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Of Grammatology

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In the context of Derrida's early project - to provide a critique of the foundational human science - linguistics - Of Grammatology is an essential book. In it he develops ideas about "writing" and about the "trace", ideas which illuminate much about the modern science of linguistics. His work is an astringent when applied to other more "analytical" philosophers of language (e.g. John Searle).

Derrida's writing style may seem difficult at first, until one realizes that it embodies two other important ideas - play and undecideability. Of Grammatology is not exactly a book of philosophy, and not exactly a book on linguistics, and not exactly a literary work but one which rests uneasily among these three disciplines. By not drawing conclusions, by keeping in play many concepts at once, Derrida manages to provide provocative ideas on mental representations while at the same time instantiating these ideas in the ebb and flow of the work itself.

Because of its kalidescopic style, the book can be read for the pure enjoyment of a rambunctious entertainment, and as an important philosophical text, and as a satire, and as profoundly serious.

As the academic furor over "decontruction" dies down, Derrida's work perhaps can begun to be read for its human importance. Those who value an insistent questioning will find a champion here.

This volume is central to Derrida's project and is, perhaps, his single most important work. In it, one finds the essentail contentions that inform his other essays. Whether one views, from the analytic tradition, these concepts as indulgent rubish or as culmination of a pre-Socratic force hidden under the ubiquitous effects of Plato and Aristotle, they are critical in understanding the disjunctions of philosophy.

While Derrida's writing may be difficult because it is both dense and playful, allusive and iconoclastic,these presentational "quirks" are not empty but tied to the basic structures of his argumentation.

Since its publication, popular characterizations of this book have attributed to it positions it does not hold. Derrida is, among his other gifts, a scholar of the first order and behind his statements are close readings of many of the philosphical greats that preceded his effort. This is not the babbling of the manic mind but a huge encounter with the dominant tradition of interpretation.

Such a gigantic target cannot be exhausted in one volume, but even if one wishes to affirm the analytic tradition, this volume should be read with the respect and care one gives a worthy enemy.

Having spent many frustrating hours looking for the substance in Derrida's many labyrinthine works, I make this suggestion to others: `Of Grammatology' is the thread text to start your wonderings through the rest of Derrida's thought.

I first read this in the eighties, before I was ready. If you want to understand deconstruction, I was told, "Of Grammatology" is the singlemost important text. Then I read the excellent introduction by Christopher Norris, went back and re-read Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," went back and read Plato's "Phaedrus," which Pirsig deconstructs in "Zen." Finally, the pieces came together and it became possible to appreciate Derrida for the genuine philosopher/philologist/phenomenologist/existential thinker that he is.

In reading Derrida I find it useful to keep in mind several key ideas: first, language, spoken or written, is subject to the movement of "real" time. Any "now"utterance is necessarily a past "trace" and a hypothetical future. 2nd, language is not the expression of thought; rather, language "is" pure consciousness. All ideas are words, all words are "interpretations," meanings made by human minds. Hence, there is no escaping the "text." We can "know" nothing beyond the interpretations of the thinking (language-using/meaning-making) human subject. 3rd, the text, while "intranscendable," is necessarily inexhaustible, since every signified must in turn become a signifier. Hence, the awesome (dis)play of language by a thinking subject such as "Shakespeare," whose metaphors never attempt to posit a reality beyond the human world of language (there are no "truth claims" in Shakespeare's sonnets: every meaning can be "proven" by the words which create it. 4th, any "opposition" is more a trick/trope of language than an actual "event." Speaking vs. writing. male vs. female, white vs. black, life vs. death, ideal vs. mundane, the center vs. the margin are all "provisional" metaphors, more complementary than exclusive: the one term always depends upon the other for completion of its meaning.

Finally, just as it is unwise to conflate Christian and biblical understandings about anything, it's mistaken to confuse Derrida with the "liberal, radical fringe" often accused of dismantling the canons and foundations of Western civilization. In fact, Derrida's respect for language has more in common with more "traditional" critics such as Bloom and Kermode than it does with the academic activists, political reformers, socialist zealots who have attached themselves to "positions," alliances, causes. These latter groupings violate the very nature of language and thought. (Unfortunately, the American public frequently vote for candidates on the basis of their "positions"--guns, taxes, abortion, etc.--rather than a candidate's ability to think and use language.)

Frankly, I now find it curious that I once regarded Derrida with suspicion. His work belongs in the mainstream of philosophy and semantics.

I was unable to figure out what this book meant. I kept reading, hoping things would get clearer, but I got the impression that the language just kept on going round in self referential circles, not actually talking about anything clear that I could grasp. It's like, just when I thought it was about to come out and say something that made sense, it seemed to end up saying something else instead. Infuriating. Can someone please sum up what Derrida was trying to say here?

Derrida's thought is the primary reason why I inevitably feel an urge to put quotation marks around so many of the conceptual labels in my own writing; he initiates a needful misgiving: Do we really know what we are speaking about when we attempt to speak philosophically? Or is our language so subverted, displaced, and otherwise (blindly) ideological that a lot of the theoretical malarkey that academics put forth just seems to beg the age-old questions of knowledge, truth, meaning, etc.? But wait. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that Derrida's writing shies away, almost essentially, from authoritative positioning in such matters because his own writing is subject to the same blind alleys and provisionalism that all writing is. In this respect, his writing is always, in a way, winking and playful, but admittedly in an rigorous and sometimes difficult way.

Is this book difficult? Yes, you bet it is! But I assure you that it's is as close to entry-level Derrida as any other book written by him. I first encountered the thinking of Derrida in a very watered-down gloss on his theory in postmodernist primer; this intrigued me to pursue him further, to read such things as Beginner's Guides and Short Introductions (which I definitely recommend to those who have either no prior experience with him or no great familiarity with the other thinkers he addresses in Of Grammatology--Saussure, Rousseau, etc.). Of course, you'll discover that these tidy little intros can be oversimplifying in places, but they at least get you to the general neighborhood before your set out on your own.

Derrida's writing, because of its inherent need for argumentative clarity and rigor, can at times be difficult to decipher; therefore, do not obsess over every sentence; the overall meaning of the argument is much more important and often becomes clearer if you just plow through difficult passages.

Every writing, especially philosophical writing, and even of course Derrida's, is by nature ideological; it works outward from a set of assumptions. There is no other alternative. We cannot start from scratch, from some dreamed-of ground zero where there is no preceding meaning and out of which we may deduce all the truths of the universe. Derrida's ideological vantage is then what appealed to me about him; perhaps never in black and white, but always and everywhere his thinking seems to question authoritative accounts, seeks to expand upon the marginalized element in any discourse, and foregrounds the difficulty in making large and almost mathematical pronouncements in philosophical and other supradisciplinary affairs. These are certain dispositions which align with my own particular perspective, and if they have some resonance with you, and if you come to Derrida having completed a little homework and bringing along a good dose of patience and effort, then you'll likely find this book rewarding as well.

A final note on the opposing opinion: Although there is no one camp of thinkers or philosophers which opposes Derrida's thought for one and only one reason, some of the most vocal of his detractors (and I will temporarily assume their voice here) regard him as a proponent of relativism or an attempted (but miserably failed) assassin of the western philosophical tradition. They are less skeptical of a fundamental faith in the general structures of meaning and in the rudimentary capabilities of the rational mind to attain to some variety of truth, however limited. Also, opponents often regard Derrida as a kind of interloper in the field of philosophy, that he should putter around with his obscurantist games in the narrow field of literary theory where he belongs. Therefore, if Plato, Descartes, and Locke seem like more feasible philosophical pursuits, Derrida probably (1) won't convert you and (2) won't be to your liking. He doesn't put forth a philosophical system, and neither does he assert an epistemological framework, so you won't find the kind of concrete, axiomatical philsophical claims common to pre-modern and early modern philosophy.

In OF GRAMMATOLOGY, Jacques Derrida examines the relation between writing and Being. He further considers how speech and writing develop as forms of language. His book is divided into two parts: "Writing before the Letter" and "Nature, Culture, Writing." When academics think of Derridean style deconstruction, they usually lump the contents of OF GRAMMATOLOGY with "Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Science" and "Differance." In all three works, Derrida posits the idea that all of Western thought, language, and culture are based on a rarely examined given--that human beings live their lives under the shared illusion that there exists an eternal and fixed "center" from which all else flows. This center has many variations--God, truth, love, man--all of which are seen and understood in terms of polar opposites or binaries: God/devil; truth/falsehood; love/hate; man/woman etc. Derrida took this view from the writings of Ferdinand de Saussure who argued that the left/right division could make sense only if there were clear and marked differences between them. De Saussure also wrote of signifiers (the "sound" of a word) and of signifieds (the abstract concept that the sound puts in the mind of the listener). What Derrida did to Saussure's theory was to take a theory that clearly linked words to words and ideas to ideas and added something new--that these signifieds could never point to their "real" referents. There never was nor can there ever be a "real" referent. What Derrida was suggesting was that signification was far more than the mere spatial differences of Saussure. Signification must now include temporalization, a fancy word that suggests that time passes eternally and endlessly as each signified points only to other signifieds like a dog chasing its tail. Derrida calls this useless and never ending search a mask that offers the comforting illusion that the ground underneath one's feet is as truly as firm as it feels. Though Derrida asserts that this "center" does not exist, he nevertheless gives the concept a variety of names all of which mean roughly the same: transcendental signified, metaphysics of presence, and logocentrism. When word leaked out beginning in 1967 what Derrida had written, there was a very nearly universal acceptance that the search for "metaphysics of presence" meant only that the seeker was hopelessly out of touch with this trendy anti-establishment mode of thought. Even now some forty years later, the vast majority of intellectuals, philosophers, and university professors still profess outright admiration for deconstruction. Sadly, all such believers have been taken in by an extraordinarily elaborate smoke and mirror illusion that cannot withstand close analysis.

Those who praise Derrida often gloss over a myriad of his assertions that are ill-defined, incoherent, or simply garbled. Derrida's main thrust in OFGRAMMATOLOGY is to prove that all of Western thought has privileged speech over writing from Plato until the present. As proof, Derrida discusses Saussure as one who privileged writing over speech. Saussure, however, actually privileged speech over writing in that he feared that societies that had limited written records would then be excluded from the intricacies of a melding between thought and writing. Derrida also, without justification, pictures Saussure as a supporter of an entrenched Western ethnocentrism, which Derrida further claims "everywhere and always had controlled the concept of writing." Such a sweeping statement as this is typical of the florid and dramatic vocabulary of one who seeks to dazzle with pomp rather than convince with hard logic. As far as Derrida's complaint that writing must always and everywhere privilege itself over speech is contradicted by the following: (a) speaking had long pre-existed writing as a mode of communication (b) some languages are spoken but not written but none are written without being spoken (c) Many individuals today can speak but not write but none barring infirmity can write without speech (d) though there is a very large number of written languages none can compare to speech in terms of intonation.

Derrida tends to use a variety of terms that are ill-defined, an unwise omission for one who seeks to validate the acceptance of a radical and revolutionary philosophy as deconstruction. He introduces the term "play" rather than its more common synonym "contrast" only to nudge the reader into an unthinking acceptance of an unexpected word in a novel context. Had Derrida used "contrast" instead of "play," then he would have given the linguistic game away since the former requires clear differences between one thing and another while the latter allows Derrida to continue the fiction of an endless deferring of meaning. Derrida uses other terms like "trace" and "supplementarity" in a similar unfounded manner. As part of his paradigm that meaning must be endlessly deferred is his insistence that language is a system of signifiers; this is an incorrect quote from Saussure who wrote that language is a system of signs. The difference between "signs" and "signifiers" is sufficiently pronounced to call into question the comprehension of one who sees himself as the avatar of a daring and complex philosophy. Derrida, in addition, makes the interesting claim that a signified can become a signifier in an open loop of repetition. As with his other terms, Derrida offers no explanation.

Normally, the prose style of a writer should not be used as a marker of illogic. After all, many complex ideas cannot be expressed in simple terms. However, when one notices Derrida's penchant for the grandiose phrase like "transcendental signified" or "metaphysics of presence," one can expect him to justify why the one fancy phrase cannot be swapped for its more mundane synonym. Had Derrida used the phrase "certain terms cannot be further extrapolated" rather than either of these two, then as with "play" he would have opened the curtain for Dorothy to see the Wizard pulling the levers of fear.

Finally, the fatal flaw of deconstruction is its one size fits all methodology. One might think that a legitimate critic would seek to analyze a topic in a manner that is a challenge to his skills and ability. What does a deconstructionist do but announce that his target is ready to undergo "demystification" before he uses (incorrectly) Saussure's binary polarities merely to subvert it by turning the meaning inside out. It is ironic that deconstruction, which promised a sophisticated level of thought would emerge as a pointless exercise in dreary simplification.

Gayatri Chekravorty Spivak has done justice to this famous (some would say infamous) work of philosophy and literary theory. Derrida's Grammatology exploded like an intellectual bomb in American and European literary circles upon its publication, and it has remained the source of considerable debate and often vituperative outrage within the halls of academe. Derrida questions the Western privileging of speech over writing through a deconstruction of modern structuralism. A sustained and nuanced reading of Saussure, Levi-Strauss, and Rousseau reveals an ethnocentrism and logocentrism determined by a classical metaphysical understanding of being as presence. But Derrida proposes the centrality of the play of absence and presence as the horizon of significance and meaning, of 'Differance.' With a collapsing of the clean Saussurean distinction between the signifier and the signified, Derrida presents the 'gramme,' the mark, as a productive force in signification. "A writing that breaks with the phone radically is perhaps the most rational and effective of scientific machines; it no longer responds to any desire or rather it signifies its death to desire. It was what already operated within speech as writing and machine. It is the represented in its pure state, without the represented, or without the order of the represendted naturally linked to it." 'Of Grammatology is a crucially significant development in 20th century thought. A knowledge of Heidegger, Freud, Nietzsche, Plato, Rousseau, Saussure, and Levi-Strauss is assumed.

This text is worth the effort and cost, if only for the fantastic introduction by Spivak -- perhaps the nicest introduction to Deconstruction available. The Introduction itself, was, in fact required reading for comp-lit classes studying Deconstruction at Yale in the mid-80s -- the time of DeMann, Hartmann and J. Hillis Miller.

This book is not for everyone. Derrida's poststructuralism made several new critical approaches possible, and his contribution to the analysis of language is interesting at least for that. If you are not a fan of Deconstruction, which means looking at the different parts of a text and how they make up the whole (rather than Destruction, which would mean taking apart the house), then this book is obviously not for you. You are looking for Harold Bloom, and you will find him. My suggestion is that you read this book only if you have an open mind and the desire to test your perspective on a number of subjects against that of one of this century's great philosophers.