the unfixing of Metaphysics. Derrida’s Philosophy has been called anti-foudationalism. That’s
partly useful. But Derrida is not simply “against” foundations, he knows they are inescapable. However,
metaphysical foundations can still be shaken. That’s what he does. He makes a movement of solicitation
(French word, from old Latin solliciatare, to shake as a whole), a shaking at the core, a tremor through
the entire structure.

Metaphysical oppositions rely on assumptions of presence. The first or privileged binary term “full”
presence. Its subordinate is the term of absence, or of mediated, attenuated presence. This concept
Derrida takes from Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), the German Phenomenologist. Adopting Heidegger’s
formulation, Derrida argues that in western thinking the meaning of being in general has been
determind by presence, in all the senses of this word. Presence can be spatial: for example, proximity,
nearness or adjacency, and also immediacy, having actual or direct contact, lacking mediation, having no
intervening material, object or agency. And it can be temporal, it evokes the present as the single
present moment, the now; and occurrence without delay, lapse or deferral. Presence organizes
metaphysical concepts of being. And all the “groundly” terms of metaphysics designate a presence.
Derrida gives these examples: [18]

Presence of the object to sight

Presence as substance essence or existence

Temporal presence as the point of the ‘now’, or of the instant

Self presence of thought or consciousness

Present being of the subject

Co-presence of the self and the other


Presence is the foundation for many claims, philosophical or not:-

That a truth can lie behind (therefore in proximity to) an appearance

That there is an immediate bond between the “the word of God” and truth

That a “spirit of the age” can inform an historical era, and therefore be present within it.

That a photograph can capture the “significant moment”, the now

That an artist’s expressed emotion can be present in their work

Why, then, is the speech/writing opposition so important….? Why is the privileging of speech a gesture
which inaugurates Western philosophy? And if Philosophy as we know it is writing, why treat writing as
a corruption, an obstacle or an irrelevance? To all this question Derrida give one single answer to all
these questions “because it is a necessity of the metaphysics of presence.”[19] From that perspective
speech seems to carry full presence. Metaphysical concepts of being, in time and space, demand
presence. Writing depends on absence. Its characteristics oppose presence, metaphysical thinking has to
eject it or subordinate it. In Speech, the speaker and the listner have to be present in at least two
senses:

Present to the word in a spatial sense

Present at a particular moment in time in which the words are uttered.

Therefore, it seems that the speakers’ thoughts are as close as possible to their words. The thoughts are
present to the words. So speech offers the most direct access to consciousness. The voice can seem to
be consciousness itself. Derrida says “When I speak, I am conscious of being present for what I think, but
also of keeping as close as possible to my thought a signifying substance, a soud carried by my breath. I
hear this as soon as I emit it. It seems to depend only on my pure and free spontaneity, requiring the use
of no instrument, no accessory, no force taken from the world. Tis signifying substance, this sound,
seems to unite with my thought…..so that the sound seems to erase itself, become
transparent…..allowing the concept to present itself as what it is, referring to nothing other than its
present.”[20]

Speech is transparent, a diaphanous veil through which we view consciousness. Speech and thought,
nothing comes between them. No lapse of time, no surface, no gap. So presence beguilingly seems to
attend spoken words…..but not writing. Writing operates on absences; it does not need the presence of
writer, or of the writer’s consciousness. The written marks are abandoned, cut off from the write, yet
they continue to produce effects beyond his presence and beyond the present actuality of his meaning,
that is, beyond his life itself.” [21]

And the same for the reader, all writing, in order to be what it is , must be able to function in the radical
absence of every empirically determined addressee in general. This is not a modification of presence,
but a break in it, a ‘death’ or the possibility of a ‘death’ of the addressee.” Writing cannot be writing
unless it can function in these two absences. Presence is unsustainable.

Derrida and Rousseau

Having displayed how Saussure’s argument about the centrality of speech deconstructs itself, Derrida
proceeds to make the same sorts of moves on the 18th century French Philosopher Jean Jacques
Rousseau, the father of French romanticism. In Discourse on Sciences and Arts, Discourse on the Origin
and Bases of Inequality and Confessions, Rousseau reacted against the view of his contemporaries that
progress in the arts and sciences will make human beings happy. Instead, he argued that civilization and
learning corrupt human nature. He celebrated the “original”, “natural”, “uncivilized” man, the “noble
savage” who was innocent of writing, private property and the powerful property and the powerful
Institutions of the political state. Rousseau yearned to return to a “natural” state of idyllic simplicity,
innocence and grace, living most of his life with an illiterate servant girl.

Rousseau’s writings depend upon a binary opposition between nature and culture. Nature is good,
original, virtuous, noble and present. Culture is corrupt, degenerates, a “supplement” to nature’s
fullness of presence. Rousseau also feels that writing is perverse—a product of civilization, a dangerous
supplement to natural speech. He argues that in small scale, organic, living communities the face-to-face
presence of speech had eventually given way to civilization, to inequalities of power and economics, and
to the loss of the ability to speak one-to-one.

For Rousseau it is writing that has intruded upon the idyllic communal peace and grace of the one-to-
one intimacy of natural speaking societies. But Derrida says that “Is it Rousseau’s dream of idyllic,
intimate, primitive, speaking community simple the social and political equivalent of logocentrism and
the metaphysics of presence? Isn’t he just yearning for the full presence of speech and distrusting
writing? ” Yes, he is. And it is Derrida’s task, then, to demonstrate how Rousseau’s writings deconstruct
themselves. Now Derrida says, that all these Rousseau’s writings are writings, i.e. Rousseau is not
present to us, he is absent, he is not speaking, we know him only through his writing, which he must
depend on to communicate his thoughts to us. Rousseau, writing in a candid, confessional mode,
realizes that even though writing is artificial and decadent, he is a writer. He realizes that he must rely
upon writing to make his own most intimate thoughts and feelings known, even to himself. He also
confesses that it is when writing down the history of his life and emotions, that he feels tempted to
embellish, to fictionalize, to dress up the original, natural truth. Thus, he concludes that writing is a
dangerous supplement to speech.[1]

However, Derrida seizes upon the fact that supplement, (suppléer, in French), can mean not only 1) to
supplement, to add on to—but also, 2) to take the place of, to substitute for. So supplement is
paradoxical, it can mean adding something on to something already complete in itself, or adding on
something to complete a thing.

So it is like an ambigram.[2] And for Rousseau, writing is both something that is added on to speech,
which is supposedly already complete and full of presence—and it is something which makes speech
complete. But speech is obviously not complete if it needs writing to supplement it. It is not full of
presence. It must contain absence.

And then Derrida shows that for Rousseau all his human activities involve this play of presence/absence.
For instance, Rousseau writes that melody—the pure, spontaneous impulse to sing—is central, because
it is so present to the natural voice. Harmony, on the other hand—the arrangement of multiple voices in
concert—is unnatural. After all it depends upon notation, which is a form of writing. Rousseau argues
that as civilizations become more complex, more abstract, written harmonies replace the innocent grace
of natural speech-song—melody.[3]

But Derrida shows how Rousseau’s argument deconstructs itself. Rousseau writes that melody “has its
principle in harmony, since it is an harmonic analysis that gives degree of the scale, and the chords of
the mode, and the laws of modulation, the only elements of singing.[4]” We always sing a melody in a
certain key, in a certain scale—and that is harmony. So the pure, pristine melody is always a form of its
dangerous supplement—for it substitutes or adds a perverse, solitary and weakening pleasure to the
normal, natural presence of erotic experience with a lover. The masturbator has fantasies about absent
beauties with his imagination, supplementing them for the real thing.

And both sex and masturbation realizes Rousseau, may be just a substitute for his foster-mother his
original object of desire. Thus the masturbator, the fantasist, is engaged in an endless quest. For his
fantasies—and even his lovers—can never replace the full presence he enjoyed with his foster-mother.
Again, but, is not it that just another form of the yearning for full presence all over again…? Just another
example of what Derrida calls the metaphysics of presence…?

Yes, And what Derrida reveals is that throughout the Confessions, Rousseau relies upon the dangerous
supplement, fantasy—because he admits that at the very core of “natural” sexual desire—there is lack,
absence. Rousseau admits that his “natural” erotic experiences with women have never been
passionate, as exciting and fulfilling, as his erotic dreams and daytime fantasies. Sex can not live up to
fantasy. Neither can it live up to the fullness of presence he once felt with his foster-mother. So like
speech and melody, the presence of sex is always already inhabited by a certain lack, by an absence,
which then must be filled in with dangerous supplement—fantasy.

Picking up on Rousseau’s comparison in the Confessions of “silent and ill chosen reading” to his first
discoveries of auto-eroticism (masturbation), [5] Derrida comments on the difficulty of separating
writing from masturbation. What links these two activities is the experience of “touching touched,”[6] or
the double sensation of two exposed surfaces of the body at once. Not only, he argues, are all living
things capable of auto-affection, but also “auto affection is the condition of an experience in general”[7]
because sensory exteriority “submits itself to my power of repetition.”[8]

Derrida also wants to employ the metaphorical sense of masturbation as the expanding or the
ejaculation seed in the world. Speech does not fall into the exteriority of space. While suppressing
difference, speech nevertheless requires the listener as present other. It is what is added to “living self
present speech” as supplement, much as masturbation presupposes (or supplements) the concept of
sexual activity with a partner.[9]
Rouseau favors speech, melody, nature and sex. But then Derrida notices how Rousseau finds a
dangerous supplement in all of these—in harmony, in writing, in civilization and in fantasy or
masturbation—regarding all these supplements as marginal

Central Marginal
Melody Harmony

Speech Writing

Nature Civilization

Sex Fantasy/masturbation

Central Marginal
Melody Harmony

Derrida and Saussure

In order to show, how Deconstruction is applied in Philosophy, Derrida offers in Part I, chapters 2 and 3,
a reading of Saussure’s A Course in General Linguistics by considering the implications of that text and
its legacy for an affirmative science Of Grammatology. Derrida explains that he has given privileged
attention to Saussure not only because of Saussure’s continuing importance in contemporary linguistics
and semiology, but also because Saussure holds himself at the limit of the structure of thought that he
initiates. Like Heidegger, he remains within the limits of the metaphysics that calls out for the kind of
deconstructive reading to which Derrida subjects it; but also, again like Heidegger, Saussure himself has
‘scruples’ and hesitations concerning those limits. Saussure, then, is important for Derrida, first, because
his explicitly limited view of writing calls out for a grammatological critique; and, second, because his
own text provides the means for that critique, which describes this way:

Unless my project has been fundamentally misunderstood, it should be clear by now that, caring very
little about Ferdinand de Saussure’s very thought itself, I have interested myself in a text whose literality
has played a well known role since 1915, operating within a system of readings, influences,
misunderstandings, borrowings, refutations, etc. What I could read—and equally what I could not
read—under the title of A Course in General Linguistics seemed important to the point of excluding all
hidden and “true” intentions of Ferdinand de Saussure.[1]

This reading of Saussure is simultaneously a demonstration of deconstructive processes always at work


everywhere, an exposition of how close Saussure himself came to understanding those processes, and a
critique of Saussure’s moral and metaphysical denunciation of writing, which keeps him confined by the
very limitations he was able to see. It is ironically fitting, because of its favorable attention to speech at
the expense of writing, that Saussure’s Course survives as a posthumous and disputed reconstruction of
his lectures. In 1907, 1908-9, and 1910-11, Saussure taught a course on general linguistics at the
University of Geneva. Because he kept few written notes from the course, it has had to be reconstructed
from notes taken by his students. After his death in 1913, two of Saussure’s colleagues, Charles Bally
and Albert Sechehaye, who had not attended the lectures, decided to produce a text based chiefly on
notes from 1910-11, but incorporating earlier material as well. Although Saussure’s influence was made
possible by Bally and Sechehaye’s work, it is now apparent that they misrepresented Saussure’s thought
in a number of key respects, including misunderstanding his concept of the phoneme and giving
inadequate consideration to his argument for the arbitrariness: of the sign. A recent critical edition of
the Course has at last made available al. of the student notes from which the text was constructed. The
arguments in the Course that are most important for Derrida are these:

Language is a system of signs.

The sign has two components: the form that signifies (the signifier) and what it signifies (the signified).

The link between these two components is arbitrary, which “is the organizing principle for the whole of
linguistics, considered as a science of language structure.”

The signifier and the signified are relational or differential entities.

Language, then, is not simply a nomenclature; there are no fixed universal concepts or signifiers.

Each language is a distinctive and arbitrary way of organizing and conceptualizing the world.[2]

These concepts become part of Derrida’s positive science Of Grammatology. What is most problematic
for Derrida is chapter VI of the Course, “Representation of a language by writing.” Like Rousseau,
Saussure values most what is original and natural. In the language that is speech, whereas writing sets
out to usurp what is primary and to promote a forgetfulness about the origins. Although it pretends to
be an aid to memory, writing in fact opposes or displaces living memory with its own artificiality,
secondariness, and supplementarity. Here, Derrida points out, Saussure has made the same discovery
that Plato came upon in the Phaedrus: writing signifies forgetfulness, because it is a mediation and the
departure of the logos from itself. Without writing, the [logos] would remain in itself. Writing is the
dissimulation of the natural, primary, and immediate presence of sense to the soul within the logos. Its
violence befalls the soul as unconsciousness.[3]

For Derrida the entire western tradition of thought—from the ancient philosophy of Plato to the
Romantic philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and even the modern linguistics of Ferdinand de
Saussure and the anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss—favors speech, the spoken word over writing,
the written word. Derrida call this Bias Logocentrism. Logocentrism comes from the greek word “logos”,
that means word truth reason and law. The ancient Greeks thought of logos as a cosmic principle hidden
deep within human beings, within speech and within the natural universe. Logocentric believe that
TRUTH is the voice, the word, or the expression of a central, original and absolute cause or Origin.

For instance,
In the new testament, the word is god. Also,

God is the word The Gospel of St. Jones declares:

He is the God-Word. In the beginning was the Word

A Word-God, And the word is with God.

A Super-Word. And the word was God.

And as western Philosophy proceeded down through the centuries everything in the universe was seen
as the center of this one transcendent cause—this transcendental signified. In order to know what a
transcendental signified is, we must first know what a “signified” is. The word “signified” contains the
word “sign”. A “sign” is a word. The sign “cow” is made up of the sound “cow” which is the signifier—
and the concept or meaning of “cow”, which is the signified. (The actual animal is called the referent).[4]

A transcendental signified is a meaning that lies beyond everything in the whole universe. After all,
transcendent simply means that which is beyond everything else. For instance, the logos, the God-Word,
supposedly lie beyond the entire universe. But though the god-word, dwells beyond the structure of the
universe, the god-word is thought of as centering and limiting the free play of the universe. He makes
sure that cows never turn into cantaloupes. He makes the rules. He makes good and evil. Yet, though he
makes the rules, the God-word is beyond the rules. He just sits down there—up beyond the rules, the
God-word is beyond the rules. Though he is beyond the structure of the world, He is its Center. He
Centers it.

During the long history of philosophy, other names have stood for an inner transcendental signified—
names such as the Ideal, the world spirit, Mind, the divine will, Consciousnesss, etc. (such terms are
usually capitalised). In the western philosophy these inner principles and the words or expressions
which express them are central and involve a metaphysics of presence. Metaphysics is talk about
transcendental signifieds, original moments, golden ages, transcendental principles, or an unarguable
meaning for an utterance or text because it is divine. The metaphysics of presence is the notion that
there is a transcendental signifier, a God-word that underlies all philosophical talk and guarantees
meaning. It’s like when I am talking with you now. It seems as if my talking with you is a present, direct
expression of my thoughts, my emotions, even my spirit. My talk is how I present my thoughts and
feelings to you. When I talk with you I seem to verbalise my true self. My words come directly from
myself. They seem like a perfect one-to-one fit for my thoughts, feelings, and intuitions.[5]

Just like the uttered Word, the logos, the Son, is believed by Christian theologians to be the perfect
expression of God. So the yearning for presence seems to be tied in with this favoring of language over
writing, with logocentricism. In fact Derrida says that the whole history of logocentricism, is one vast
metaphysics of presence. All the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have
always designated an invariable presence. Thus meaning is more distant in writing, when I write it to
you. That is precisely the central and seemingly natural assumption that Derrida unmasks or
deconstructs in Of Grammatology. In his reading of a work by the swiss linguistics, Derrida showed how
Saussure sets up a binary opposition between speech and writing, and favors speech over writing, with
logocentricism.

It was in his A Course in General Linguistics that Saussure defined language as made up of a system of
signs. As we have seen, a linguistic sign like “cow”—which is the signifier—and the concept or meaning
of “cow”, which is the signified. (The actual animal is called refferent). Derrida’s first argument with
Saussure is that he regards the signified—the meaning—as more important than the sound “c-o-w”, the
signifier. For sausser the tangible sound only gives us access to the intangible meaning. Sound is outer,
meaning is inner.[6]

Derrida points out that just as the western metaphysics of presence cherishes the idea of an inner bond
between inner meaning and outer sound. Thus Sausser’s linguistics, a science which is supposedly free
of God-talk, simply repeats the ancient pre-scientific assumptions of God-talk. Speech, according to
Saussure, is natural and direct, immediately intimate and present to thought and meaning. But Saussure
degrades writing, asserting it veils language, that it is not a guise for a language but a disguise, that it is
artificial, perverse, pathological, evil, degenerative and only used in absence of speech.[7]

Saussure also argues that just as speech is a way of representing inner meaning, writing is simply a
means of representing speech. If speech is a sign of inner meaning—then writing, a sign of speech is
twice removed from inner meaning—a “sign of sign”. Thus, for Derrida, the first stage is to see that
Saussure privileges speech as central and natural because it is closer to inner meaning—just as the
logos, the word and the Son are close to God. He marginalizes writing as perverted and evil. All that is
needed for the second stage is a deconstructive reversal, revealing how writing can be central in
Saussure’s own text.[8]

And that is what Derrida unravels next. He reminds us how, on the one hand, Saussure says there is a
natural bond between sound (the signifier) “c-o-w” and meaning (the signified) “cow”—as if meaning
(the signified) depends upon some sort of natural correspondence with the sound c-o-w.

But Sausser also said that the link between the (sound) signifier “c-o-w”, and its signified meaning is just
due to chance. In French one says “vache”, in Swahili one says “ng’ombe jike”, in Arabic “baqara”, in
Japanese “meushi” to signify “cow”. So there is nothing essential in the sound “c-o-w” that relates it to
its meaning.

In fact on the level of sound, “c-o-w” gains its identity only because it is slightly different from “Mao”,
which is only slightly different from “sow”, which is slightly different from “bough”, which is only slightly
different from “bout”. The sound “cow”, in other words, depends upon its difference from these other
sounds, these other signifiers—to distinguish itself from them. So the (horizontal) difference between
sound and sound is what shapes the sound of language, not some vertical, intimate correspondence
between sound and meaning.[9]

There is only this vast interwoven system of differences. A sound is what it is, only because it differs
from other sounds in the same language. It gains its being through being different from them. Similarly
on the level of meaning, the concept “cow”, the signified, has no meaning in-and-of-itself. Our concepts
distinguish themselves only through their difference from other concepts. The concept “boat” gains its
identity by being different from the concept of “ship” or “yawl”. So on the level of the concept, the
signified, also there is only a system of differences. And there is no stable foundation to the system of
difference which the language is. For instance if you don’t know English, and want to know what a cow
is, you would have to look up “cow” in the dictionary. But under the entry “cow,” instead of finding a
meaning that would satisfy your search for a meaning, since you don’t know English, you would only find
a bunch of other sounds: Cow, The mature female of domestic cattle, or of other animals, as the whale,
elephant, etc.[10]

But in order to know the meaning of the sounds “cattle”, “whale”, and “elephant”, you would have to
look up their meanings, their signifieds, but you would find only more lists of signifiers, more sounds! A
whale is a large mammal that lives in the sea, but then what is a mammal, what is a sea….? So one never
arrive at a stable signified, a stable signified, a stable meaning that is capable of providing a foundation
for the entire system in meaning. Because every potential meaning turns out to be just another sound,
searching for yet another potential meaning. One never reach meaning—there is only an endless chain
of sounds.

It’s just like our system of triangles. There is no comfiguration of triangles which can ground the system,
make it stable. Each wave of triangles that seems to become present has arisen from a past wave and is
dissolving into a future wave. Derida points out that Saussure, in trying to describe how language is just
a vast tissue of differences, must employ a graphic system—writing—as an example. For writing is just a
play of differences.

For instance, the marks #, @, % mean nothing in-and-of themselves. They have no essential features.
They gain their identity only through there difference from other elements in there system. Thus
Saussure says that language is a system of differences with no stable positive elements, no unchanging
linguistic atoms that might provide a foundation for language.[11]

But if language, made up of sound and meaning, is just a play of differences, and if the relation between
the sound “c-o-w” and its meaning changes from language to language, then how can Saussure still
claim that there is a natural bond between sound and meaning..? How can he privilege speech as the
natural presence of meaning, and trash writing as evil and absent from meaning…? After all, as Saussure
himself explains, both the meanings and sounds of speech are systems of difference, just like writing.
The sound “c-o-w” is different from “bough” or “wow”. And the meaning of “cow” is different from
“bough” or “wow”. And the meaning “cow” is different from “horse”. It is the play of difference that
makes the sounds. And this play of difference in speaking is just like the play of difference in writing. For
in writing an “r” means nothing in itself, but is what it is because it is different from “t” or “I”. So it could
be said that speaking is like a form of writing. This is deconstructive reversal—to invert the hierarchy
that favors speech as natural and central and to reveal how writing, which had been seen as perverted,
pathological and derivative, can be central and not marginal.[12]

But Derrida does not stop at this. For to do so would be just replace speech with writing. What he does
next is to show that neither the word “speech” nor the word “writing” is adequate to describe the more
abstract play of differences which they both are; both speech and writing are just a play of difference.
So Derrida is not simply reversing the hierarchy—making writing central and speech marginal. What he
does next is to put both terms, writing and speaking, under erasure, or in French sous rature[13]

Derrida indicates that concepts are under erasure (a correction made by erasing) by drawing an “X”
through them. To put a binary opposition under erasure you write the words, but then mark a big black
“X” over them, thus:

Speech Writing

It is a device Derrida borrowed from the philosopher Martin Heidegger, and it simply means that both
“Speech” and “Writing” are inadequate to describe the more general play of differences common to
both. But in discussing the matter, he simply cannot do without them. So they must be used. And
putting them under erasure allows Derrida to have his cake and eat it too, so to speak. It allows him to
use a word or concept and simultaneously indicate its highly inadequate nature.. Thus Derrida’s next
step, then, is to invent an expression which shows that speaking and writing are just the spoken and
written forms of the play of difference, a non-existent form of “writing” he calls it arche-writing.[14]

Arche writing is not merely writing on a page, graphic marks or sounds. It is not the Roman alphabet. It
is not any kind of “mraking” that can be made with the voice, with pictures, with hieroglyphies, with
cuneiforms, with Chinese characters, with choreography, with musical notations, with the forms of
sculptures in space, which can be marked with an awl[15] on oak, with pen on paper, with fingers on
sand, with hands on clay, by the contrast of lights and shadows on film. Arche writing is not a thing. It is
the pure possibility of contrast, of difference. Arche writing makes possible the play of differences. It
does not exist as a thing, yet makes all these possible. Arche writing is not a concept, nor even a word
which can be defined. It is like the play of the triangles, the possibility of differing that underlies the
play. And Of Grammatology is the science of Arche writing.[16]

Sassure’s project is important for Derrida because Saussure was on the verge of understanding language
as logocentric metaphysics. He saw without fully understanding a point of convergence of the new
science of linguistics with philosophy of language. Semiotics has given sustained attention to that
convergence; and as Derrida proceeds to examine the contributions of these fields, his own text
manifests the strains produced by concurrently opening philosophical discourse up to the contributions
of linguistics and alerting linguistics to the metaphysical implications of its most recent discoveries.[17]

Derida credits the American Philosopher C.S. Peirce, the founder of semiotics, with having gone “very far
in the direction that I have called the de-construction of the transcendental signified.”[18] Although
Peirce died in 1914, the year before the publication of Saussure’s Course, Derrida sees in his semiology
an advance over Saussurean linguistics. In his disarming assertion, “We think only in signs,” Peirce had
come to see logic as the science of signs. In his view, a sign (or representamen) is that “which stands to
somebody for something in some respect or capacity” and is, therefore, “anything which determines
something else (its interpretant) to refer to an object to which itself refers (its object).”[19] For Peirce,
grammar, logic, and rhetoric are but three branches of the science of semiotics. Although semiology, as
proposed by Peirce, is more comprehensive than linguistics, the tenacity of the linguistic sign is such that
its operations remain the model for semiology. Thus, Roland Barthes claims that “linguistics is not a part,
even if privileged, of the general science of signs, it is semiology that is a part of linguistics.”[20] This
reversal, which submits semiology to linguistics, is for Derrida exemplary of logocentric metaphysics
[21].

Whereas Peirce’s semiotics differs from Saussurean theory by incorporating language into a more
comprehensive science of signs, Louis Hjelmslev’s glossematics[22] modifies Saussurean linguistics from
within its own theory. While largely accepting Saussure’s principle that language is, above all, form
rather than substance, Hjelmslev departs from Saussure’s view that the sign is the basic unit of
language. Even before Hjelmslev, linguists had investigated units of language smaller than the sign, such
as the phoneme and the seme, which are the distinctive phonetic and semantic units. The prior
discovery of these elements made it possible for Hjelmslev to study the combination and interplay of
linguistic units, rather than concentrating solely on their distinctive features. Once the authentic form of
language that constitutes these combinations emerges, it became possible for Hjelmslev to investigate
the form of content. He was careful, however, to remind his readers that the combinatorial units
(glossemes) in no way dispense with the distinctive features of language as studied by phonologists, nor
did he find it possible to say positively what these units of combination are. For Derrida, Hjelmslev
succeeded in finding not only a certain amount of play within Saussurean theory but also in finding that
language is more like a game of chess than like the principles of economics. Derrida quotes Hjelmslev’s
declaration that “The scheme of language is in the last analysis a game and nothing more.”[23]

Having celebrated the achievements of the Copenhagen School of linguistics—especially Hjelmslev’s


isolation of the linguistic system from metaphysical speculation—Derrida proceeds to inquire into the
transcendental origin of the linguistic system itself and of the theory that studies it. Is the formalism or
scientific objectivity of glossematics simply a concealed metaphysics? In order to pursue this question,
Derrida invokes a number of conceptual terms that serve to explore territory beyond or “short-of” the
terrain of transcendental criticism or classical reason. These terms are parts of a metaphorical network
derived from the physical processes of writing: ‘trace,’ ‘arche-writing,’ ‘erasure.’ Although it is difficult to
resist the temptation to ask, “What does Derrida mean by these terms?,” the terms themselves
participate in his effort to investigate critically the need to ask ‘what is’ and to answer any such question
with a definition that forgets the differential and deferring processes of signification, which Derrida
insists is the only way words and concepts receive meaning.[24] These particular terms mark Derrida’s
determination “to see to it that the beyond does not return to the within”, which at least is an effort to
resist forgetting Saussure’s challenge to remain aware of how processes of signification cannot even be
thought about without the first move of recognizing the sign as pointing beyond itself, rather than
making what it points to present in itself.[25] If that first move is too easily forgotten, it is not surprising,
therefore, that such comprehensive and transcendental concepts as Plato’s eidos, St John’s logos, or
Heidegger’s Dasein can too easily be conceived as available – and, above all, present – in those italicized
words.

If the reader starts, however, with the recognition that the opposition to such transcendental concepts
is productive – that, in Blake’s terms, “without contraries is no progression,” or in Paul de Man’s, that
insight can come out of blindness – then it should be possible to uncover the pathway that such
concepts leave behind as and when they are opposed. If they leave a track or trace in the text – a
footprint for the grammatological detective to follow—then following the track should not be expected
to lead back to the source or forward to its presence. Instead, ‘trace’ signifies the minimal element of
structure that makes any sense of difference possible. (It may, therefore be thought of as both inside
and outside—before and after—the possibility of definition.) It is like the sign, the glosseme, the seme,
the phoneme, and the grapheme in that it is another entry in the lexicon of linguistics that seeks an
understanding of the atomic elements of structure that make language possible. The trace is the
concept hidden beneath those other entries and simultaneously marks the point in Heideggerian
discourse where “the meaning of being as presence and the meaning of language as the full continuity
of speech” begins to undermine itself. The trace also marks Derrida’s intention in writing Of
Grammatology, which he describes with uncharacteristic directness: “To make enigmatic what one
thinks one understands by the words ‘proximity,’ ‘immediacy,’ ‘presence’ (the proximate [proche], the
own [propre], a.1d the pre- of presence), is my final intention in .this book.”[26] The trace must be
thought through before such oppositions as nature and culture, speech and writing, painting and music,
upon which the thought of Rousseau rests, can be critically examined.

As that minimal element of structure that makes possible differentiation, the trace gives rise to such
distinctions as primary and secondary, interior and exterior. “Arche-writing” moves back and forth
between these distinctions. The judgment that writing is secondary and exterior to speech requires the
signifying movements these distinctions make possible. As the origin of writing, arche-writing may be
thought to be the spoken word. But if speech is natural, then it would seem to require a sense already of
what is not natural, which in this context must be writing. This particular trace—arche-writing—is, then,
“the opening of the first exteriority in general, the enigmatic relationship of the living to its other and of
an inside to an outside.”[27] Such a non-presence of the other and the simultaneous possibility of
thinking of the other as though present gives rise to metaphor. Further, the presence-absence of the
trace underlies the play that makes metaphorical ambiguity possible, since ambiguity presupposes the
logic of presence, which it proceeds to disobey.

As a development from the trace and arche-writing, the graphological technique of putting a word
under erasure [sous rature] makes possible the visualizing of these traces; thus, Derrida introduces this
phrase, derived from Heidegger, before proceeding to theorize the trace[28]. Again and again in thinking
and writing about Derrida the temptation arises to use such words as “is,” “means,” “identifies”, “says,”
as though those words retain something of their pre-Derridean innocence. Because these words have
been subjected to Derridean critique—because their metaphysical freight has been weighed—they are
crossed out; but being unavoidable indeed, because they make the critique possible—they remain
legible. In The Question of Being (Zur Seinsfrage) Heidegger explores the philosophical problems of
definition as he attempts to define nihilism. He thus crosses out the word “Being,” while keeping it
legible. Derrida’s “trace” and the particular trace that he designates “arche-wrting” are extensions of
Heidegger’s textual practice in The Question of Being, lust as most of Derrida’s thought has critical
reference points in Heidegger’s texts. Indeed, crossing out while keeping legible is not a misleading
metaphor for deconstruction.

Derrida and Levi-Strauss

Derrida now turns his attention to French anthropologist Claude Levi-strauss, for it was Levi-Strauss who
applied Saussure’s structural linguistics to the study of anthrology in general, and myth in particular.
Both Rousseau and Levi-Strauss base all there arguments on the binary opposition between nature and
culture. Nature is innocent, pure and natural. Culture is corrupting, perverse. Both Rousseau and Levi-
Strauss favor nature over culture. Both long for a lost innocence in culture. And both see writing as a
perverse supplement to natural speech.

Part II, chapter 1, “The Violence of the Letter,” is largely devoted to Derrida’s reading of two episodes in
Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques. This reading makes possible both a focusing of Derrida’s argument and
an expansion of it at the same time. Unlike Saussure, Levi-Strauss contributes little to Derrida’s theory of
textual processes; but like Rousseau, he conceives of writing in broad historical and ideological terms
that seem to invite Derrida’s deconstructive reading. Derrida begins by making a distinction between
discourse and text. ‘Discourse’ signifies “the present, living, conscious representation of a text within the
experience of the person who writes, or reads it,” whereas the ‘text’ not only exceeds such
representation but does so “by the entire system of its resources and its own laws”[1], as though guided
by an internal avoidance mechanism that keeps it from being totally captured by a single act of reading.
Deconstruction might then be seen as operating in this problematic zone between text and discourse.

Derrida, however, delights in showing how Rousseau’s dream of purity, innocence and presence shows
up even in a modern science like anthropology. The Text Derrida deconstructs here is Levi-Strauss’s “The
writing lesson”, a chapter in his book Tristes Tropiques (sad tropics), this book is an extended and
sweetly melancholy farewell to a world which ceased to exist between the 193Os, when Levi-Strauss
was there, and 1955, when his book was published.[2] Tristes Tropiques is the story of Levi-Strauss’s
anthropological field work in the wilds of Brazil. There he finds the Nambikwara, a tribe in which he sees
the perfect example of primitive naturalness. In fact, in his role as anthropologist, Levi-Strauss feels
guilty—like a voyeur, an communal innocence of this primitive culture which knows no writing—only
speaking. Levi-Strauss admires there closeness to nature, their open, communal sexuality, there way of
knowing through myth rather than through science.

‘The Writing Lesson’ begins with a stark reflection on the gradual extinction of the Nambikwara
population, which declined from approximately 20,000 in 1915 to no more than 2,000 when Levi-
Strauss visited with them in 1938. It is not only their exemplary helplessness that makes the
Nambikwara important; they also constitute the goal of the ethnographer’s professional quest: “I had
been looking for a society reduced to its simplest expression. That of the Nambikwara was so truly
simple that all I could find in it was individual human beings.”[3] As the subject of Levi-Strauss’s
dissertation, La Vie familiale et sociale des lndiens Nambikwara, published in 1948, they become
intimately associated with his reflections on his own writing practices. In this tribe, Levi-Strauss is
convinced, he succeeded in finding not only the most elementary of cultures, but also the equivalent of
the natural origin of human life that Rousseau had sought but was unable to find.

It had been Levi-Strauss’s practice to distribute pencils and paper among the non-literate tribes he
visited. When Levi-strauss was writing in his note-book he observes the Nambikwara drawing various
wavy lines, he recognizes that they are simply mimicking what they see him do with writing implements.
The chief of the tribe, however, had further ambitions, since “he was the only one who had grasped the
purpose of writing.” What the chief understands is that writing is a matter of power and that if he
convinces his companions that he has mastered the white man’s writing and has become an
intermediary agent for the exchange of goods, then his power will be enhanced. But it is only after the
fact that Levi-Strauss realizes that the chief had seized of writing not to acquire knowledge, to
remember, or to understand, but rather to reinforce his prestige and authority, and to maintain the
unequal distribution of goods in his favour, at the expense of others. This realization in turn leads Levi-
Strauss to reconsider the common view that writing has increased the ability of humans to preserve
knowledge, that it is a form of artificial memory, that it makes possible a clearer view of the past and an
enhanced ability to organize the present and the future, and that it marks the distinction between
barbarism and civilization. This view he rejects because one of the most creative phases of human
history occurred before writing, in the early neolithic age; because there dearly was tradition before
writing; because writing, invented between 4,000 and 3,000 BC, was itself a result of the ‘neolithic
revolution’; because for 5,000 years, from the birth of writing, ‘knowledge fluctuated more than it
increased;’ and because life for a Greek and Roman citizen was not ,vastly different from that of an
eighteenth-century middle-class European such as Rousseau. These reflections lead Levi-Strauss to the
conclusion that writing seems to have favoured the exploitation rather than the development of human
beings.[4]

Indeed, it finally seems, as Levi-Strauss reflects back on this episode, that the Nambikwara knew this
before he did, since they withdrew their allegiance to their chief because of his attempt to exploit a
feature of civilization in order to assert his power over them. But even this is in accordance with a
principle of Rousseau’s. As he becomes corrupted by the uncertain power of writing, the chief refuses to
renounce his independence in the interest of the general will. Writing –even as mime—blinds him to the
basis of social life. which consists of contract and consent.[5]

Derrida finds his opening for a critique of Levi-Strauss in an earlier chapter of Tristes Tropiques entitled
‘On the Line.’ Here the question becomes, whose violence is displayed in Levi-Strauss’s text? This
episode opens with Levi-Strauss’s unconvincing assurance that “the Nambikwara were easy-going, and
unperturbed by the presence of the anthropologist with his notebook and camera.”[6] He proceeds to
describe playing with a group of children when a little girl, after being hit by a playmate, tried to
‘whisper something in his ear. He soon realizes that as an act of revenge against her enemy, she is
violating the taboo against revealing proper names. Indeed, it had become a practice of the
anthropologists to assign Portugue’s names to the Indians because they could not learn their proper
names.

Levi-Strauss seizes upon the opportunity supplied by the quarrel between the two girls “to incite the
children against each other and get to know all their names.”[7] As in ‘The Writing Lesson,’ Levi-Strauss
is aware of the devastating consequences of the contamination by Western culture on the disappearing
world of the Nambikwara, yet he is eager to believe that they were ‘untroubled by the presence of the
anthropologist,’ proceeds to violate the virgin space of the girls’ play, to exploit unscrupulously—as he
himself admit—their childish quarrels, to encourage the tribe to mimic literacy, and to tempt their chief
to exploit the power of Western literacy in a way that leads eventually to his deposition and exile. Here
the ultimate violence is not that of the children against each other or of the chief against his tribe;
rather it is the violence of the ethnographer himself, who violates the virginal space of the Nambikwara
first with his foreign spectator’s presence and then with his political ideology [8].
Levi-Strauss has felt at one and the same time the necessity of utilizing this opposition and the
impossibility of making it acceptable. In the Elementary Structures, he begins from this axiom or
definition: that belongs to nature which is universal and spontaneous, not depending on any particular
culture or on any determinate norm. That belongs to culture, on the other hand, which depends on a
system of norms regulating society and is therefore capable of varying from one social structure to
another. These two definitions are of the traditional type. But, in the very first pages of the Elementary
Structures, Levi-Strauss, who has begun to give these concepts an acceptable standing, encounters what
he calls a scandal, that is to say, something which no longer tolerates the nature/culture opposition he
has accepted and which seems to require at one and the same time the predicates of nature and those
of culture. This scandal is the incest-prohibition. The incest-prohibition is universal; in this sense one
could call it natural. But it is also a prohibition, a system of norms and interdicts; in this sense one could
call it cultural.[9]

Derrida recalls that Levi-Strauss had himself referred to the ‘Marxist hypothesis on the origins of
writing’[10] to be found in Tristes Tropiques. That hypothesis–more accurately a blend of Saussurean
phonocentrism and Levi-Strauss’s Marxism–combines the two constituents of the European
hallucination: (1) man’s exploitation by man is the fact of writing cultures of the Western type, and (2)
communities of innocent and un-oppressive speech are free from this accusation.[11] In his critique of
Levi-Strauss’s political ideology, Derrida observes that Levi-Strauss does not distinguish either between
hierarchization and domination or between authority and exploitation. As a result of this failure, he
‘confounds law and, oppression’ in a way that is totally alien to Rousseau, while nonetheless offered
under the name of Rousseau.

Levi-Strauss argues a necessary coincidence of compulsory education, military service, which leads him
to conclude that the struggle in the nineteenth century against illiteracy is ‘indistinguishable from the
increased powers exerted over the individual citizen by the central authority” and that it is in the
interest of the state for everyone to be able to read so that Authority can decree that ignorance of law is
no defence[12]. Derrida warns against the temptation simply to reverse Levi-Strauss’s judgment. Indeed,
in Europe in the nineteenth century, Derrida concedes, the progress of education and formal legality
might well have had the effect of consolidating power in a given class or in the state. But it cannot be
rigorously deduced that liberty, illiteracy, and the absence of public instruction go hand in hand. Levi-
Strauss has been driven by the unexamined metaphysical and ethical weight of his suspicion of writing
to adopt a univocal conception of law and the state, which substitutes anarchy for Rousseau’s contract
and consent. In this sense, Levi-Strauss made his long journey into the jungles of Brazil only to deny the
other, which was the object of his search. Without differance, which is the recognition of writing in
speech, and without the ‘presence of the other,’ Derrida concludes, there is no ethics[13], only
ethnocentrism replicated in the name of anti-ethnocentrism.

Derrida and Levi-Strauss

Derrida now turns his attention to French anthropologist Claude Levi-strauss, for it was Levi-Strauss who
applied Saussure’s structural linguistics to the study of anthrology in general, and myth in particular.
Both Rousseau and Levi-Strauss base all there arguments on the binary opposition between nature and
culture. Nature is innocent, pure and natural. Culture is corrupting, perverse. Both Rousseau and Levi-
Strauss favor nature over culture. Both long for a lost innocence in culture. And both see writing as a
perverse supplement to natural speech.

Part II, chapter 1, “The Violence of the Letter,” is largely devoted to Derrida’s reading of two episodes in
Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques. This reading makes possible both a focusing of Derrida’s argument and
an expansion of it at the same time. Unlike Saussure, Levi-Strauss contributes little to Derrida’s theory of
textual processes; but like Rousseau, he conceives of writing in broad historical and ideological terms
that seem to invite Derrida’s deconstructive reading. Derrida begins by making a distinction between
discourse and text. ‘Discourse’ signifies “the present, living, conscious representation of a text within the
experience of the person who writes, or reads it,” whereas the ‘text’ not only exceeds such
representation but does so “by the entire system of its resources and its own laws”[1], as though guided
by an internal avoidance mechanism that keeps it from being totally captured by a single act of reading.
Deconstruction might then be seen as operating in this problematic zone between text and discourse.

Derrida, however, delights in showing how Rousseau’s dream of purity, innocence and presence shows
up even in a modern science like anthropology. The Text Derrida deconstructs here is Levi-Strauss’s “The
writing lesson”, a chapter in his book Tristes Tropiques (sad tropics), this book is an extended and
sweetly melancholy farewell to a world which ceased to exist between the 193Os, when Levi-Strauss
was there, and 1955, when his book was published.[2] Tristes Tropiques is the story of Levi-Strauss’s
anthropological field work in the wilds of Brazil. There he finds the Nambikwara, a tribe in which he sees
the perfect example of primitive naturalness. In fact, in his role as anthropologist, Levi-Strauss feels
guilty—like a voyeur, an communal innocence of this primitive culture which knows no writing—only
speaking. Levi-Strauss admires there closeness to nature, their open, communal sexuality, there way of
knowing through myth rather than through science.
‘The Writing Lesson’ begins with a stark reflection on the gradual extinction of the Nambikwara
population, which declined from approximately 20,000 in 1915 to no more than 2,000 when Levi-
Strauss visited with them in 1938. It is not only their exemplary helplessness that makes the
Nambikwara important; they also constitute the goal of the ethnographer’s professional quest: “I had
been looking for a society reduced to its simplest expression. That of the Nambikwara was so truly
simple that all I could find in it was individual human beings.”[3] As the subject of Levi-Strauss’s
dissertation, La Vie familiale et sociale des lndiens Nambikwara, published in 1948, they become
intimately associated with his reflections on his own writing practices. In this tribe, Levi-Strauss is
convinced, he succeeded in finding not only the most elementary of cultures, but also the equivalent of
the natural origin of human life that Rousseau had sought but was unable to find.

It had been Levi-Strauss’s practice to distribute pencils and paper among the non-literate tribes he
visited. When Levi-strauss was writing in his note-book he observes the Nambikwara drawing various
wavy lines, he recognizes that they are simply mimicking what they see him do with writing implements.
The chief of the tribe, however, had further ambitions, since “he was the only one who had grasped the
purpose of writing.” What the chief understands is that writing is a matter of power and that if he
convinces his companions that he has mastered the white man’s writing and has become an
intermediary agent for the exchange of goods, then his power will be enhanced. But it is only after the
fact that Levi-Strauss realizes that the chief had seized of writing not to acquire knowledge, to
remember, or to understand, but rather to reinforce his prestige and authority, and to maintain the
unequal distribution of goods in his favour, at the expense of others. This realization in turn leads Levi-
Strauss to reconsider the common view that writing has increased the ability of humans to preserve
knowledge, that it is a form of artificial memory, that it makes possible a clearer view of the past and an
enhanced ability to organize the present and the future, and that it marks the distinction between
barbarism and civilization. This view he rejects because one of the most creative phases of human
history occurred before writing, in the early neolithic age; because there dearly was tradition before
writing; because writing, invented between 4,000 and 3,000 BC, was itself a result of the ‘neolithic
revolution’; because for 5,000 years, from the birth of writing, ‘knowledge fluctuated more than it
increased;’ and because life for a Greek and Roman citizen was not ,vastly different from that of an
eighteenth-century middle-class European such as Rousseau. These reflections lead Levi-Strauss to the
conclusion that writing seems to have favoured the exploitation rather than the development of human
beings.[4]

Indeed, it finally seems, as Levi-Strauss reflects back on this episode, that the Nambikwara knew this
before he did, since they withdrew their allegiance to their chief because of his attempt to exploit a
feature of civilization in order to assert his power over them. But even this is in accordance with a
principle of Rousseau’s. As he becomes corrupted by the uncertain power of writing, the chief refuses to
renounce his independence in the interest of the general will. Writing –even as mime—blinds him to the
basis of social life. which consists of contract and consent.[5]
Derrida finds his opening for a critique of Levi-Strauss in an earlier chapter of Tristes Tropiques entitled
‘On the Line.’ Here the question becomes, whose violence is displayed in Levi-Strauss’s text? This
episode opens with Levi-Strauss’s unconvincing assurance that “the Nambikwara were easy-going, and
unperturbed by the presence of the anthropologist with his notebook and camera.”[6] He proceeds to
describe playing with a group of children when a little girl, after being hit by a playmate, tried to
‘whisper something in his ear. He soon realizes that as an act of revenge against her enemy, she is
violating the taboo against revealing proper names. Indeed, it had become a practice of the
anthropologists to assign Portugue’s names to the Indians because they could not learn their proper
names.

Levi-Strauss seizes upon the opportunity supplied by the quarrel between the two girls “to incite the
children against each other and get to know all their names.”[7] As in ‘The Writing Lesson,’ Levi-Strauss
is aware of the devastating consequences of the contamination by Western culture on the disappearing
world of the Nambikwara, yet he is eager to believe that they were ‘untroubled by the presence of the
anthropologist,’ proceeds to violate the virgin space of the girls’ play, to exploit unscrupulously—as he
himself admit—their childish quarrels, to encourage the tribe to mimic literacy, and to tempt their chief
to exploit the power of Western literacy in a way that leads eventually to his deposition and exile. Here
the ultimate violence is not that of the children against each other or of the chief against his tribe;
rather it is the violence of the ethnographer himself, who violates the virginal space of the Nambikwara
first with his foreign spectator’s presence and then with his political ideology [8].
Levi-Strauss has felt at one and the same time the necessity of utilizing this opposition and the
impossibility of making it acceptable. In the Elementary Structures, he begins from this axiom or
definition: that belongs to nature which is universal and spontaneous, not depending on any particular
culture or on any determinate norm. That belongs to culture, on the other hand, which depends on a
system of norms regulating society and is therefore capable of varying from one social structure to
another. These two definitions are of the traditional type. But, in the very first pages of the Elementary
Structures, Levi-Strauss, who has begun to give these concepts an acceptable standing, encounters what
he calls a scandal, that is to say, something which no longer tolerates the nature/culture opposition he
has accepted and which seems to require at one and the same time the predicates of nature and those
of culture. This scandal is the incest-prohibition. The incest-prohibition is universal; in this sense one
could call it natural. But it is also a prohibition, a system of norms and interdicts; in this sense one could
call it cultural.[9]

Derrida recalls that Levi-Strauss had himself referred to the ‘Marxist hypothesis on the origins of
writing’[10] to be found in Tristes Tropiques. That hypothesis–more accurately a blend of Saussurean
phonocentrism and Levi-Strauss’s Marxism–combines the two constituents of the European
hallucination: (1) man’s exploitation by man is the fact of writing cultures of the Western type, and (2)
communities of innocent and un-oppressive speech are free from this accusation.[11] In his critique of
Levi-Strauss’s political ideology, Derrida observes that Levi-Strauss does not distinguish either between
hierarchization and domination or between authority and exploitation. As a result of this failure, he
‘confounds law and, oppression’ in a way that is totally alien to Rousseau, while nonetheless offered
under the name of Rousseau.
Levi-Strauss argues a necessary coincidence of compulsory education, military service, which leads him
to conclude that the struggle in the nineteenth century against illiteracy is ‘indistinguishable from the
increased powers exerted over the individual citizen by the central authority” and that it is in the
interest of the state for everyone to be able to read so that Authority can decree that ignorance of law is
no defence[12]. Derrida warns against the temptation simply to reverse Levi-Strauss’s judgment. Indeed,
in Europe in the nineteenth century, Derrida concedes, the progress of education and formal legality
might well have had the effect of consolidating power in a given class or in the state. But it cannot be
rigorously deduced that liberty, illiteracy, and the absence of public instruction go hand in hand. Levi-
Strauss has been driven by the unexamined metaphysical and ethical weight of his suspicion of writing
to adopt a univocal conception of law and the state, which substitutes anarchy for Rousseau’s contract
and consent. In this sense, Levi-Strauss made his long journey into the jungles of Brazil only to deny the
other, which was the object of his search. Without differance, which is the recognition of writing in
speech, and without the ‘presence of the other,’ Derrida concludes, there is no ethics[13], only
ethnocentrism replicated in the name of anti-ethnocentrism.

Derrida and Warburton, Vico, Condillac

Of Grammatology concludes by placing this reading of Rousseau’s Essay within the context of three
other eighteenth-century texts that deal with similar topics: WiIliam Warbuton’s The devine legation of
Moses Demonstrated (1741, Giambattista Vico’s The New Science (1744), and Etienne Bonnot de
Condillac’s An essay on the origin of Human Knowledge (1746). Throughout part II of his text, Derrida
uses Vico in his footnotes as a counterpoint to his exposition of Rousseau’s argument in the Essay, even
though Rousseau himself both borrowed from and argued against Vico. Derrida attributes to Vico the
rare, if not unique, distinction of having advocated the contemporaneous origin of writing and speech.
In the introduction to The New Science he wrote,

“letters and languages were born twins and proceeded a pace through all their three stages. Those
stages are simultaneously the three ages of the world, the three kinds of nature and government, and
the three kinds of language, all of which are epitomized in the three languages of the Egyptians. These
correspondences may be diagrammed as follows:[1]

Historical Age

Kind of Language

Egyptian version

The age of Gods:

Divine government by oracles


Historical Age Kind of Language Egyptian version

1. The age of Gods: 1. Mute language of 1. Hieroglyphic or


Divine government Secret

signs and physical


by oracles

objects, which have

natural relation to

ideas expressed
1. The Age of Heroes: 1. Symbolic
aristocratic common wealth
based on the
assumption of 2. Heroic emblems,

superior nature images, metaphors,

1. The age of Men: natural descriptions


Popular commonwealths
and monarchies based on
the assumptions of equality
in human nature.

3. Human language 3. Epistolary or vulgar

using commonly

agreed upon words

by which the people

fix the meaning of

laws that nobles and

priests and kept

secret

Vico anticipates that by using his theory of the stages of history and language, scholars of any language,
ancient or modern, should be able to advance philological knowledge beyond any previous expectation.
Furthermore, he declares, it is now possible to claim with confidence that early peoples were poets who
spoke in poetic characters.[2] This discovery is “the master key” to the new science of man.

Despite his immense learning, Vico appears to be unaware of William Warburton’s monumental defense
of Moses against the Deists. William Warburton’s discussion of the origins of writing in The Divine
Legation of Moses Demonstrated is indicative of the transition in the treatment of writing and writing
systems that was occurring in this period. Warburton’s work, which at one point discusses the origin and
development of writing, shows an affinity with seventeenth-century works on writing systems — it
outlines a number of different writing systems. In particular, Warburton discusses the ideographic and
pictographic writing systems of the Mexicans, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese writing as
representative of three stages in the development of writing representing images or ideas. These
systems are fundamentally different, he argued, from systems which use writing to represent sounds or
words. The Divine Legation introduces an interest in the theory of writing and the importance of the
relationship between writing and speech. In book II, he describes the process of the development of
writing:

Men soon found out two ways of communicating their thoughts to one another; the first by SOUNDS,
and the second by FIGURES: for there being frequent occasion to have their conceptions either
perpetuated, or communicated at a distance, the way of figures or characters was next thought upon,
after sounds (which were momentary and confined), to make their conceptions lasting and extensive.[3]
(Warburton 1788, II:388)

In book IV, section 4, Warburton offers a history of writing in order to show that Egyptian hieroglyphics
constitute an important proof of the antiquity of Egypt. His thesis is a lucid and succinct statement of
the opposite position from Vico’s:
There are two ways of communicating the conceptions of our minds to others; the first by sounds, and
the second by figures. For there being frequent occasion to have our conceptions perpetuated, and
known at a distance, and sounds being momentary and confined, the way of figures or characters was,
soon after that of sounds, thought upon to make those conceptions lasting and extensive. The first and
most natural way of communicating our conceptions by marks or figures, was by tracing out the images
of things. To express, for instance, the idea of a man or horse, the informer delineated the form of each
of those animals. Thus the first essay towards writing was a mere picture.[4]

This distinction indicates a fundamentally different interest in writing from the seventeenth-century
scholars: here, writing is a way of representing conceptions, and is thus secondary to thought.
Warburton also put forward a theory that the type of literature composed in a given language at a given
time is related to the written form in which it was recorded. He states that in primitive times, when the
only visual form (and the most natural way) of representing language was with pictures, the dominant
form of literature was one of action, that is, stories were illustrated with gestures and so on. As picture
writing evolved, Warburton claims, metonymy and metaphor `came into being. Although it would have
better served his theological interests to argue, as Vico had, that the metaphorical character of primitive
languages had a divine origin, Warburton is sufficiently committed to his belief in the representational
origin of writing—a picture of a horse representing a horse, for example—that he takes the opposite
view from Vico’s.

When Condillac appropriated Warburton’s history, he kept much of Warburton’s language but silently
altered his view of the origins of metaphor:

When mankind had once acquired the art of communicating their conceptions by sounds, they began to
feel the necessity of inventing new signs proper for perpetuating them, and for making them known at a
distance. Their imaginations then represented nothing more to them than those same images, which
they had already expressed by gestures and words, and which from the very beginning had rendered
language figurative and metaphorical. The most natural way therefore was to delineate the images of
things. To express the idea of a man or of a horse, they represented the form of each of these animals;
so that the first essay towards writing was a mere picturc.[5]
By locating metaphor at the point of the origin of language, Condillac, like Vico, is able to conceive of the
original style of language as poetical, because it began with depicting the most sensible images of our
ideas. By inheriting this debate on original language as mediated by Condillac, Rousseau was able to
overcome his pre-Saussurean position in history. Condillac provided him with a sense of the
arbitrariness of the sign and with a rudimentary conception of deconstruction.[6]

This legacy of Condillac is more fully sketched in Derrida’s The archeology of the Firivolous: Reading
Condilac (1973), which elaborates on the allusions to Condillac at the end Of Grammatology. In this later
book, Derrida quotes with obvious approval from one of Condillac’s letters to Gabriel Cramer:

You want me to explain the prerogative of arbitrary signs over natural ones and why the arbitrary signs
set free the operations of the soul that the natural ones leave necessary. That is the most delicate point
of my system on the absolute necessity of signs. The difficulty has all its force and is so much better
founded since I did not anticipate it. That is what causes me to be a little tangled on this whole matter. I
even notice that I have said more than I wanted to, than I meant.

An even more striking anticipation of Derrida’s formulation of deconstruction is a passage from


Condillac’s Essay, to which he seems to allude without directly citing it:

Sometimes after having distinguished several ideas, we consider them as forming only a single notion; at
other times we prescind from a notion some of the ideas of which it is composed. This is what we call to
compound and decompound our ideas. By means of these operations we are capable of comparing
them under all sorts of relations, and of daily making new combinations of them.

Condillac also appears to have anticipated the perversion Of Grammatology both by its Derridean
disciples and by those who would make war on what is ultimately a feature of language. First, Condillac
describes the strategies of such a writer as Rousseau or Heidegger or Derrida, who finds that “every
style analogous to the character of the language, and to his own, has been already used by preceding
writers,” leaving him no option but to “deviate from analogy.” But “in order to be an original, he is
obliged to contribute to the ruin of a language,” which in earlier generations he would have worked to
improve. Although “such writers may be criticized, their superior abilities must still command success.”
But because their defects are easy to copy, soon “men of indifferent capacities” rush to acquire what
reputation they can, even by imitating those defects. “Then begins the reign of subtle and strained
conceits, of affected antitheses, of specious paradoxes, of frivolous turns, of far-fetched expressions, of
new-fangled words, and in short of the jargon of persons whose understandings’ have been debauched
by bad metaphysics.”[7]

Grammatology as a Positive Science

“On what conditions is a grammatology possible?” Derrida asks in chapter 3. His search for an answer is
guided by the work of Madeleine V. David, whose Le Debat sur les ecritures et I’hieroglyphe aux xvii et
xviii siecles (1965) provided Derrida with the occasion for the first formulation of this chapter, which
appeared as a review in Critique.[1] In her book and in several journal articles Madeleine V. David began
to carry out a philosophical investigation into the history of writing. As in natural science, the first efforts
to carry out a history of writing in the eighteenth century had to cope with “speculative prejudice and
ideological presumption.”[2] Of Grammatology, however, even more than natural science, was
hampered by ideology and theological prejudice because of the powerful link between Judaeo-Christian
theology and biblical assumptions about writing. The belief that Hebrew script was first written by the
finger of God and that biblical Hebrew was the first of the world’s languages became eventually linked
with the belief that Jesus Christ was the incarnation of God’s word and the means by which God makes
himself present in the world. Seventeenth and eighteenth century historical linguists and
grammatologists had to contend with a theological opposition to what threatened theology’s
fundamental ideological investment: the transcendent word, by which God becomes present in history.
“In all its forms, overt or covert, this theologism, constituted the major obstacle to all Of
Grammatology.”[3]
In an effort to overcome this obstacle, Descartes, Leibniz, and others seized upon Chinese script as a
model for philosophical language because it was thought to be free of voice and liberated from history.
The ‘Chinese prejudice’ thus arises to fill a European philosophical need. That this language of the other
is created to fill what the European mind experiences as its lack is best conveyed by a sentence from
Leibniz’s Opuscules et fragments: “Meanwhile [this language of undifferentiated presence] will be a
great help—for using what we know, for finding out what we lack, for inventing ways of redeeming the
lack, but especially for settling controversies in matters that depend on reasoning.[4] Rather than being
considered a distinctive language in itself, Chinese was imagined as a whole and complete metaphysical
presence. The other side of this hallucination was the total disparagement of what was thought
distinctively European. Thus, the non-European other served only to fill what was designated as the
European lack, and this ethnocentrism manifested itself specifically as a logocentrism. Here Derrida
begins to make good on his claim, in the opening pages of his text, to provide a critique of the
ethnocentric underpinnings of logocentrism. There are, then, wide implications of the hallucination of a
non-existent Chinese language that solves the problem of all other language. Ethnocentrism can work in
more subtle ways than the assumption of unique power and authority in European culture. Derrida sees
in the projection of the longing for presence, completeness, and identity onto the non-European culture,
and the corresponding disparagement of what is Western by the Western mind, an equally dangerous
form of ethnocentrism. Both forms deny the otherness of the other. The concept of Chinese writing thus
functioned as a sort of European hallucination.[5]

The problem, for Derrida, is less the European lack than the European invention of a plentitude in the
Other, which denies the Other its linguistic and psychoanalytic (divided) subjectivity. The cost of being
the European object of hallucination is nothing less Of Grammatology, therefore, resists being
encompassed by the ‘sciences of man’ because it thoroughly suspects—as Lacan had done—the
assumption of human identity or unity. Identity assumes sameness always and everywhere. Andre Leroi-
Gourhan’s work, which Derrida reviews in this chapter, also emphasizes the productive disruption of this
unitary assumption about man that is effected by writing: “To free unity from the concept of man is
undoubtedly to renounce the old notion of peoples said to be ‘without writing’ and ‘without history’[6].

But once the assumption of viable unity is disrupted, so is the medium by which it is asserted the book.
Derrida, in this carefully structured book, repeatedly announces ‘the end of the book.[7] Derrida is
warning that the European hallucination is also invading psychoanalytic theory undetected. He
concludes part I with the dreadful prediction that Grammatology, like psychoanalytic theory, will remain
walled-in by the metaphysical-theological linguistics of presence. But within the walls of that
metaphysics there is thought, which Derrida describes as “the blank part of the text, the necessarily
indeterminate index of a future epoch of difference.”[8] The play within the structure of the text gives
thought room to work and a profoundly serious job to do.

The goal of deconstruction is to uncover the implicit hierarchies contained in any text by which an order
is imposed on reality and by which a subtle repression is exercised, as these hierarchies exclude,
subordinate, and hide the various potential meanings. To ‘deconstruct’ philosophy, thus, would be to
think-in the most faithful, interior way-the structured genealogy of philosophy’s concepts, but at the
same time, to determine from a certain exterior that is unqualifiable or unnamable by philosophy-what
this history has been able to dissimulate or forbid, making itself into a history by means of this
somewhere motivated repression. Deconstruction is thus conceived as as metascience surpassing the
metaphysics of logocentric systems: It inscribes and delimits science; . . . it marks and at the same time
loosens the limits which close classical scientificity[9]

Of Grammatology

Derrida’s monumental work Of Grammatology (1967) is his most representative work. Of Grammatology
is an examination of the relation between speech and writing, and it is an investigation of how speech
and writing develop as forms of language. Derrida argues that writing has often been considered to be
derived from speech, and he says that this attitude has been reflected in many philosophic and scientific
investigations of the origin of language. He says that the tendency to consider writing as an expression
of speech has led to the assumption that speech is closer than writing to the truth or logos of meaning
and representation. He explains that the development of language occurs through an interplay of
speech and writing and that because of this interplay, neither speech nor writing may properly be
described as being more important to the development of language.

Of Grammatology is divided into two parts. Part I is entitled “Writing before the Letter,” and Part II is
entitled “Nature, Culture, Writing.” Part I describes traditional views of the origin of writing, and
explains how these views have subordinated the theory of writing to the theory of speech. Part II uses
this explanatory method to deconstruct various texts in such fields as linguistics (Saussure’s Course in
General Linguistics), anthropology (Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques), and philosophy (Rousseau’s Essay
on the Origin of Languages).

Even though his Of Grammatology is a comparatively early work, it offers a classic statement of
deconstructive processes and a detailed formulation of Derrida’s theories of written language. Parts of
the text were composed in 1965 as reviews of books on writing by Madeleine V. David and Andre Leroi-
Gourhan and of a collection of papers from a colloquium entitled L’Ecriture et la psychilogie des peuples.
These reviews in substantially their original form appear in part I, chapter 3. Similarly, much of Derrida’s
discussion of Levi-Strauss, first published in 1966 in the Levi-Strauss issue of Cahiers pour l’analyse,
reappears in part II, chapter 1. The complete text of De la Grammatologie (French), which Derrida calls a
two-part essay, was translated into English by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and published in 1976. While
her own accomplishment in this translation is superb, it is apparent from her detailed translator’s
preface’ that Derrida served, however modestly, as the translator’s collaborator.

Of Grammatology opens with a preface and an exergue. The preface outlines the structure of the text:
Part I offers “a theoretical matrix,” which is then tested in part II by a reading of the “age of Rousseau”.
For Derrida, Rousseau’s example and influence extend undiminished from the eighteenth century to our
‘own time. To read the age of Rousseau is to assess the structures of thought that reach from the years
Rousseau wrote to the present. Saussure, Levi-Strauss, and Derrida himself are in this sense
Rousseauists. Not only, however, is this philosopher who has been marginalized by historians of
philosophy allowed to give his name to the chronological expanse that includes Kant, Nietzsche, and
Heidegger, but also Derrida has the courage to select the little-known text of the Essay on the Origin of
Languages in order to read the age of Rousseau and to test the theoretical work of part I of Of
Grammatology.

As he proceeds with his fundamental project “to produce the problems of critical reading[1],” Derrida,
while having “no ambition to illustrate a new method,” demonstrates the necessity that reading free
itself “from the classical categories of history. . . and perhaps above all, from the categories of the
history of philosophy[2]” . Already Derrida anticipates ways in which Of Grammatology will be misread.
Its methods are not new; rather, they have been overridden, not by history, but by a mode of historical
writing that neglect (or refuses) to view the past “in every respect as a text.”[3] Although it continues to
be claimed that Of Grammatology’s (or deconstruction’s) project is anti-historical and apolitical,
Derrida’s argument, forcefully announced on the first page of his text, refutes this claim in advance. Of
Grammatology ‘reads’ the age of Rousseau by recovering the textual remains of its past, texts that
intervening historians have systematically left unread, justifying their neglect by invoking such
unexamined categories as philosophy and literature and by assigning Rousseau to the latter in the
interests of purifying the history of philosophy.

Of Grammatology‘s preface concludes by forecasting a fundamental contradiction in the age of


Rousseau: on the one hand, it values documentation and the protocols of historiography – “legibility and
the efficacy of a model.”[4] But even as it sets about the recovery of the past, it necessarily disrupts it,
as will be seen in Derrida’s later critique on Levi-Strauss, as yet unnamed modern anthropologist of the
preface final sentence. Despite the surprises of the preface, its tone is quiet and restrained, especially in
contrast to the messianic call of the exergue. Derrida does not set himself above or apart from the age
he is about to read, nor ‘is he claiming himself immune to the contradictions and disruptions of previous
Rousseauist historians. Indeed, all of the texts he reads—Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Saussure, Heideger,
Levi-Strauss—he reads with compassionate respect and with a recognition of his own susceptibility to
the errors he identifies in others.

In this vein the exergue outlines Of Grammatology as a field of thought by focusing on unexamined
metaphysical assumptions concerning phonetic writing in historical linguistics and on the first
movements towards the dislocation of those assumptions. Like the preface, the exergue illuminates
what has previously been kept hidden or obscure. An exergue, though part of the text, claims to remain
outside the work (ex + ergon [work]), or more technically, it is the small space on the reverse side of a
coin beneath the principal device where an inscription may be found.[5] This particular piece of
writing—the portion Of Grammatology entitled ‘Exergue’ – is both outside of and part of the text.[6]

The exergue begins with three numbered quotations. The first, by way of metaphor, identifies a
grammatologist with the sun and the Babylonian sun-god (Samas) with the light that illuminates the
earth, making the land appear a piece of writing (Cuneiform signs), in striking similarity to the
grammatological metaphors of the biblical Psalm 19. The second quotation (from Rousseau’s Essay)
identifies the practice of three forms of writing with three progressive stages in the history of
civilization. The final quotation (from Hegel), by an exercise in metonymy[7], makes the ethnocentrism.
of Rousseau’s history explicit in its claim for the superior intelligence of alphabetic script (and by
implication, those peoples who use; it). The first sentence of Derrida’s own exergue, following these
quotations, identifies the quotations themselves as a “triple exergue,” the writing outside the writing
that is outside the text. The witty claim here is that writing as a concept has been controlled by the kind
of ethnocentricism manifested in the three quotations: religion, social history, and philosophy disguise
ethnocentrism as logocentrism.[8] The word encumbered by the weight of unexamined metaphysical
assumptions becomes the defining essence of god, civilization, and philosophy.

Derrida proceeds to enumerate three ways by which logocentrism as the agent of ethnocentrism
imposes itself on the world. As “the concept of writing” (here distinguished from the physical process of
producing signs with pen or keyboard), logocentrism generates a dissimulated history of phonetic
writing even as it proceeds to inscribe its own history; as “the history of. . . metaphysics” from the pre-
Socratics to Heidegger, it both identifies the origin of truth with the logos and the history of truth with
the repression of writing as the concept of science[9], it both assigns language and logic central
importance for the project of science and announces its dissatisfaction with phonetic writing.

The future, which Of Grammatology works to bring about by exploiting the stresses and cracks in the
structure of the present historical-metaphysical age, can only be proclaimed or presented by Of
Grammatology itself, because that future puts “into question the values of sign, word, and writing”[10]
For the representation of that future, there is no ‘exergue, nothing legitimately outside the inscription
or text of the moment. Thus, Of Grammatology is a fecund, liberating force that for the moment is
bound in by traditional notions of metaphor, metaphysics, and theology. It nonetheless asserts itself in
multiple and interdisciplinary ways, although it can never claim its own essentiality or toe unity of its
project, given its basic distrust of all essentialisms and all easy claims of reconciling unities.

Key Terms
1. Deconstruction

Deconstruction is a strategy of critical questioning directed towards exposing unquestionable


metaphysical assumptions and internal contradictions in philosophical and literary language.
Deconstruction often involves a way of reading that concerns itself with decentering—with unmasking
the problematic nature of all centers. Further deconstruction is a form of textual practice derived from
Derrida, which aims to demonstrate the inherent insatiability of both language and meaning. It rejects
the word “analysis” or “interpretation” as well as it rejects any assumption of texts.

2. Binary Oppositions
The binary opposition is the structuralist idea that acknowledges the human tendency to think in terms
of opposition. For Saussure the binary opposition was the “means by which the units of language have
value or meaning; each unit is defined against what it is not.” With this categorization, terms and
concepts tend to be associated with a positive or negative. For example, Reason/Passion, Man/Woman,
Inside/Outside, Presence/Absence, Speech/Writing, etc. Derrida argued that these oppositions were
arbitrary and inherently unstable. The structures themselves begin to overlap and clash and ultimately
these structures of the text dismantle themselves from within the text. In this sense deconstruction is
regarded as a forum of anti-structuralism. Deconstruction rejects most of the assumptions of
structuralism and more vehementaly “binary opposition” on the grounds that such oppositions always
previlege one term over the other, that is, signified over the signifier.

3. Differance

Against the metaphysics of presence, deconstruction brings a (non)concept called differance. Derrida
uses the term “difference” to describe the origin of presence and absence. Differance is indefinable, and
cannot be explained by the “metaphysics of presence.” In French, the verb “deferrer” means both “to
defer” and “to differ.” Thus, difference may refer not only to the state or quality of being deferred, but
to the state or quality of being different. Differance may be the condition for that which is deferred, and
may be the condition for that which is different. Differance may be the condition for difference.

Derrida explains that difference is the condition for the opposition of presence and absence.[1]
Differance is also the “hinge” between speech and writing, and between inner meaning and outer
representation. As soon as there is meaning, there is difference.[2]

4. Metaphysics of presence/ Logocentricism

According to Derrida, “logocentrism” is the attitude that logos (the Greek term for speech, thought, law,
or reason) is the central principle of language and philosophy.[3] Logocentrism is the view that speech,
and not writing, is central to language. Thus, “Of Grammatology” (a term which Derrida uses to refer to
the science of writing) can liberate our ideas of writing from being subordinated to our ideas of speech.
Of Grammatology is a method of investigating the origin of language which enables our concepts of
writing to become as comprehensive as our concepts of speech.

According to logocentrist theory, says Derrida, speech is the original signifier of meaning, and the
written word is derived from the spoken word. The written word is thus a representation of the spoken
word. Logocentrism maintains that language originates as a process of thought which produces speech,
and that speech then produces writing. Logocentrism is that characteristic of texts, theories, modes of
representation and signifying systems that generates a desire for a direct, unmediated, given hold on
meaning, being and knowledge.[4]

Derrida argues that logocentrism may be seen in the theory that a linguistic sign consists of a signifier
which derives its meaning from a signified idea or concept. Logocentrism asserts the exteriority of the
signifier to the signified. Writing is conceptualized as exterior to speech, and speech is conceptualized as
exterior to thought. However, if writing is only a representation of speech, then writing is only a
‘signifier of a signifier.’ Thus, according to logocentrist theory, writing is merely a derivative form of
language which draws its meaning from speech. The importance of speech as central to the
development of language is emphasized by logocentrist theory, but the importance of writing is
marginalized.[5]

Derrida explains that, according to logocentrist theory, speech may be a kind of presence, because the
speaker is simultaneously present for the listener, but writing may be a kind of absence, because the
writer is not simultaneously present for the reader. Writing may be regarded by logocentrist theory as a
substitute for the simultaneous presence of writer and reader. If the reader and the writer were
simultaneously present, then the writer would communicate with the reader by speaking instead of by
writing. Logocentrism thus asserts that writing is a substitute for speech and that writing is an attempt
to restore the presence of speech.

Logocentrism is described by Derrida as a “metaphysics of presence,” which is motivated by a desire for


a “transcendental signified.”[6] A “transcendental signified” is a signified which transcends all signifiers,
and is a meaning which transcends all signs. A “transcendental signified” is also a signified concept or
thought which transcends any single signifier, but which is implied by all determinations of meaning.

Derrida argues that the “transcendental signified” may be deconstructed by an examination of the
assumptions which underlie the “metaphysics of presence.” For example, if presence is assumed to be
the essence of the signified, then the proximity of a signifier to the signified may imply that the signifier
is able to reflect the presence of the signified. If presence is assumed to the essence of the signified,
then the remoteness of a signifier from the signified may imply that the signifier is unable, or may only
be barely able, to reflect the presence of the signified. This interplay between proximity and remoteness
is also an interplay between presence and absence, and between interiority and exteriority.

5. Trace

The idea of difference also brings with it the idea of trace. A trace is what a sign differs/defers from. It is
the absent part of the sign’s presence. In other words, We may now define trace as the sign left by the
absent thing, after it has passed on the scene of its former presence. Every present, in order to know
itself as present, bears the trace of an absent which defines it. It follows then that an originary present
must bear an originary trace, the present trace of a past which never took place, an absolute past. In this
way, Derrida believes, he achieves a position beyond absolute knowledge. According to Derrida, the
trace itself does not exist because it is self-effacing. That is, in presenting itself, it becomes effaced.
Because all signifiers viewed as present in Western thought will necessarily contain traces of other
(absent) signifiers, the signifier can be neither wholly present nor wholly absent.

6. Arche-writing

The term ‘arche-writing’ is uded by Derrida to describe a form of language which cannot be
conceptualized within the ‘metaphysics of presence.’ Arche-writing is an original form of language which
is not derived from speech. Arche-writing is a form of language which is unhindered by the difference
between speech and writing. ‘Arche-writing’ is also a condition for the play of difference between
written and non-written forms of language.

Derrida contrasts the concept of “arche-writing” with the “vulgar” concept of writing. The “vulgar”
concept of writing, which is proposed by the “metaphysics of presence,” is deconstructed by the
concept of “arche-writing.”[7]

7. Supplement

Derrida takes this term from Rousseau, who saw a supplement as “an inessential extra added to
something complete in itself.” Derrida argues that what is complete in itself cannot be added to, and so
a supplement can only occur where there is an originary lack. In any binary set of terms, the second can
be argued to exist in order to fill in an originary lack in the first.

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