A rchive Date
[ 10-10-2004 ]
Category
[ Philosophy ]
sub-Categoy
[ Jacques Derrida ]
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[http://www.public.iastate.edu/~honeyl/derrida/grammatology.html
Of Grammatology
Because, you see, intelligence is free now (he said), and it can start anywhere or go anywhere. And it is possible that he [Dahfu] lost his head, and that he was carried away by his ideas. This was because he was no mere dreamer but one of those dreamers-doers, a guy with a program. And when I say that he lost his head, what I mean is not that his judgment abandoned him but that his enthusiasms and visions swept him far out - Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King
First published in English in 1976, Of Grammatology has since that time been viewed in a number of different ways, ranging from J. Hillis Miller's assessment of it being "one of the major works in the development of contemporary criticism and philosophy" to outright hostility, such as my initial reaction.
For Derrida, Of Grammatology marked a turning point in his career, giving him an understanding that allowed him to write in the playful, irreverent manner that marked many of his latter works, such as The Post Card and Glas. As he explains in an interview with Imre Salusinszky in 1985:
. . . the moment when I wrote Of Grammatology was the moment when I felt that something became, not clear for me, but something began to give me an access to what a dominant interpretation of writing had been in Western culture and philosophy. That's an event for me, in my intellectual history: when all the texts I had been reading . . . helped me to have, to some extent, a coherent vision of Western culture and its relation to writing and speaking.
And then I had the feeling that I could write differently. (22-23)
Here's a link to another interview about Of Grammatology.
To investigate those ideas that liberated Derrida to write so differently, to merge philosophy and literature into a continual sense of serious play, I offer the following captioned excerpts from Of Grammatology itself. Of course, all these Derridean musings have created a river of ink and electrons about their import.
On Deconstruction of the Transcendental Signifier
From the moment there is meaning there is nothing but signs. We think only in signs. Which amounts to turning the notion of the sign at the very moment when, as in Nietzsche, its exigency is recognized in the absoluteness of its right. One could call play the absence of the transcendental signified as limitlessness of play, that is to say as the destruction of ontotheology and the metaphysics of presence. (50)
On the Tyranny of Metaphysics, Linearity, and Speech
It is precisely these concepts that permitted the exclusion of writing: image or representation, sensible and intelligible, nature and culture, nature and technics, etc. They are solidary with all metaphysical conceptuality and particularly with a naturalist, objectivist, and derivative determination of the difference between outside and inside.
And above all with the "vulgar concept of time." I borrow this expression from Heidegger. It designates, at the end of Being and Time, a concept of time thought in terms of spatial movement or of the now, and dominating all philosophy from Aristotle's Physics to Hegel's Logic. This concept, which determines all of classical ontology, was not born out of a philosopher's carelessness or from a theoretical lapse. It is intrinsic to the totality of the history of the Occident, of what unites its metaphysics and its technics. And we shall see it later associated with the linearization of writing, and with the linearist concept of speech. This linearism is undoubtedly inseparable from phonologism; it can raise its voice to the same extent that a linear writing can seem to submit to it. Saussure's entire theory of the "linearity of the signifier" could be interpreted from this point of view. (72)
On Writing, Marxism, and Metaphysics
Yet, the issue was nothing less than the distinctions between phonetic and ideographic, syllabic and alphabetic, scripts, between image and symbol, etc. The same may be said of the instrumentalist and technicist concepts of writing, inspired by the phonetic model which it does not conform to except through a teleological illusion, and which the first contact with nonoccidential scripts ought to have demolished. This instrumentalism is implicit everywhere. Nowhere is it as systematically formulated, with all the attendant consequences, as by Marcel Cohen: Language being an "instrument," writing is the "extension to an instrument." The exteriority of writing to speech, of speech to thought, of the signifier to the signified in general, could not be described better. There is much food for thought in the matter of the price thus paid by a linguistics -- or by a grammatology -- which, in this case, professes to be Marxist, to the metaphysical tradition. (82)
The End of Linear Writing
The end of linear writing is indeed the end of the book, even if, even today, it is within the form of a book that new writings -- literary or theoretical -- allow themselves to be, for better or for worse, encased. It is less a question of confiding new writings to the envelope of a book than of finally reading what wrote itself between the lines in the volumes. That is why, beginning to write without the line, one begins also to reread past writing according to a different organization of space. If today the problem of reading occupies the forefront of science, it is because of this suspense between two ages of writing. Because we are beginning to write, to write differently, we must reread differently. (86-87)
On God as Logos (Transcendental Signifier)
God is the name and the element of that which makes possible an absolutely pure and absolutely self-present self-knowledge. From Descartes to Hegel and in spite of all the differences that separate the different places and moments in the structure of that epoch, God's infinite understanding is the other name for the logos as self-presence. The logos can be infinite and self-present, it can be produced as auto-affection, only through the voice: an order of the signifier by which the subject takes from itself into itself, does not borrow outside of itself the signifier that it emits and that affects it at the same time. Such is at least the experience -- or consciousness -- of the voice: of hearing (understanding)-oneself-speak [s'entendre-parler]. That experience lives and proclaims itself as the exclusion of writing, that is to say of the invoking of an "exterior," "sensible," "spatial" signifier interrupting self-presence. (98)
Beyond the Epoch of Logocentrism
The epoch of logocentrism is a moment of the global effacement of the signifier: one then believes one is protecting and exalting speech, one is only fascinated by a figure of the techne. . . . The concept of history is therefore the concept of philosophy and of the epistem. Even if it was belatedly imposed upon what is called the history of philosophy, it was invoked there since the beginning of that adventure. It is in a sense unheard of until now -- all idealist, or conventionally Hegelian follies of an analogous appearance notwithstanding -- that history is the history of philosophy. Or if one prefers, here Hegel's formula must be taken literally: history is nothing but the history of philosophy, absolute knowledge is fulfilled. What exceeds this closure is nothing: neither the presence of being, nor meaning, neither history nor philosophy; but another thing which has no name, which announces itself within the thought of this closure and guides our writing here. A writing within which philosophy is inscribed as a place within a text which it does not command. Philosophy is, within writing, nothing but this movement of writing as effacement of the signifier and the desire of presence restored, of being, signified in its brilliance and glory. The evolution and properly philosophic economy of writing go therefore in the direction of the effacing of the signifier, whether it take the form of forgetting or repression. (286)
Writing as an Infectious Virus of Non-Presence
Thus one takes into account that the absolute alterity of writing might nevertheless affect living speech, from the outside, within its inside: alter it [for the worse]. Even as it has an independent history, as we have seen, and in spite of the inequalities of development, the play of structural correlations, writing marks the history of speech. Although it is born out of "needs of a different kind" and "according to circumstances entirely independent of the duration of that people," although these needs might "never have occurred," the irruption of this absolute contingency determined the interior of an essential history and affected the interior unity of a life, literally infected it. It is the strange essence of the supplement not to have essentiality: it may always not have taken place. Moreover, literally, it has never taken place: it is never present, here and now. If it were, it would not be what it is, a supplement, taking and keeping the place of the other. What alters for the worse the living nerve of language . . . has therefore above all not taken place. Less than nothing and yet, to judge by its effects, much more than nothing. The supplement is neither a presence nor an absence. No ontology can think its operation. (314) ]
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