Jacques Derrida's 1967 book that founded deconstruction through the systematic analysis of the Western privileging of speech over writing and the development of the concept of différance.
of-grammatology
Derrida's 1967 founding work of deconstruction, developing the analysis of the Western metaphysics of presence through the critique of the privileging of speech over writing and introducing the concept of différance.
Published in 1967 by Éditions de Minuit as De la grammatologie. English translation by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
Introduction
Of Grammatology (French: De la grammatologie) is the 1967 book by Jacques Derrida that founded deconstruction and produced one of the most influential single works of late-twentieth-century continental philosophy. The book develops the systematic deconstructive analysis of the Western metaphysics of presence through the critique of the privileging of speech (phonē) over writing (gramme) that Derrida traces from Plato through Saussure. The analysis introduces the concept of différance (a Derridean coinage that combines to differ and to defer) and develops the broader framework within which subsequent Derridean work would operate.
The book is organized in two parts. Part One (Writing Before the Letter) develops the general theoretical framework: the analysis of the metaphysics of presence, the critique of the speech-writing hierarchy, the introduction of différance, the analysis of the trace. Part Two (Nature, Culture, Writing) provides the extended deconstructive reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (especially the Essay on the Origin of Languages and the Confessions) that demonstrates the deconstructive method at work on a particular text. The two parts together give both the theoretical framework and the practical methodology of the deconstructive program.
Composition and publication
Derrida had been working on the materials of the book since the early 1960s. The doctoral and post-doctoral work on Husserl (especially the 1962 Introduction to Husserl's Origin of Geometry) had developed portions of the framework; the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference paper Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences introduced portions of the framework to American audiences.
De la grammatologie was published in 1967 by Éditions de Minuit as part of the trio of books — L'écriture et la différence (Writing and Difference) and La voix et le phénomène (Speech and Phenomena) also appeared in 1967 — that established Derrida's reputation as the major founder of deconstruction. The Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak English translation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) made the book available to English-language readers and was influential in the broader American reception of deconstruction; Spivak's translator's preface (about 90 pages in the original edition) became one of the most-cited single pieces of English-language Derrida scholarship.
Central doctrines
The metaphysics of presence
The diagnostic framework of the book is the analysis of the metaphysics of presence that organizes Western philosophy from Plato to Heidegger. Western philosophy, on Derrida's analysis, has been organized around a series of oppositions in which the first term is treated as the site of full presence and the second as derivative, marginal, or supplementary: speech/writing, presence/absence, soul/body, signified/signifier, nature/culture, philosophy/literature, masculine/feminine. The first term in each opposition is the site at which meaning, being, or value is fully present; the second term is the site at which presence is mediated, deferred, or compromised.
The deconstructive analysis does not directly oppose the metaphysics of presence — such direct opposition would simply reverse the hierarchy and preserve its structure. The deconstructive analysis works through the texts of the tradition to show that the apparent priority of the first term depends on features of the second that the framework had marginalized; that the second term is constitutive of the first rather than derivative from it; that the apparent opposition is not a binary but a entanglement in which neither side can be cleanly separated from the other.
Speech and writing
The central analysis of the book concerns the Western privileging of speech over writing. The framework, traceable from Plato's Phaedrus through Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Languages to Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, has treated speech as the natural, primary, immediate mode of meaning (the speaker is present to the meaning expressed; the audience is present to the speaker) and writing as the derivative, secondary, mediated supplement (writing operates in the absence of the author and the original audience).
The deconstructive analysis shows that the features Western philosophy had assigned exclusively to writing — absence (the structural possibility of being read when the author is absent), the structural possibility of being read in contexts the author did not anticipate, the mediation of meaning through the structural conditions of representation — are equally constitutive of speech. The apparent priority of speech over writing depends on the suppression of features that speech in fact shares with writing.
The reversal does not simply privilege writing over speech; the reversal opens the recognition that what Western philosophy called writing (the mediated, deferred, absent, structural conditions of meaning) is the general condition of any sign whatever, including the spoken signs that philosophy had treated as immediate. The Derridean term arche-writing (arche-écriture) names this general condition.
Différance
The concept of différance (the Derridean coinage combining to differ and to defer) is the central theoretical innovation of the book. Meaning, on the Derridean analysis, is constituted by the network of differences among signs (the Saussurean insight) and by the deferral of full presence (no sign is ever fully present to itself; every sign refers to other signs in a network that cannot be closed).
The term différance is itself deconstructive in its form. The French différance and différence are pronounced identically in spoken French; the difference is visible only in writing (the a rather than the e). The concept whose articulation requires the features that Western philosophy had relegated to writing is itself articulated through the features that speech cannot capture.
The supplement
The reading of Rousseau in Part Two of the book develops the concept of the supplement (supplément). Rousseau's framework treats certain things as supplementary additions to natural or original conditions — writing supplements speech, masturbation supplements natural sexuality, representation supplements direct experience, civilization supplements natural human life. In each case, the supplement is treated as derivative from and inferior to what it supplements.
The deconstructive analysis shows that the logic of the supplement is more complicated than Rousseau's framework had allowed. The supplement is added to what it supplements precisely because what it supplements is incomplete; the supplementation is constitutive of the original rather than derivative from it. The logic of the supplement — the way that what is treated as derivative is in fact constitutive of what is treated as original — operates throughout the Western tradition as the structural feature that the metaphysics of presence had marginalized.
Reception
The immediate reception in France was substantial. The 1967 trio of Derrida publications established him as one of the major French intellectual figures of his generation. The American reception through the 1970s and 1980s, especially through Spivak's translation and through the Yale School of literary criticism (Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, Harold Bloom), made Of Grammatology one of the most-cited single works in the late-twentieth-century American humanities.
The contemporary engagement continues across multiple disciplines. The influence on literary theory, on the philosophy of language, on the contemporary engagement with media theory (especially through the recognition that digital writing has produced conditions that vindicate portions of the Derridean analysis), on postcolonial theory through Spivak's own work, on feminist theory through Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, on legal theory through the critical legal studies movement, on religious studies through John Caputo and others has been substantial.
Critical reception has been substantial. The analytic engagement (especially through the Searle-Derrida exchange of 1977 over Derrida's reading of J. L. Austin) has been contested; the Habermasian critique (in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 1985) argued that Derrida's framework undermines the rational foundations of its own critique; the Cambridge honorary doctorate controversy of 1992 became a focal point for the broader analytic-continental divide.
Place in the wiki
Of Grammatology is the founding work of deconstruction and the canonical statement of the Derridean analysis of the Western metaphysics of presence. It is the principal source for the concepts of différance, arche-writing, the supplement, and the broader framework within which subsequent deconstructive work has been conducted.
Further reading
- Derrida — the author
- Husserl — the phenomenological predecessor Derrida engaged extensively in the early work
- Heidegger — the major continental predecessor whose Destruktion of the metaphysics of presence Derrida inherited
- Foucault — the contemporary whose work Derrida engaged in Cogito and the History of Madness
- Levinas — the close interlocutor whose work Derrida engaged extensively
Derrida's 1967 founding work of deconstruction. The canonical statement of the analysis of the Western metaphysics of presence and the introduction of the concept of différance.