Derrida on Speech, Writing and Presence

8/12/2019 Derrida on Speech, Writing and Presence

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Derrida on Speech, Writing and Presence:

the Gutenberg Galaxy revisited

Christopher Norris

(Note: This text was transcribed from the tape of an improvised talk and then edited for

publication, mainly to put the grammar straight and fill in some missing links of detail and

argument. Hence the sometimes rather chatty and offhand style, which hope the reader won!t

find too annoying."

t!s still difficult to get used to the idea that #errida!s no longer alive, no longer $there! as a kind

of tutelary (sometimes cautionary" presence. t!s difficult for all sorts of reasons, partly because

he was such a dominant influence on the intellectual scene, partly because he was so active,

productive and intellectually creative right up until the last few months of his life. %ut also

because he wrote so much over the years about &uestions of presence, the writer!s supposed

presence in his or her work, and about &uestions of absence, including the kind of absence that

overtakes a body of written work when the author dies and is no longer present to answer directly

for his or her words.'This raises the whole vexed &uestion of intentions, of authorial meaning

(vouoir-dire", of how far we can or should respect those $original! (genuine or imputed"

intentions, and so forth. nd of course it also raises crucial issues about the scope and limits of

interpretation, issues that we are very much concerned with in this conference.

n some of his earliest work, for instance in his ')*' essay on +.. ustin and speech-act

philosophy, #errida was already saying that one of the peculiar traits of written language was the

fact that in some sense it survives, it lives on, it continues to communicate or signify beyond the

writer!s lifetime.n a sense this is obvious enough, yet #errida thought of it as something really

&uite mysterious and hard to explain, this way that writing manages to convey at least the

simulacrum of presence regardless of the author!s absence, whether through death or /ust not

being there to respond to any &ueries. 0o there are all sorts of strange, rather spooky intimations

in #errida!s work about our own situation now, that is to say, the situation of trying to make

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sense of #errida!s work when he!s no longer around to talk at events like this and explain what he

originally meant. His almost obsessive interest in the whole &uestion of oral vis--visliterate

culture goes back to his earliest work, including his great text Of Grammatologywhich is, more

than anything, a book about the complex relationship between speech and writing.

s a kind of structuralist 1 albeit one highly critical of the structuralist enterprise - #errida was

much concerned with binary oppositions, with either2ors, with one thing as opposed to or defined

by contrast with another. He put the case (and many scholars have &uestioned this, have found it

an extravagant and &uite preposterous claim" 1 he argued that the speech2writing opposition was

central to all these binary distinctions, including those between nature and culture, philosophy

and literature, reason and rhetoric, concept and metaphor, male and female . . . . all the structuring

oppositions of what he called 3estern logocentric (or $phallogocentric!" discourse. He wrote Of

Grammatologyat a time when there was &uite a burgeoning industry of speculative writing on the

relations between oral and literate culture 1 the $4utenberg galaxy! debate -- and #errida took a

line which, on the face of it, was pretty s&uarely opposed to the ideas being put forward by

5arshall 5c6luhan and 3alter 7ng.8( think it was my old friend and colleague Terry Hawkes

who first made that /oke about $the 7ng with the numinous prose!9" 3hat #errida appeared to be

saying was that writing is in some sense prior to speech 1 of course not historically,

chronologically, or developmentally prior but prior in the sense that spoken language presupposes

the possibility of writing, that the potential for writing 1 along with many of its structural

characteristics 1 is built into the very nature of language from the outset.

That struck many readers (one is tempted to say: many not too patient or careful readers" ofOn

Grammatologyas being a downright absurd or nonsensical claim. n historical, developmental,

diachronic, or cultural terms speech comes before writing there is no recorded instance of a

culture that developed writing before it was able to speak and communicate through spoken

sounds. 0o clearly, #errida is not saying that. 3hat he is saying is that writing in a certain sense,

the possibility of writing, is always there at the origin of speech. This &uestion of the origin of

language had long been a bone of contention, especially amongst ;rench academicians. gather

the ;rench cademy actually once placed a veto on any further essays on the origin of language,

because it got people tied up into such conceptual knots. #errida is not so much trying to unpick

those knots and finally resolve the issue but is rather trying to understand /ust why we get into

such a muddle when we speculate on the origin of language or, for similar reasons, on the

speech2writing relationship. To put it in structuralist terms, which are the terms in which #errida


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first came at this problem: which comes first, langueorparole9 7n the one hand we are

compelled to suppose that certain $primitive! speech-acts, perhaps certain kinds of fragmentary,

gestural as yet pre-articulate but somehow intelligible utterances must have been produced 1 and

secured some sort of basic communicative uptake 1 before language could settle down and get

codified into a systems of conventions, semantic, grammatical, and so forth. That would be a

fairly commonsense, intuitive way of thinking about the origin of language. 7n the other hand,

how could it count as a languagein anything like the full sense of that term unless it already

possessed certain structural characteristics, mean, lexical distinctions and grammatical markers

and at least the possibility of conveying articulate ideas and concepts through a stock of shared

conventions9 This is why so many people became confused: can you ever disentangle those

conflicting priorities and make sense of &uestions concerning the origin of language9

#errida doesn!t provide an answer to that. 3hat he does say is that we have to re-conceptuali


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straightforward, face-to-face oral communication, and it!s only with the development of society,

as social structures become more complex and hierarchical, that we need a more complex

language, a highly articulate language that can communicate complex ideas. nd of course it is at

this stage that we also develop a need for writing as the means whereby to record laws, deliver

/udgments, draw up constitutional arrangements, assign various sorts of delegated authority, etc.

0o writing for =ousseau was an instrument of oppression because its various powers and

capacities were exercised by the few at the expense of the many. #errida!s point is that the kinds

of suspicion or hostility so often directed against writing by philosophers, social thinkers,

religious thinkers (especially in the 6hristian tradition", and even by linguists 1 0aussure among

them 1 has always been aimed at something other and more than /ust $writing! in the sense of a

graphic or written as opposed to a spoken language. t has always attracted these negative or

pe/orative associations because writing is conceived as secondary, derivative, supplementary,

parasitic, and all those other (supposedly" bad things. +ust think of that biblical passage 1 $the

letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life! 1 to which #errida adds numerous others from a great

range of religious, philosophical, and other $logocentric! traditions of thought.

There is a fascinating demonstration of this 1 and of the kinds of textual complication to which it

gives rise 1 in #errida!s classic essay $>lato!s >harmacy!.?>lato had a deep mistrust of writing,

influenced by his teacher 0ocrates, who made a virtue of writing nothing since the written word

had a corrupting influence on spoken language and, through that, on the proper, truth-seeking

exercise of human reason. 0o it was left to >lato to record 0ocrates! thoughts and thereby ensure

that they were handed down to posterity, in however inade&uate or defective a form. There is one

dialogue especially, thePhaedrus, where this issue comes to the fore, that is to say, which has to

do with the inherent superiority of speech and unsuitability of writing for the communication of

philosophical ideas. 0uch communication can be truly achieved only between collocutors, people

who address each other face to face in a process of reciprocal reason-giving and shared

intellectual en&uiry. Thus the only proper way to teach >hilosophy was the 0ocratic way of

walking around, talking to people and engaging them in conversation, teaching them and

responding to their &uestions. 0ocrates says at one point: you know the trouble with books (or

with scrolls or whatever" is that they don!t answer back if you say $what do you mean, scroll9! it

doesn!t reply, it /ust carries on saying the same thing, in a stupid and inert sort of way. This is a

rather comical example but it does make #errida!s point: that the animus against writing in

3estern culture has its roots deep in this attachment to the notion of an inward, living,

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intrinsically meaningful thought-speech and this attendant aversion to the idea of a dead,

mechanistic, spirit-killing, intrinsically inferior writing.

#errida also picks out some remarkable passages in 0aussure where he says that the written

language has a corrupting influence on speech.@0aussure gives the example of certain proper

names in ;rench that were once pronounced in the $proper! original, authentic way and were later

written down with some discrepancy in the spelling. The result 1 he declares with some

vehemence 1 was that first the written form diverged from the spoken, and then (contrary to

nature" the spoken form followed suit. Thus writing exerts what 0aussure regards as a corrupting,

wholly deleterious effect upon speech, /ust as culture 1 in =ousseau!s view 1 exerts a deeply

corrupting influence on the natural state of human relations when society had not yet advanced to

the stage of (so-called" $civililato to Husserl 1

involves the appeal to a notion of speech as the privileged means of such access, whereas writing

functions only as a block to truthful or ade&uate communication. Hence #errida!s

philosophically-loaded pun on the phrasesentendre-parler, that is, $to hear2understand oneself

speak!, as if the one were somehow e&uivalent or anyway near-enough e&uivalent to the other.

0o we can see that #errida!s readings of >lato, =ousseau and 0aussure have a lot to do with the

contrast between oral and literate cultures, even if 1 on his deconstructive account of it 1 that

contrast doesn!t work out &uite as thinkers like 5cuhan and 7ng were arguing at the time when

Of Grammatologyfirst appeared. His point is that >lato, =ousseau and 0aussure trip themselves

up, so to speak, that their arguments turn around and bite them. Thus he shows, very convincingly

think, that when 0aussure describes the properties of language 1 the fact that it is differential,

that it!s a system of differences $without positive terms! 1 then he relies on what 0aussure himself

calls the $trace!, the absent yet contrastive trace of other words in the word that one is using at the

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moment. That is to say, it is the contrasts, the differential structures of language that make it

possible for language to function or communicate in the first place. nd it is here 1 in trying to

account for this 1 that 0aussure falls back on a whole set of metaphors, a whole series of

analogies with written language: the very word $trace!, for instance, which turns out to be the

only means by which 0aussure can explain /ust how it is that language becomes able to function

in this purely differential way.

0omething similar happens to =ousseau 1 or, more precisely, to the logic of =ousseau!s argument

1 in the course of his reflections on the origin and history of language. 3hen =ousseau tries to

explain language, he gets into a mythical scenario and says: $7nce upon a time, before it was

corrupted, language was oral, it was spoken (not written" and therefore it was innocent, authentic,

and sincere!. The further back you go, =ousseau suggests in this very speculative way, the further

you get toward a purely passionate speech-song where language and music would not yet have

separated out, and where feelings and emotions passed from mind to mind (or from soul to soul"

without any detour through merely linguistic or social conventions. >eople didn!t need elaborate

systems of grammatical, or lexical, or logico-semantic distinction since verbal language and

music still had a common source in the passionate expression of natural human feelings, needs,

and desires. 0o it was only with the later, lamentable split between verbal language and music

that the process of corruption set in.

t this point =ousseau introduces yet another mythical story to account for our present, post-

lapsarian state. =ousseau was himself a musician, a performer and composer, and he wrote a great

deal about music history and theory, in particular about the relationship between melody and

harmony. He had a kind of running feud with =ameau, a composer who was extremely popular

and successful at the time, whereas =ousseau!s music was not very successful or popular. (Aou

can track down his opera The Village Soothsayerin a 6# recording, which goes some way

toward explaining why =ameau eclipsed him in musical terms, then and now." 7ne way of

looking at =ousseau!s ideas about the melody2harmony dualism is to view them as the working-

out of a tiff he was having with =ameau. Thus he says that the ;rench music of his day is much

too elaborate, ingenious, complex, $civili


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distinction between melody and harmony. t the outset melody was self-sufficient, it had no need

of harmony, and good music -- authentic music -- is still (or at any rate should be still" pure

melody, with no need of the $dangerous supplement! of harmony, /ust as language (authentic,

spoken language" should still have no need for the $dangerous supplement! of writing. Harmony

is a supplement, a mere supplement, which unfortunately added itself to the otherwise self-

sufficient nature of melody, so that 1 at a certain point in its historical development 1 music took

this path toward artifice, corruption, false sophistication, through the advent of counterpoint or

harmony.

3hat!s more, =ousseau says, this is where writing came in and exerted its deleterious effect,

because if you have a complex piece of contupuntal music, by =ameau let!s say, then you!ve got

to write it down. >eople can!t learn it off by heart you can &uite easily learn a folk tune, or an

unaccompanied aria, or perhaps a piece of plainchant, or anything that doesn!t involve harmony

because it sinks straight in, it strikes a responsive chord straight away. %ut as soon as you have

harmony then you have this bad supplement that comes along and usurps the proper place of

melody, that somehow corrupts or denatures melody, so to speak, from the inside. Now the

interesting thing, as #errida points out, is that =ousseau can!t sustain that line of argument,

because as soon as he starts to think harder about the nature of music, as soon as he begins to

write his articles about music theory, he recogni


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need entirely devoid of expressive or passional desire 1 and is hence not to be considered

$musical! in the proper sense of that term. Aet you would think that, given his preference for

nature above culture, melody above harmony, authentic (spontaneous" above artificial

($civili


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the plain fact that no such language or music could ever have existed outside this myth of his own

inventing. 0ome critics have argued that #errida is playing fast and loose with the term $writing!,

that he expands its meaning to suit his purpose from one context to the next, and that only in a

highly metaphorical sense can $writing! be deployed in this way. However think that #errida!s

case holds up pretty well. t!s impossible, he claims, for =ousseau to conceive of some kind of

pure orality, some culture that would be entirely $natural! in so far as it was centered on speech

and the straightforward, direct, spontaneous expression of feeling without $articulation! of any

kind.B

He makes a similar point about 6laude Evi-0trauss!s structural anthropology, more specifically,

about the book Tristes Tropiqueswhere Evi-0trauss has a lot to say about the contrast between

natural, $primitive! cultures as yet untouched by the evils of $civili


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the power to give some people power over others through possession of an occult skill or

techni&ue that made them the law-givers, cultural elites, and wielders of rank and privilege.

This is why #errida says Evi-0trauss still belongs s&uarely to the epoch of =ousseau, in his

belief that somehow, at that very moment, these people recogni


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signify a certain legally enforced order of property relations. ikewise he says that kinship

systems are a form of writing they already harbour within themselves the possibility of the

emergence of writing in the narrower, $literal! sense.

5oreover, Evi-0trauss gives us all the evidence of this, because he!s a wonderfully acute

observer of the scene, trained to observe significant details 1 though without necessarily drawing

the relevant conclusions. 6hief among them, #errida suggests, is the fact that all the necessary

conditions for the emergence of writing were there already, manifest in every aspect of tribal life,

including 1 what Evi-0trauss fails to reckon with even though he describes it in exemplary

fashion 1 the existence of a highly differentiated social structure with various punitive sanctions

attached. 0o it is a kind of =ousseauist mysti&ue of origins 1 the dream of a mythical, non-

existent organic community 1 that leads Evi-0trauss to ignore all the evidence that he himself

has so patiently assembled and maintain that the Nambikwara didn!t up to then possess anything

like writing. n the case of the little girl, #errida says that again Evi-0trauss is being in a sense

naGve, or not accepting the implications of his own fieldwork. There must already have been the

potential for that kind of violence built into the very system of $proper! names, a system that

allows for such acts of betrayal even though 1 or /ust because 1 it rules against them. fter all,

names are not /ust an innocent, neutral kind of nomenclature they belong to a system that marks

various socially sanctioned structures of kinship, inter-generational difference, familial authority,

gender distinction, property ownership, and so forth. That is to say, proper names are not $proper!

in the sense of belonging to the individual by some kind of special, authentic, proprietary right

but rather n the sense of having been assigned on the basis of various social, cultural, and

economic norms. 0o the fact that the $secret! name was revealed to him, to Evi-0trauss should be

taken as a sign, not of his guilt as a purveyor of evil from outside, but of the potential violence

that was always there, built into the very nature of the system.

0o, in many ways, #errida seems to be advancing a thesis directly contrary to some of the

arguments we!ve been hearing at this conference. 3hat have in mind is of course the idea of

$secondary orality! and the claim put forward in the late ')BFs by thinkers like 5cuhan and 7ng

that we were entering a new epoch of mass-communications, a global village marked by this new

kind of massively extended, technologically enhanced oral culture. That thesis looks highly

prescient from our own perspective, forty years on. 5oreover, it seems to sit awkwardly with

#errida!s idea that claims for the priority of speech of speech over writing should be seen as

expressions of the logocentric (or homocentric" bias that is well-nigh ubi&uitous in 3estern

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intellectual tradition but is everywhere subverted or undermined by its tacit reliance on that which

it denounces. 7n the other hand, it!s clear that #errida is not in any sense devaluing spoken

language, or denouncing oral cultures, or claiming (absurdly" that writing 1 in the narrow sense 1

should take priority over speech. 3hat he!s saying, rather, is that language in general partakes of

all those supposed defects that have always been attributed to writing, but which in fact provide

language with its very capacity to function as a means of communication. nd what he is seeking

to expose, as a corollary to this, is a certain nostalgic mysti&ue of origins 1 of speech as the

natural, proper, uncorrupted form of language 1 whose regular effect is to deny or efface all the

signs of that proto-writing in the absence of which, &uite simply, we should have neither language

nor culture.

This is really #errida!s central topic in all his early texts. There are many examples of it, and one

of the most striking, as have said, is his reading of >lato!sPhaedrus. ThePhaedrushas often

been considered by classical scholars and philosophers to be an ill-formed, rather maladroit piece

of dialogue construction. t used to be thought of as an early work of >lato, composed when he

hadn!t yet learned to write really good, tightly argued and well constructed dialogues then more

recently the fashion has been to say that he wrote it very late in his career when he!d forgotten

how to pull the thing off. The reason for this 1 one reason, at least 1 is that thePhaedruscontains

a rather curious and (for >lato" out-of-character episode from Cgyptian mythology concerning the

origin and invention of writing. Now >lato was famously $against! myths, since he thought that

they belonged, like the poetry of Homer, to an earlier and somewhat infantile state of human

cultural development. n his view humankind should have put such childish things behind them

and embraced the greater wisdom and knowledge afforded by philosophy. Aet thePhaedrusdoes

have this mythic component that cannot be dismissed as /ust a"eu despritor a kind of ironic

subterfuge since it!s a load-bearing part of the dialogue, an episode that has to be given due

weight if the whole structure is not to fall apart or appear downright incoherent, as the scholars

used to think

t!s actually about a lesser god, Thoth, in the Cgyptian pantheon who comes to the great sun-god

Thamus and offers him the gift of writing. Thamus says he!ll go off and think about it, then come

back the next day and announce his verdict. This takes the form of catalogue of virtues and vices,

of the benefits that writing will bring along with its attendant drawbacks and limitations. To be

sure, as Thoth says, writing will extend the scope of historical and cultural memory, it will make

possible the preservation of scientific and other truths, it will promote knowledge in all sorts of

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ways and thus make up for the inherent shortcomings of oral tradition. 7n the other hand,

Thamus remarks, writing will have a deleterious effect on the human capacity for critical,

reflective, thought, for the active exercise of mind, and for the genuine learning (rather than the

rote-like, mechanical memori


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different way when he talks about the $iterability! of speech-acts, that which ensures that they will

carry a certain sense or performative force across a great, indeed an open-ended and wholly

unforeseeable range of contexts. This is yet another respect in which spoken language can be

thought of as a kind of writing: that speech-acts depend for their meaning or performative

efficacy on codes, conventions, and generic features that are most aptly characteri


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between such authentically expressive uses of language and those other, merely $indicative! types

of sign whose sense involves nothing more than their belonging to some purely conventional,

arbitrary system of agreed-upon significations9 To which Husserl answers that the difference lies

in the intentional character of expressive language, that is, in its conveyance of meanings that are

present-to-mind in the very act of utterance and thereby infused with a purport that is entirely

absent from indicative signs. Aet, as #errida shows, this order of priority is thrown into &uestion

as soon as one adopts a structuralist, as opposed to a phenomenological approach, since then it

seems 1 following 0aussure 1 that the indicative (i.e., the structural or systemic" dimension of

language must always be conceived as the precondition for whatever we are able to express in the

way of speaker!s meaning or intent.'?%ut then again, this approach comes up against its limits

when confronted with the power of language 1 especially creative or literary language 1 to

express something other and more than could ever be explained by a purely structuralist analysis.

Thus 0aussure is caught up, no less than Husserl, in /ust the kind of strictly unresolvable aporia

that #errida is so perceptive in bringing to light. nd this in turn has much to do with the

speech2writing opposition which very often goes along with the issue of priority between

language in its twofold (creative-expressive and structural-systemic" aspects.

ikewise central to #errida!s deconstructive reading of Husserl is the problem of time-

consciousness and how we are to conceptuali


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merely indicative" signs that provide a linguistic grounding for Husserl!s phenomenological

approach.

7f course the paradox about time is one that goes a long way back. ristotle was the first to spell

it out clearly, and there!s a famous argument by the 7xford philosopher 5cTaggart which

purports to demonstrate the unreality of time.'BThis has to do with the two different ideas of time,

what he calls the $-series! and the $%-0eries!, the past-present-future (phenomenological"

conception and the ob/ective (earlier-than, simultaneous-with, and later-than" conception.

5cTaggart showed, to his own satisfaction at least, that these conceptions cannot be reconciled,

that they generate certain strictly unthinkable paradoxes, and hence 1 remarkably enough 1 that

time can!t exist. #errida doesn!t go &uite as far as that but he does bring out the impossibility of

defining or establishing the present moment, the moment of self-present speech, and the way this

connects with the speech2writing opposition. 3hat he shows, in brief, is that there cannot be a

clear-cut distinction between expressive language (by which Husserl means primarily spoken

language" and that other, indicative realm of signs 1 often associated with writing 1 that are

merely conventional, arbitrary not meaningless but expressionless like traffic lights, or $Ieep

7ut! signs, or anything else that serves to convey a message without the appeal to speaker!s

intent. 0o you don!t ask a traffic light or a $Ieep 7ut! sign what it means to express or intends

you to do you /ust register its standard, conventionally encoded prescriptive or proscriptive force

and then act (or refuse to act" accordingly.

Husserl maintained that there was 1 had to be 1 some means of drawing a clear, categorical, and

principled distinction between expressive and indicative signs. Cxpressive signs were the basis of

all authentic communication, of any utterance that truly conveyed what the speaker had in mind

and what the listener (or recipient" had to grasp if he or she was to count as having properly

understood its meaning. ndicative signs were secondary, derivative, parasitical on expressive

signs since they ac&uired their routine sense only through having first conveyed some authentic

(intentional, expressive" purport and then become mere conventional ciphers. Aet this cannot be

the case, #errida argues, if one takes 0aussure!s point about the priority of langueoverparole,

that is to say, the absolute impossibility that any utterance should mean, convey, or communicate

anything whatsoever unless there is already a system in place 1 a network of systemic

relationships and differences $without positive terms! 1 which constitutes the necessary

precondition of all meaningful utterance, spoken or written. 3hat #errida does, essentially, is

/uxtapose the insights of structuralism and phenomenology, the two great movements of thought

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that really formed the matrix of #errida!s work, especially his early work. >henomenology

because it had gone so far 1 in the writings of Husserl and 5erleau->onty after him 1 toward

describing that creative or expressive $surplus! in language (and also, for 5erleau->onty, in the

visual arts" that would always elude the most detailed and meticulous efforts of structuralist

analysis.'*0tructuralism because, on its own philosophic and methodological terms, it revealed

how this claim for the intrinsic priority of expressiveparoleover pre-constituted languewould

always run up against the kind of counter-argument that have outlined above. Thus most of the

essays collected in his early volume #riting and $ifferencecan be seen as coming at this issue

between structuralism and phenomenology from various angles. They don!t so much claim to

resolve that issue as treat it 1 like Iant!s ntinomies of >ure =eason 1 as a spur to further, more

rigorous and philosophically fruitful reflection.'D

0tructuralism basically takes one side of the chicken2egg dilemma mentioned at the start of this

paper, putting its chief emphasis on system, code, convention, the arbitrary nature of the sign, and

all those elements of language that must be in place before we can even begin to communicate.

>henomenology in Husserl!s conception, and as 5erleau->onty conceived it later on, was about

the strictly irreducible surplus of expressive meaning over anything that could possibly be

articulated in terms of a structuralist account. #errida has a very striking and evocative passage

in one of his early essays, $;orce and 0ignification!, where he says that once you have completed

a structuralist analysis of a literary text 1 here one might think of =oman +akobson!s exhaustive

(and exhausting" analysis of a 0hakespeare sonnet 1 what!s left is something like a city that!s

been laid waste by some man-made or natural catastrophe.')He makes it sound rather like a

neutron bomb (although they hadn!t yet been invented when this essay appeared", you know,

those capitalist dream-weapons that do no damage to buildings and infrastructure but kill all

living creatures for miles around, so you have this kind of deathly, uninhabited


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hope have made it clear, in keeping with the topic of this conference, that the debate about

speech and writing, about oral and literate cultures, and also about the distinction between

$primary! and $secondary! orality, is absolutely central to #errida!s work. don!t know whether

he!d read 5cuhan!s work when he wrote those early texts 1 Speech and Phenomena, Of

Grammatology, #riting and $ifference, and$issemination1 which have mainly been

discussing here. There is no direct evidence that he had, but then, #errida was a really voracious

reader so it!s never safe to assume that he hadn!t come across this or that source. %ut in a sense

that &uestion is irrelevant: what needs saying here is that his work engages deeply and critically

with these issues and moreover that it complicates the whole idea that one can clearly distinguish

not /ust oral from literate cultures, but $primary! from $secondary! forms of orality. 7ne need

only look to the opening chapters of Grammatologyto gain some impression of the range of

#errida!s scholarship, the historical reach of his argument, and also how decisive or uncannily

prescient that argument must now appear, forty years on, when so many of its claims that then

seemed highly speculative or downright wild have been amply borne out by developments in

various (not least scientific" fields.

Thus it took a &uite remarkable, well-nigh prophetic degree of insight to recognilato down 1 been associated metaphorically with the access to

truth through authentic, inward, self-present knowledge while writing has so often ac&uired /ust

the opposite range of metaphoric attributes. 3hat sets his early work decidedly apart from some

of the then more modish strains of futurological thinking is, again, its depth of historical

perspective and its extreme critical acuity. t seems to me, as #errida says of the encounter

between phenomenology and structuralism, that no treatment of the oralcy2literacy debate can

afford to neglect or to sidestep that decisive contribution.

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'References

0ee especially +ac&ues #errida,%Speech and Phenomena and Other &ssays on 'usserls Theory of

Signs, trans. #avid %. llison (Cvanston, : Northwestern Jniversity >ress, ')*8" Of Grammatology,

trans. 4ayatri.6. 0pivak (%altimore, 5#: +ohns Hopkins Jniversity >ress, ')*?" #riting and$ifference, trans. lan %ass (ondon: =outledge K Iegan >aul, ')*D"$issemination, trans. %arbara

+ohnson (ondon: thlone >ress, ')D'".

0ee +ac&ues #errida, $0ignature Cvent 6ontext!, Glyph, Lol. ' (%altimore: +ohns Hopkins Jniversity>ress, ')*@", pp. '*-)*, $imited nc abc!, Glyph, Lol. (')**", pp. *@-'*B and $fterword: toward

an ethic of conversation!, in 4erald 4raff (ed.",(imited )nc(Cvanston, : Northwestern Jniversity

>ress, ')D)", pp. '''-@?.

8 0ee 5arshall 5. 5cuhan, The Guten*erg Gala+y, the maing of typographic man(Toronto:Jniversity of Toronto >ress, ')B" and 3alter +. 7ng, Orality and (iteracy, the technologi.ing of the/ord (New Aork: 5ethuen, ')DD".?

0ee #errida, $>lato!s >harmacy!, in$issemination(op. cit.", pp. B'-'*'.

@0ee #errida, Of Grammatology(op. cit" ;erdinand de 0aussure, 0ourse in General (inguistics, trans.

3ade %askin (ondon: ;ontana, ')*?".

B;or further discussion, see 6hristopher Norris, $#errida on =ousseau: deconstruction as philosophy of

logic!, in Norris and #avid =oden (eds.",1acques $errida, ? vols. (ondon: 0age, FF?", Lol. , pp.*F-'?.

*#errida, Of Grammatology(op. cit." 6laude Evi-0trauss, Tristes Tropques, trans. +ohn and #oreen

3eightman (ondon: >an %ooks, ')@@".D

#errida, $0tructure, 0ign and >lay in the #iscourse of the Human 0ciences!, in #riting and $ifference

(op. cit.", pp. *D-)8.)

Cdward 3. 0aid, Orientalism (New Aork: Lintage %ooks, ')*)".'F

0ee for instance #errida, $;orce of aw: the Mmystical foundation of authority!, trans. 5ary

Ouaintance, 0ardoso (a/ 2evie/, Lol. '' ('))F", pp. )))-'F?@3porias, dying 4 a/aiting 5one

another at6 the %limits of truth!, trans. Thomas #utoit (0tanford, 6: 0tanford Jniversity >ress, '))8"

Spectres of 7ar+, trans. >eggy Iamuf (ondon: =outledge, '))?" The Gift of $eath, trans. #avid3ills (6hicago: Jniversity of 6hicago >ress, '))@"&thics,)nstitutions8 and the 2ight to Philosophy,

trans. and ed. >eter >. Trifonas (anham, 5#: =owman K ittlefield, FF".''

0ee #errida, Speech and Phenomena(op. cit." also $M4enesis and 0tructure and >henomenology!, in

#riting and $ifference(op. cit.", pp. '@?-BD.'

#errida,&dmund 'usserls %Origin of Geometry, an introduction, trans. +ohn >. eavey (>ittsburgh:

#u&uesne Jniversity >ress, ')*D".'8


21/21

0ee especially Cdmund Husserl, 0artesian 7editations, trans. #orion 6airns (#ordrecht: Iluwer,

'))@".'?

#errida, Speech and Phenomena(op. cit.".'@

0ee Husserl, The Phenomenology of )nternal Time-0onsciousness, trans. +ames 0. 6hurchill

(%loomington, N#: ndiana Jniversity >ress, ')B?".'B

0ee =obin e>oidevin and 5urray 5c%eath (eds.", The Philosophy of Time(7xford: 7xford

Jniversity >ress, '))8".'*

0ee especially 5aurice 5erleau->onty, The Visi*le and the )nvisi*le, trans . ingis (Cvanston:

Northwestern Jniversity >ress, ')*@".

'Dmmanuel Iant, 0ritique of Pure 2eason, trans. Norman Iemp 0mith (ondon: 5acmillan, ')B?".')

#errida, $;orce and 0ignification!, in #riting and $ifference(op. cit.", pp. 8-8F.F

#errida, $3hite 5ythology: metaphor in the text of philosophy!, in7argins of Philosophy, trans. lan

%ass (6hicago: Jniversity of 6hicago >ress, ')D", pp. F*-*'.

Documents

Derrida on Speech, Writing and Presence