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"To introduce another important point, however, Saussure argues that the relation between any given signifier and signified is arbitrary. It is motivated by tradition or convention, in other words, rather than by any perceived ‘natural resemblance’ between sound and concept. If I use the sound ‘cat’ to refer to the concept of a cat, it is not because there is any natural relation between this particular signifier and signified but rather because it is accepted that the two go together within the conventions of the English language: the convention is very different in the French and Italian languages, for instance, where other signifiers (‘chat’ or ‘gatto’) relate to the signified."

"says this: ‘[w]e shall designate by the term différance the movement by which any language, or any code, any system of reference in general, becomes “historically” constituted as a fabric of differences’ (p. 141)."

"‘ the (pure) trace’ he declares, is différance [ la trace (pure) et la différance]’ (p. 62/92)."

"To recall Saussure’s argument, linguistic signs are not constituted by any intrinsic phonic or conceptual substance – a particular sound or idea that is inherent to that sign itself – but by their difference from other signs in the system. If every sign in the system obtains its identity through its difference from all the other signs, then this means every sign is intrinsically marked by what it is not. Every sign must retain the traces of the other signs against which it is to be defined, in other words, in order to have any meaning at all."

"To put it simply, what Derrida calls the originary trace represents his most systematic attempt to articulate this central point in the Grammatology: mediation goes all the way down."

"Derrida’s contention is that the position historically attributed to ‘writing’ in western culture actually describes the condition of all language whatsoever: what is called ‘writing’ names the framework ‘common to all systems of signification’ (p. 46/68) whether they be spoken, written, drawn, electronically recorded or transmitted. Indeed, he goes to great pains to distinguish this ‘originary’ concept of writing from what he calls the ‘vulgar’ or conventional idea of writing as a set of empirical marks, letters or inscriptions (p. 46/68)."

"The fact is that every signifier might best be described as a ‘signifier of a signifier’ because, according to Saussure’s own theory, every sign works by referring to other signs within the system rather than to some positive content of its own. There is an important sense, then, in which the lowly position of writing – inferior, derivative, always at one step removed from the main action – accurately describes the position of language as a whole. This means that writing is not so much ‘comparable’ to language as the other way around: language might even be described as a species of writing (p. 52/75)."

"The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it. ( Course, pp. 117–18) What exactly is Saussure saying here? If any one sign has meaning, it is not because it possesses any content or substance in itself but because it differs – both phonically and conceptually – from other signs within the linguistic system. The sign ‘cat’ (regardless of whether we see it from the perspective of the sound or the concept) exists within a prior network of relations to other signs (‘hat’, ‘bat’ and so on). There is a paradoxical sense in which the idea of a singular or unique sign is, then, something of a contradiction-in-terms. This is because any apparently singular, ‘present’ and independent sign necessarily contains within it the traces of other signs within the system against which it is to be defined. In Derrida’s view, as we will A Guide to the Text 67 see in a moment, this theory has radical implications for the logocentric theory of the sign."

"Intriguingly, he is especially worried that writing may displace speech from its position at the centre of language and reverse the natural order of the spoken and the written word. What concerns him is that the written word – because it seems to represent a more durable, lasting mode of signification than speech – will gradually come to be seen as representative of language as a whole. Now, this would be an absolute disaster, in his view, because writing mediates, or even breaks, what he sees as the ‘natural bond’ between sound and sense. If writing is taken to represent language as whole, Saussure predicts, all sorts of apocalyptic catastrophes will ensue. The spelling of a word will come to influence, and even modify, the way in which that word is said, he says, and even in his own time this is leading to terrible mispronunciations. This scenario will not strike many readers as particularly awful though – is mispronunciation really such a disaster"

"Finally, and most importantly, however, Saussure also argues that any linguistic sign only acquires its meaning through its difference from other linguistic signs rather than through any ‘positive’ value it might possess in itself. The meaning of any sign is determined by its difference – both phonic and conceptual – from other signs within the system. This complex linguistic system – arbitrary, conventional and differential – is the basis for our experience of the world outside language."

"However, what the originary trace shows us is that every sign first refers to other signs, as opposed to some ‘present’ concept that is not itself a sign. We can see, then, that the originary trace throws the whole logocentric concept of the sign into crisis by proposing that we never arrive at a simple or unmediated meaning: nothing is unmediated. For Derrida, every signifier relates to other signifiers that surround it in space and time and so we can never reach a pure thought or concept – a signified – that exists in and of itself independently of all signifiers: what is supposedly beyond language is plunged back into language. If we take a very simple example of this, it becomes much clearer: every time we look up a word in the dictionary – ‘love’, for example – what we find is not the meaning of that word but merely other words that act as synonyms for it (‘love’ means ‘adoration’ or ‘desire’) or even antonyms (‘love’ means the opposite of ‘hate’)."

"According to Saussure’s structure-based approach, language is not a nomenclature, that is, a series of names for pre-existing objects in the outside world. On the contrary, it is a system that acquires meaning through its own internal structure and relations."

"For Saussure, as we will see, the signifier and the signified – the physical mark and the concept it refers to – are inextricably linked to one another like two sides of the same sheet of paper:"

"writing cannot be the object of a science, Derrida argues, because it is what makes scientific study possible in the first place. Why is this? For Derrida, as we saw in our discussion of Husserl, writing is the sole means by which we can record, preserve and transmit our thoughts and thus establish something as ‘truth’, ‘knowledge’ or ‘objectivity’ in the first place: the written text is what enables the objects of geometry to transcend the mind of the 58 Derrida’s Of Grammatology first geometers, for instance, and become universal objects for everyone"

"Derrida’s concept of an ‘originary writing’ is not an attempt to establish a new point of origin – as if it would be plausible to say that writing really did evolve before speech – but a way of calling into question the very idea of an origin, an absolute beginning, a pure historical, theological or philosophical point of ‘presence’ to which everything can be traced back."

"For Derrida, however, this ‘linguistic’ turn is in the process of being superseded by what we might call a ‘scriptural’ turn. It is now writing, and not language in general, that has become the dominant means of explaining consciousness, culture, the psyche and so on: ‘[n]ow we tend to say “writing” for all that and more’ (p. 9/19)."

"For Ferdinand de Saussure, linguistic signs give shape and clarity to what would otherwise be a shadowy flux of impressions in the same way that a pair of glasses gives definition to the sight of a myopic person: it is only because I have the sign of a ‘table’ – both the signifier and the idea or concept signified by it – that I am able to make sense of the real, actual object in front of me. If Saussure is concerned with how language mediates or constructs our experience of the real world, his structuralist successors go on to extend his principles from language to reality itself: our engagement with the real world itself – the world that supposedly lies beyond language – is structured according to models of signification drawn from Saussure’s linguistics."

"On the contrary, language is a defining condition of everything that we understand as constituting the sphere of the human: consciousness, thought, expression, culture.6 Martin Heidegger, for instance, famously argues that it is language that ‘speaks’ man – rather than the other way around – in the sense that it names or calls into existence the things that constitute the world of Dasein.7 Now, this concept of language as something that does not merely describe the world, but actively constructs the way in which we experience it, is intensified by the structuralist revolution."

"For Derrida, as we will see in the next section, every signifier can be seen as a mere ‘a signifier of a signifier’ – to quote the famous logocentric dismissal of writing – as opposed to something that relates directly to a present signified: what we call ‘writing’ is another name 50 Derrida’s Of Grammatology for the original condition of language as a whole (p. 7/16). Finally, then, it becomes clear that what enables us to ‘close the book’ on logocentrism is this recognition of the inescapably mediated status of all signs: we cannot gain access to a full or present signified, meaning or logos. The ‘death’ of the civilisation of the book, then, signifies the growing awareness that writing cannot be traced back to a pure or unmediated presence, in the way that we can trace the words of a book back to the author who wrote them. This new concept of writing, and indeed language as a whole, has been emerging for a long time, Derrida argues, but it is now beginning to manifest itself in the form of a series of contemporary developments in post-war philosophy, science and thought (p. 6/15–16). Enter grammatology."

"However, we will see later on that all signs are characterised by this state of mediation – which makes it impossible for them to directly relate to a ‘present’ meaning or signified – and so what logocentrism attributes to ‘writing’ actually describes the state of language as such."

"In what is now a A Guide to the Text 77 famous argumentative move, Derrida contends that the originary trace thus places every metaphysics of presence in a curious double-bind: it is both what makes the desire for presence possible in the first place and what makes the fulfilment of that desire impossible."

"If the epoch of writing is characterised by anything, it is less the advancement of knowledge than the extension of power, domination and segregation through political, economic and administrative elites: the historic function of writing has been to reinforce the power of the few rather than to bring knowledge to the many."

"For Derrida, in other words, an ‘originary’ writing appears well before writing in the narrow sense: it is ‘already in the différance or the arche- writing that opens speech itself ’ (p. 128/186)."

"For Derrida, this story reveals that the violence of writing – the network of differences, relations and mediation which interrupts every pure, unique or self-identical meaning – is at work within Nambikwara society long before the advent of writing in the accepted, empirical sense of that term: what Lévi-Strauss persists in calling ‘peace’ is already a state of violence. In the next part of the chapter, Derrida pursues this insight into a reading of another pivotal scene in Tristes tropiques called the ‘writing lesson’."

"To put it in a word, then, Derrida argues that the second level of violence is the institution of law. However, once again this seems a somewhat strange move to make: law is commonly seen as that which puts an end to violence, that which restores or protects a state of peace, so why see it as representing a new form of violence? Quite simply, the answer is that what we call the ‘law’ can only meet violence with violence. The institution of law by the Nambikwara cannot actually restore an original state of peace in which all proper names are respected, for no such state ever existed, so all it can do is more or less violently suppress the violence of language itself under the guise of ‘justice’ ‘morality’ or ‘society’. This apparent attempt to preserve the so-called ‘proper’ names by forbidding their disclosure is, Derrida argues, thus actually what makes those names proper in the first place. For Derrida, then, it is the identification of, and prohibition against, something called ‘impropriety’ that produces the illusion of a pre-existing state of ‘propriety’. In other words, the institution of law manufactures the very state of original ‘propriety’ it claims to protect: ‘the so-called proper, substitute of the deferred proper, perceived by the social and moral consciousness as the proper’ (p. 112/165)."

"According to Saussure’s differential theory of language – which, as we have seen, heavily influences Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology – a proper name can only be proper if it exists in a relation to other proper names: ‘Peter’ is only meaningful because it is different from ‘Mary’. Now, the upshot of this position is that no name can ever be ‘proper’ in and of itself – in the sense that it refers solely, directly and uniquely, to what it names – and this leads Derrida to speak of the ‘death’ of absolutely proper naming (p. 109/164). To Derrida’s eyes, in other words, it thus becomes possible to speak of an ‘originary’ violence at work in the act of naming because the very structure of language itself violates the supposed propriety, the supposedly unique status, of the proper name: ‘Anterior to the possibility of violence in the current and derivative sense’ he argues, we find ‘the violence of the arche-writing, the violence of difference, of classification, and of 88 Derrida’s Of Grammatology the system of appellations’ (p. 110/162). For"

"For Derrida, the larger Rousseauean agenda of this narrative is also clear: Lévi-Strauss is not so much seeking to discover the way of life of any particular people but the ideal basis of human society as a whole (p. 115/169–70). In fact, Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology might be suspected of a kind of reverse ethnocentrism: what begins as an almost Marxian critique of attempts to impose western culture on other peoples as if it were a universal standard ends up setting up a thoroughly romanticised version of non-western culture as the ideal by which all humanity is to be judged."

"As Derrida argues, what seems like an innocent anecdote actually belongs to an eighteenth-century A Guide to the Text 85 tradition of confessional writing whereby autobiography is the basis for a philosophical reflection upon the relation between nature and society, between an ‘ideal’ society and ‘real’ society or, to put it more bluntly, between ‘us’ and ‘them’ (pp. 113–14/166)."

"all language – whether it be the ‘speech’ of the Nambikwara or the ‘writing’ of Lévi-Strauss himself – is already a species of a more originary and generalised ‘writing’ and this compels him to re-think the Rousseauean mythology of a fall from a prelapsarian utopia. In Derrida’s words, we are not dealing with a fall from nature into culture, peace into violence or speech into writing so much as a fall within nature itself, which is thus revealed to be never quite ‘natural’ in the first place."

"Now, Lévi-Strauss himself portrays writing as something that arrives to violate a place or moment of pure presence from ‘outside’, but what Derrida is once again going to show is that this foreign body is already intrinsic to language itself: we must articulate the ‘originary violence of a language which is always already a writing’ (p. 106/156)."

"If Saussure and other modern linguists obviously dispense with any belief in a creator god lying behind the sign, Derrida has little difficulty in showing that they still retain a residually theological investment in what he calls a ‘transcendental signified’ – an ultimate presence – which anchors all meaning in itself: the presence of God is merely replaced by the presence of the speaker, of his or her thoughts and feelings, and so on. In this sense, Derrida argues that the age of the sign is essentially theological: ‘the sign and divinity have the same place and time of birth’ (p. 14/25)."

"What should be opposed and hierarchised terms presuppose one another. To Derrida’s eyes, any value that metaphysics posits as ‘present’ – speech, nature, consciousness – is thus always already spreading or dispersing outwards into a network of traces, differences and mediations: nothing is ever purely present or absent."

"To declare that ‘everything begins with the trace’, then, is not an attempt to posit some new, even more fundamental point of origin, in other words, but to assert that there is no pure, simple or present origin in the first place (p. 65/95). For Derrida, that is to say, any origin is always multiple: what claims to be a singular point of origin must always define itself against something that it is not, dividing itself in at least two, multiplying itself like a cell through a process of infinite differing/deferring"

"Quite simply, the whole point of the trace is that it is an orginary condition of mediation, synthesis or complexity rather than a present being, thing or entity: ‘[t]he trace is nothing, it is not an entity, it exceeds the question What is?’ (p. 75/110)."

"the logic of metaphysics? In simple terms, the trace is prior to every metaphysical concept because it is the movement of différance – of differing and deferring – that allows them to appear as concepts in the first place: ‘[ t] he trace is in fact the absolute origin of sense in general’ (pp. 62/95)."

"For Derrida, the trace cannot be traced to any point of simple spatial or temporal presence – whether a present that is now past or one that is yet to come – because it is the underlying differential condition of any ‘presence’ whatsoever. In Derrida’s own paradoxical phrase, the originary trace can never be ‘there’ because it is ‘always-already-there [ toujours déjà-lá]’: it both recedes into an infinite past and projects itself into an infinite future (p. 66/97)."

"In Derrida’s readings of Husserl, for example, we saw how the supposed purity of our interior consciousness requires the traces of the ‘external’ world (communication, indication, writing) in order to relate to itself in the first place: what is apparently ‘outside’ is already ‘inside’ (p. 44/65)."

"According to the same logic, the trace is neither sensible nor intelligible. It is not something that can be recognised by our senses (like a sound or smell), in other words, nor something that can be conceived within our minds (like an idea or concept). On the one hand, we cannot see or hear it because, it is nothing but the difference between spoken or written marks. On the other, we cannot quite think it either 74 Derrida’s Of Grammatology because, once again, the difference between ideas or concepts cannot, strictly speaking, itself be a concept (p. 62/92–3)."

"In Derrida’s account, all thought remains caught with the network of spatial and temporal differentiation that is the ‘trace’: ‘ We think only in signs’ (p. 50/73, English in original)."

"For Derrida, all language – whether spoken or written – exists in an irreducible state of mediation: we cannot simply return to the animating intentions, consciousness or ‘presence’ of the user, speaker or author. From the moment we begin to speak or write, in other words, we set in motion a complex linguistic machine that has a ‘life’ quite independent of our own: what we call Of Grammatology is a cog in that mechanism. If we cannot return to the true, original or intended meaning of Derrida’s text, this means that there can be no end to the process of reading, analysing and interpreting it: the meaning of the text does not lie behind us in some distant past, in other words, but in front of us, in the future, as something that is yet to be decided. In all these senses, I think the task of reading Derrida’s Of Grammatology can only be an endless one, but let us at least begin." Chapter 1: Historical Context

"It focuses on the essence of these particular ‘intuitions’, in other words, what your experience of them says about the way in which consciousness works more generally. According to Husserl, the defining characteristic of consciousness is that it is intentional, by which he means that it is always directed towards objects. To put it simply: consciousness is not an empty box into which objects are subsequently placed, but always the consciousness of some object."

"For Derrida, both traditions par-ticipate in the championing of speech as the true bearer of presence and the repression or marginalisation of writing as a base or empty vessel that is the logocentric gesture par excellence."

"The Being of entities “is” not itself an entity’.10 To introduce the thesis of his seminal work Being and Time, Heidegger argues that the basic question ‘What is Being?’ has been largely forgotten by western philosophy because the latter focuses exclusively on beings or entities ( Being and Time, p. 2). Heidegger seeks to recuperate the meaning of Being itself by focusing on a particular kind of being and the one he chooses is human being or, as he famously calls it, Dasein (‘there-being’). For Heidegger, what defines Dasein is that it is not a being or entity that exists in time (like a rock or an animal) so much as a being who exists as time, whose being is essentially temporal: we are quite literally nothing other than the accumulation of our past experiences, on the one hand, and what we have the potential to ‘project’ out of those experiences into the future, on the other."

"The crucial thing to grasp about Derrida’s readings of the history of philosophy, in other words, is that he is neither seeking to score points off metaphysics itself (as if anyone who believed in it were stupid or erroneous), nor to establish some new anti-metaphysical system (which would somehow avoid, or correct, the errors of its predecessor), so much as articulating this larger, and more complex, dilemma. There is an unavoidable sense in which every attempt to overcome metaphysics cannot help but repeat the language, discourse and assumptions of metaphysics, Derrida argues, because there is quite simply no other vocabulary available to us ( Positions, p. 12). This is why Derrida admits right from the outset of his work that his own critique of metaphysics must necessarily work within the very system of ideas it wishes to contest even, at the risk of simply replicating it ( Grammatology, p. 24/39)."

"The psychoanalytic system may well call into question the self-presence of consciousness but it does so at the cost of turning the unconscious into a ‘hidden, virtual, or potential self-presence’. This means that Freud risks establishing a metaphysics of the unconscious whereby our drives and instincts become a new metaphysical basis for truth (pp. 20–1)."

"Sigmund Freud’s pyschoanalysis intensifies this critique of the rational thinking or knowing subject which had become the last refuge of metaphysics in modernity: psychoanalysis ‘put[s] consciousness into question in its assured certainty of itself ’ Derrida writes ( Margins, p. 17). To Freud’s way of thinking, what we call the rational or self-conscious ‘I’ is the meeting point of a range of different, competing and often unconscious forces, desires or principles: ‘consciousness may be, not the most universal attribute of human processes, but only a particular fraction of them’.8 What is ground-breaking about psychoanalysis for Derrida is precisely this insight into how apparently simple, identical and present points of origin – such as the consciousness of the subject – are actually the product of an originary and unthought network of differences: ‘The putting into question of the authority of consciousness is first and always differential’ ( Margins, p. 18)."

"Friedrich Nietzsche famously sees the production of metaphysical belief systems as an attempt to repress the dynamic processes of life itself: the ‘other’ world of metaphysics is the product of this world rather than its cause or foundation. Proposing 18 Derrida’s Of Grammatology what he calls a ‘genealogy’ of metaphysics, Nietzsche shows how apparently timeless, unconditioned values arise out of the very history they are supposed to explain in the first place. Quite simply, we must see concepts like ‘truth’, ‘being’ or ‘consciousness’ less as descriptions of ‘what is’ and more as misleading linguistic abstractions of a flux of historical, physiological and affective forces. For Nietzsche, metaphysics is the product of what he calls an ‘ascetic ideal’ that leads human beings to renounce ‘this world, our world’ in favour of ‘ another world’.6 Yet, it is impossible to reach this other world because it never existed in the first place and so humanity falls back into ‘ ressentiment’: a sense of permanent guilt that finds its apex in the Christian view of human existence as ‘fallen’. What lies beneath the metaphysical ‘will to truth’ of the ascetic ideal is the ‘will to power’: the capacity to liberate ourselves from the pursuit of the timeless other world of ‘truth’, and affirm our place within, and as a product of, the endlessly creative becoming of this world."

"Karl Marx sees all our Historical Context 17 metaphysical ideas about reality as nothing more than imaginary expressions of the processes of life, nature and history. Quite simply, our view of reality is upside-down: we must understand consciousness from the perspective of life, rather than life from the perspective of consciousness.3 According to Marx’s philosophy of historical materialism, what defines ‘life’ in this case is not biology but history: being alive is not something we are so much as something we do, the way in which we work or labour, how we organise our existence socially, materially and economically ( German Ideology, p. 48)."

"If the essential metaphysical question still remained the same – what is? – the answer changed from ‘the ideal’, ‘substance’ or ‘god’ to the ‘thinking or knowing subject’. For the seventeenth-century rationalist philosopher Descartes, the ego cogito or thinking subject provided the only firm foundation upon which knowledge could be grounded and this position is pursued and refined in different ways by such figures as Kant and Husserl.2 The last decades of the nineteenth century, however, saw the emergence of a new, more radical critique of metaphysics in the work of such seminal figures as Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. This so-called ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ is what lays the groundwork for Derrida’s own attempt to question the grounding assumptions of western metaphysics ( Writing and Difference, p. 280). In Derrida’s own view, deconstruction is heavily indebted to this larger tradition of ‘anti-metaphysical philosophy’ but, as we will see, his philosophy remains deeply sceptical about the possibility of ever simply getting ‘beyond’ metaphysics."

"For Husserl, intentionality contains two, intrinsically linked, sides: the noesis, or intentional act of consciousness that is directed towards an object, and the object, or noema, towards which that act is directed. If this argument goes some way towards breaking down the subject/object dualism that has plagued philosophy since Descartes, it is important to bear in mind that Husserl’s phenomenology remains at all times a theory of consciousness: what concerns him is purely that which presents itself to our conscious experience – a phenomenon – and he is careful not to make any presumptions about what may or may not lie behind that appearance. The intentional act can only be understood as what it is if Historical Context 25 we suspend or ‘bracket’ off – the key term Husserl uses here is ‘ epoché’ – all our everyday assumptions about the empirical existence of external objects (what he calls the ‘natural attitude’), together with any prior philosophical assumptions or prejudices we might have about essence, existence or substance. This ‘transcendental’ attempt to clarify the pure or essential structures of consciousness by rigorously suspending or ‘reducing’ any presumption of the existence of the empirical world is increasingly criticised by Husserl’s successors. In the view of later figures like Heidegger, Levinas and Ricoeur, Husserl’s focus on the purity of consciousness risks becoming too abstract and theoretical in approach: phenomenology must take account of the context – linguistic, existential, ethical – in which consciousness is embedded."

"‘The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures’ ( Grammatology, p. 24/39)."

"Derrida does not propose that we can ever simply overcome logocentric or metaphysical assumptions. We cannot simply establish some new, more accurate theory or system of knowledge to replace the metaphysics of presence ( Positions, p. 12). If Derrida’s work is a thoroughgoing interrogation of metaphysics, the fact remains that he is deeply sceptical of any attempt to get ‘beyond’ it for the very simple reason that we have no way of thinking, talking or writing that is not dominated by the metaphysical tradition: ‘[w]e have no language – no syntax and no lexicon – which is foreign to this history’ he writes in a contemporaneous essay.3 To reject metaphysics tout court, in other words, is to reject language and thought itself."

"Derrida challenges the logocentric attempt to champion speech over writing by arguing that all language – whether spoken or written – might be described as ‘writing’: writing is another name for language itself."

"logocentrism might even be described as the most ‘original and powerful ethnocentrism’, he writes in the ‘Exergue’, because it violently privileges and imposes the values of western culture over all others (p. 3/12)."

"For Derrida, Of Grammatology takes the form of an extended analysis of the metaphysical opposition between speech and writing. It focuses on what the philosopher takes to be a defining form of what we have called the metaphysical search for ‘presence’: logocentrism (p. 3/11). According to the etymology of the term, ‘logocentrism’ 8 Derrida’s Of Grammatology signifies the philosophical attempt to find what the Ancient Greeks called the logos: a term which can be literally translated as ‘word’ but also carries within it the larger sense of ‘logic’, ‘reason’ or ‘meaning’."

"Derrida shows that the supposedly primary, dominant or superior value implicitly relies on the supposedly secondary, different or inferior value in order to achieve the presence that it should achieve all by itself: the masculine depends upon the feminine in order to define its own identity in the first place. What form does this process take in the Grammatology?"

"whatever we perceive or experience as fully ‘present’ – the sound of my own voice, the wooden desk that I can touch in front of me, the thoughts that are running through my head while I read or write, even the ‘here and now’ of space and time in which I exist – is actually shot through with an infinite, and almost imperceptible, number of differences, delays or spaces. Quite simply, Derrida argues that every apparently pure, stable or self-identical presence is nothing more than an effect generated by a prior series of differences: nothing is ever purely or simply ‘there’."

"Derrida argues that ‘grammatology’ offers us an insight into a much bigger set of philosophical assumptions, namely, the ‘metaphysics of presence [la métaphysique de la présence]’ (p. 49/71). What exactly does this forbidding term mean? It is generally understood that ‘metaphysics’ is the name for a specific branch of philosophy that seeks to locate an ultimate ground, essence or foundation of reality that lies beyond the physical or empirical world: the classic example of such a position would be Plato’s idealism which argues that our world is merely the imitation of a pre-existing world of permanent, unchanging Ideas or Forms. However, Derrida has a much more ambitious understanding of ‘metaphysics’ that encompasses the entire history of western philosophy from Plato to the present day. For Derrida, the western philosophical tradition in its entirety can be described as ‘metaphysical’ in the sense that it all seeks to establish an essential foundation for reality and, in his view, that foundation is something called ‘presence’. If western philosophy has developed in many different directions over the last 2,500 years, what all these movements have in common is an attempt to posit a full or pure ‘presence’ as the supreme value by which all reality can be judged. From the spatial presence of something we can see, hear or touch, through the temporal presence of the ‘here and now’ in which we live, up to and including the absence of some presence that has been lost (such as an Edenic state of nature) or which may be achieved in the future (such as the return of God), western thought consistently comes to the same conclusion: what is most real, true or important is what is most present. In Derrida’s view, the ‘metaphysics of presence’ historically operates by erecting a series of binary oppositions between concepts, values or terms where, in each case, one concept is identified as the bearer of presence itself whereas the other is identified with the falling away, or loss of, that presence: Introduction 7 the transcendental is privileged as more ‘present’ than the empirical, the ideal is championed over the material, the soul over the body, the masculine over the feminine and so on ad infinitum"

"For Derrida, in other words, what Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism teaches us is that even the most rigorous disciplines outside the province of philosophy remain caught within the foundational incoherence of the metaphysics of presence because, once again, their sponsorship of truth, presence and speech is bought and paid for by the repression of mediation, difference, writing. In this way, Derrida’s critique of metaphysics inevitably takes us beyond the domain of structuralism as well as phenomenology."

"If speech directly signifies the ideas or intentions of the person speaking, in other words, writing only has a second-hand relation to thought because it is nothing more than a sign of a sign. The written signifier is merely the sign of the spoken signifier, in other words, whereas the spoken signifier is the sign of the signified idea or thought"

"It establishes an absolutely fundamental point about the sign that will endure all the way up to the present day: a sign is always a sign or re-presentation of some pre-existing idea or mental experience."

"For Derrida, then, the process of reading is not a question of actively ‘deconstructing’ logocentrism so much as showing that the metaphysics of presence is already in a process of what we might call ‘self-deconstruction’ insofar as it has a ‘self ’ at all: it has no full or ‘present’ ground or foundation on which to base itself and so it exists in a permanent state of instability or contingency."

"It is also important to stress that ‘deconstruction’ is not a new theory, technique or methodology that we can simply apply to particular texts in the way that we might, for example, do a Marxist or a Freudian ‘reading’ of a novel. As we have already begun to see by looking at the way in which Derrida reads Husserl and Lévi-Strauss, deconstruction is not something we do to a text from the ‘outside’, so to speak, so much as something that we reveal about the way in which any text is internally constructed. If Derrida’s reading of the privileged texts of logocentrism has a purpose, it is not to establish some superior position of knowledge or authority so much as to tease out the immanent contradictions within the texts themselves: Husserl is criticised by none other than Husserl and Lévi-Strauss by no one but Lévi-Strauss."

"For Derrida, what deconstruction attempts to do is to articulate the – often hidden or repressed – conditions according to which it is possible for any structure to be constituted in the first place. In Derrida’s own words, deconstruction signifies the ‘undoing, decomposing and de-sedimenting of structures’ in order to ‘understand how an “ensemble” was constituted and to reconstruct it to this end’."

"To introduce his own reading of logocentrism, Derrida somewhat mysteriously says that what is required is ‘not the demolition, but the de-sedimentation, the deconstruction’ of the logos’ (p. 10/21)."

"Finally, and most importantly, Derrida will propose that the metaphysical or logocentric commitment to speech depends upon a foundational contradiction or tension: all language – both speech and writing – is characterised by the essential mediation that metaphysics historically assigns to ‘writing’ alone. If the guarantee of truth – speech – is already contaminated with ‘writing’, we will also begin to see that this has important implications for our concept of a pure and unmediated ‘presence’ itself: we cannot gain access to a presence – a ‘there’ – that exists wholly independently of linguistic mediation. For Derrida, as 42 Derrida’s Of Grammatology we will now see, the theory of the linguistic sign represents a privileged symptom of this entire problematic: it is the sign – more than anything else – that is the site of his questioning of logocentrism. What, then, is Derrida’s argument?"

"If what we understand as ‘history’ depends upon a metaphysics of presence, Derrida’s aim is once again to show how that idea of history is itself a historical construction: it cannot be taken as truth. Finally, then, Derrida’s critique of the philosophical concept of ‘history’ seeks to do what he does to any other metaphysical idea, namely, to reveal the open-ended network of differences on which it resides: no historical moment, body of thought, epoch or tradition, is ever wholly at one with itself because it inevitably contains the traces of what precedes and follows it. In Derrida’s hands, what we might call the metaphysical concept of history – where a succession of present moments are strung together like pearls on a neck-lace – begins to unravel into a more complex, plural or differential set of relations between past, present and future: ‘there is not one single history, a general history, but rather histories’ (p. 58" Chapter 2: A Guide to the Text

"Derrida’s critique of metaphysics is in many ways an attempt to reveal what we might call the radical historicity of the present. As he consistently argues, what appear to be timeless or natural ideas – ‘being’, ‘truth’ etc. – are actually anything but. Yet, this argument also applies to the philosophical idea of ‘history’ itself, our very understanding of what history is and how it works."

"grammatology, properly understood, is the study of what writing is, when and how it originated, and the ways in which it differs from other forms of communication like speech. For Derrida, the study of writing goes as far back as Plato but, strictly speaking, the science of ‘grammatology’ itself is a more modern one"

"for all his scientific credentials – Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology remains ‘caught . . . within the metaphysics – logocentrism – which at the same time [he] claims rather precipitately to have “gone beyond” ’ ( Grammatology, p. 99/148): Lévi-Strauss, like Husserl before him, takes a more or less arbitrary decision that truth will equal presence which, in turn, will be equated with speech."

"Quite simply, structuralism’s attempt to just stop doing philosophy and begin again with something more ‘scientific’ and ‘objective’ like anthropology, linguistics or history leaves its own deepest metaphysical assumptions unquestioned. If structuralism continually throws up new scientific methodologies – Saussure’s linguistics, Lévi-Strauss’s ethnography, Michel Foucault’s archaeology or Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology – in order to get around old metaphysical problems, Derrida argues that all these supposedly original approaches actually presuppose some of the most ancient philosophical oppositions imaginable: speech and writing, nature and culture, the transcendental and the empirical, and so on."

"For Derrida, then, it becomes clear that structuralism is curiously self-exempting: everything has a structure – a relative place within the play of the system – except the centre of the structure itself where that play comes to a stop (p. 279)."

"Derrida begins this essay by effectively seeking to turn the tables on structuralism itself: what, he asks, structures the search for structures of language, culture and society? As we have already begun to see, his answer to this question is that structuralism is characterised by the attempt to identify a fixed point or centre at the heart of every structure ( Writing and Difference, p. 278)."

"For Saussure and his followers, in other words, consciousness is always mediated through a prior network of signs, concepts, and values which enable us to make sense of our experience and, in this respect, at least, it would seem to confirm Derrida’s own critique of phenomenology. More generally, as we will see in Part 2, structuralism institutes a differential and relational theory of meaning that will be an enormous influence upon Derridaean deconstruction. Just as a single chess piece only makes sense in the context of the other pieces on the board, so no individual unit within a network has meaning in itself but rather achieves meaning in relation to all the other units within the system."

"Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) was a linguist but is now commonly held to be the ‘father’ of the modern movement called structuralism. He focused his research less on particular units of language – what he calls ‘ parole’ or speech – so much as on the underlying system of language ( langue) in which those units exist. He famously argues that individual units of language acquire meaning from their relative position within the linguistic system as a whole: a word like ‘cat’, for example, has no meaning outside the system of the English language."

"It is Husserl’s contention that objects are immediately present to consciousness in both the spatial and the temporal senses of the word. When I ‘intend’ a certain object, it is present here and now to my consciousness: ‘[f]or the acts in question are themselves experienced by us at that very moment in the blink of an eye [ im selben Augenblick]’ ( Logical Investigations, p. 280). Once again, however, Derrida uses an example from Husserl’s own phenomenology – in this case his lectures on internal time consciousness – to show that the present moment in which perception takes place is in fact anything but ‘present’. To clarify what might seem at face value to be a paradoxical argument, Derrida argues that what we perceive as the Historical Context 27 ‘now’ or present moment is in fact a synthesis or composite of memory and expectation, retention and protention. Derrida notes how Husserl himself shows us in The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness that when we listen to a piece of music we retain the memory of the note just played, we hear the note currently being played, and anticipate the next note in the sequence, all at once. For Husserl, in other words, retention – the memory of what has just passed – is the ‘tail’ that always follows the ‘comet’ of primary impression.13 If perception of the present is thus shot through with absence – what has just past and what is about to come – then Husserl’s theory of consciousness is once again shown to be always and already conditioned by the kind of mediation that he brackets off as external or inessential to his phenomenology. Just as the space of consciousness is mediated by things that are not fully present – linguistic signs – so the time of consciousness is structured by what is temporally absent: the past and the future. In this sense, Husserl’s metaphysics of ‘presence’ is once again forced to rely on the very thing it seeks to exclude: ‘This alterity is in fact the very condition for presence’ ( Speech and Phenomena, p. 65)."

"Second, though, Derrida observes that Husserl goes on to associate expression with speech and indication with writing: speech is expressive because it necessarily entails the presence of the speaker, whereas writing is indicative because the writer is absent and substituted by a graphic inscription or mark. Unfortunately, though, things are not quite this simple because, as Derrida shows, the boundary between expression and indication, speech and writing and, more generally, presence and absence, constantly needs to be re-drawn. Straightaway, Husserl is forced to concede that not all s peech is expressive: when we speak in order to communicate with someone else, our 26 Derrida’s Of Grammatology words merely indicate our inner experience for the other person because, of course, they are not directly experiencing what we are experiencing."