Of Grammatology

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.

When I first tried to tackle this book I was a first year undergrad philosophy and logic student - I declared Derrida my arche-enemy.
Three years later I am devoted to Derrida.
I eventually managed to push down the frustration (and at times, the blind rage) I felt at reading his stuff and took my time to follow him where he wants to take us.
Derrida is important for thinking, whether or not you agree with what he is saying.
Derrida's greatest lesson is forcing us to look closer, he wants us to pay attention to what is really going on (or at least, to pay attention to other possibilities that may be at work)

The importance of Derrida and his movement is monumental - not for the term "deconstructionism" (heard frequently without a clue to its true meaning) but for how he has influenced (Western) society. Derrida, like Marcuse, Chomsky, Foucault and others, has moved from his original study to a broader agenda and, like many intellectuals, considers his mastery of one subject transferrable to another. He managed to survive the embarrassing Paul de Man fiasco and has since wisely avoided mention of the "Hitler in all of us". He has remarked on the authoritarian anti-democratic nature of deconstructionism, treating the subject ironically.

This is, allegedly, a textbook of post-Modern thought on language but reads like a didactic, out-of-focus Proust. The writing is nebulous, self-referential, unreadable. He speaks in Orwellian terms equating opposite qualities and words. It is so ephemeral as to lack certitude and for this very reason many commentators fear definitive statements on the subject. Deconstructionism is, despite all the twaddle, inherently subjective. He muses on expression, anxiety, emotions, signs and existentialism, finding meaning and interpretation where there is none. His popularity rests entirely on academia and like-minded camp followers in the media. I mean, how many Iowans care about the "ultimate" meaning of allusions? The problem with the ouevre is that when taken seriously, it literally make mountains of molehills.

Such as, well, equating fairy tales to S&M sagas, symphonies to invitations to rape, skyscrapers to phallic power trips, signs of "white" recycled paper as racism and stuttering as aggression. Allusions are, in Derrida-speak, fraught with deep meaning. To accomplish this one must divorce words from their sources and stated intent. The critic has been necessarily elevated above the author since only he can provide a "true" meaning. It is so outrageous that few outside of the Ivory Towers give it credence. That would be a mistake. Language is perhaps the most human of all abilities and its interpretation affects our personal and collective consciousness. His method has been called the "language of cultural Marxism" and is a necessary component of modern leftist ideology. At any time I expect Jacques Derrida to announce, like Alan Sokal, that it has all been a collosal joke on both the true believer and the reader.

While it's certainly true that there will always be a gulf between reality and words, communication between reader and writer is nonetheless very real and potentially profound, thanks in no small part to empathy and the imagination. Deconstructionism, by denying presence and instead proposing unlimited differences between signs, dismisses any connection between readers and writers and turns language into a hermetic system separated from the outside world which is, of course, inhabited by people who read and people who write. This is exactly what makes deconstructionism so empty and hypocritical: It rejects traditional metaphysics while adopting a pseudo-mystical position which regards language as some unstable and solipsistic alien creature independent of everything and everyone.

Of grammatology is a tour-de-force of Derrida's ideas about reading and writing; it encapsulates his view of de-construction, and his reformulation of such complex issues as phenomenology and structuralism. I have to admit that there were times when I felt that I was just turning the pages. I needed to go back several times just to get a sense of what I had just read. Spivak's introduction is a gem as she makes Derrida more accessible. Reading Derrida places a real strain on the reader because he assumes the reader is well informed and has an academic sense of the writers he engages in like Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. For Derrida, structuralists - particularly Levi-Strauss take for granted that speech is more direct than written script. Derrida critiques this sense of logocentrism that privileges the spoken word where the sound and meaning exist side by side. On the other hand, writing for Derrida creates an interstice between the sign and its meaning. Logocentricism and the accompanying phonologism are the seed of Derrida's deconstruction. Derrida sense of grammatology is that it is a soft science, one of writing. In this really complex mélange of engagements by Derrida, he problematizes Saussure's structural linguistics and goes to town on the notion of 'presence' that he feels has dominated the West since the Greeks, down to Heidegger and eventually culminating in the structuralism of Levi-Strauss. The notion of deconstruction is, for the most part attributed to Derrida. Deconstruction feeds into a much larger and more involved intellectual school of thought commonly known as poststructuralism. Postructuralism's genesis appeared with Derrida's exegetical critique on Strauss's the notion of, 'structure.' Taking the Saussure's lead, Levi-Strauss took structuralism into the field of structuralist anthropology - of which Levi-Strauss is said to have pioneered. In Of grammatology, Derrida portrays structuralism as the culmination of a tradition of structuralities, and reduces all to a fixed point of presence. This fixed point is effectively its center - calling for Derrida to move to de-center. To return to the issue of the sign, Derrida sees signs as random, in that they are defined not by essence but by or in comparison to something else. The solidity of the binary opposition between signifier and signified, which binds the sign, cannot be sustained unless we are prepared to grant that there exists some form of transcendental signified which would kill the play of signification. Derrida's analysis compels us to be aware that every signified is also in the position of a signifier. According to Derrida, the meaning of words is really dependent on how they are used. Derrida claims that everything is what it is, based on what it is not, - or difference. In a nutshell, Derrida is positions himself on the notion of the perennial postponement of signification - or "differance" -- or the outcome by which an opposition constantly repeats itself inside each of its component terms. In French, the word is in a liminal space between "to differ" and "to defer," as if saying there is yet one more thing to consider one more difference to account for. Moreover, Derrida seeks to de-construct claims of fixed truths. However, as a caveat, the critique on logocentrism, the practice of deconstruction, is really aimed at language, and to use it within and around other areas without really understanding Derridian de-construction is dangerous.


Miguel Llora