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Article Excerpt
DM Recently, I have been re-reading Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology. It is astonishing to think that Derrida published this in 1967, along with two other major books of that year, that, at so early a stage, he could anticipate what would prove to be his life-work, that he could analyze metaphysics in a way it had not been analyzed before. It is difficult to cut into the book and extract a statement from it, but I will try to do just that, citing from the section where Derrida reads texts on linguistics that were written by Ferdinand de Saussure. In these pages, Derrida attempts to detach his notion of the "trace" from the classical concept of the "sign" and from Saussure's privileging of the "natural bond" between sound and idea. To think the trace, Derrida says, to free such thinking of the metaphysical desire for a pure signified, "one must begin from the possibility of neutralizing the phonic substance."
Taking this proposed beginning as our point of departure here, I wonder if you might tell Mosaic readers at which stage you were in your own work when Of Grammatology reached you? In particular, how did you receive Derrida's major contention that metaphysics represents a powerful desire for a "living speech" that is unbreached by difference? It seems to me that while many readers of Derrida regularly acknowledge his challenge to the speech/writing hierarchy, not as many contend with the role of "sound" in his work, with the "acoustical plenitude" that he analyzes in the tradition of metaphysics. Do you agree? Has Derrida's deconstruction of the accord between sound, the voice, and sense changed your own work in a fundamental way?
RG On one occasion at least, and with some amusement, Derrida pointed out to me that the book, Of Grammatology, that made him famous, was, unlike the Introduction to Husserl's Origin of Geometry, and in particular, Speech and Phenomena, a work patched together of two unrelated pieces: on the one hand, a reworked review article on several important books on writing that had just been published, and which appeared in Critique in 1965 and 1966 under the title "De la Grammatologie"; and on the other hand, his lectures during this same academic year at the Ecole Normale Superieure on Rousseau, that is, on a subject that was not one of his own choice, but which was determined by the fact that Rousseau, that very year, was on the program of the "aggregation," and which it was thus his duty to teach in order to prepare the normaliens for this competitive examination for the recruitment of high school teachers and university professors. If Of Grammatology became something like an instant hit (especially after Gayatri Spivak's translation), it was in particular because of the section you refer to, which takes issue with the tenets of metaphysics by way of a radical analysis of the pilot science at the time--namely, structural linguistics and semiology--from which the human sciences (Levi-Straussian anthropology, and literary criticism, for example) took their methodologies and scientific orientation. Of Grammatology takes issue, that is, with what in linguistics and in the theory of signs is both radically promising and deeply traditional. If I mentioned Derrida's remark about the book, it was in order to point out that, from the beginning, his thought, his analysis of metaphysics, was not a function of some privileged subject matter or authors. Linguistics and semiology were at that time en vogue, and one could not not take issue with them; the author, Rousseau, was dictated as an examination subject by the committee of the aggregation. If Of Grammatology anticipates, as you point out, Derrida's life-work, it is, I would say, because the critique of metaphysics that is pro-grammatically sketched out in the first section of this work transcends from the beginning the particular domains of linguistics and semiology. It is universal as far as its thrust is concerned; hence also the incredibly prolific and versatile nature of his thought.
On another occasion, Derrida confided to me that during his own years at the "khagne" and the "hyperkagne" (the classes at the ENS preparing for the aggregation), he devoted a whole year to the study of Husserl's Logical Investigations. Derrida's commentary on Husserl's Origin of Geometry, and especially Speech and Phenomena, were to be the results of those efforts of coming critically to grips with Husserlian phenomenology. It is through this reading of the Logical Investigations, in which Derrida develops the insights of Husserlian thought to their ultimate consequences, that is, also well beyond what Husserl himself intended, that Derrida's own philosophical thought emerges. By taking Husserl's elaborations on indication, retention, re-presentation, and so forth, to their logical conclusion, Derrida was led to the insight that the major themes, issues, and questions of metaphysics are desiderata, objects of a desire to achieve presence, purity, and plenitude, and as such are constituted by an effort to free them radically from the negative implications and consequences of the conditions on which these themes and issues depended. It is here that one can grasp the universal sweep of Derrida's thought. As the numerous references to Husserl, and Husserlian issues, demonstrate in the first section of Of Grammatology, the whole debate with linguistics, semiology, science, and so forth, that takes place in this part of the book, is a further development of the concerns that grew out of Derrida's readings of Husserl, in particular, regarding the Husserlian distinction between indication and expression, which led him to the development of his conception of the trace, and which applies to anything that is, and is present.
You began by pointing out how difficult it is to cut into this book. Yet, mindful of Derrida's statement somewhere in the book that one must begin somewhere, you began by quoting the sentence that "one must begin from the possibility of neutralizing the phonic substance." In the context of the section we are talking about, to neutralize, of course, does not mean to nullify, but to put in brackets, that is, to proceed to a phenomenological reduction of the sonic substance, in other words, of that which, throughout metaphysics, has served to close off any possibility of radically conceiving the nature of the sign, the signifier, and, more specifically, of writing. Only by bracketing (in the same way as Husserl put the naturalistic attitude into brackets in order to make room for phenom-enological investigations), that is, by temporarily putting out of work the metaphysical belief about the naturalness and absolute presence to itself of the voice and its phonic substance, is it possible to fully thematize the relation to the other presupposed by any being and any presence, that is, the movement of the trace, a movement that results in the illimited play of referral in which all beings, ail presence, are inexorably inscribed.
I take the opportunity to relate another of Derrida's comments he made to me at the end of the sixties or early seventies when I attended his seminars at the Ecole Normale. He remarked that, if in the deconstruction of the classical opposition of living speech and writing, he had privileged writing over speech, keeping the term writing to name something that, of course, had little resemblances to what writing commonly means, this was primarily for strategic reasons. In short, if he privileged writing over speech, it was chiefly because of the prevailing attempts within the metaphysical tradition to reduce, to contain, and to repress, in the name of living speech, writing, and the sign. And he added that, in principle, he could have done the inverse operation, namely, that of privileging the voice, and developing under the title of the "voice" a conception as radical as that of arche-writing. By the way: I wonder whether Derrida's explicit concern with life, especially in his later works, is not precisely an attempt in this direction. After all, the desire of metaphysics for a presence--whether in the shape of living speech, or something else--unbreached by difference, is not simply a bad thing. Is not presence preferable to its contrary, absence, and is not even direct speech "better" than writing? There would be no life without this desire. Life is this very desire for, this very dream of, presence, of absolute presence to oneself. But, a life that would be radically present to itself, unbreached by difference (by temporality and spacing), would also be a life without life, a life characterized by indifference, and, in fact, indistinguishable from death. What metaphysics desires so badly is a life that is ultimately undesirable. The problem with metaphysics, however, is not that it desires, but rather that it desires badly, if I may dare say. Even though this desire for absolute presence is an inevitable dream that cannot but arise from life's inextricable mortality, to desire presence as something that would be free of difference, hence, neatly, absolutely, distinct from its opposite, without any trace within it to its outside and other: this is the metaphysical dream. What needs to be acknowledged, and this amounts to a challenge of metaphysics, is that what it dreams of--the plenitude of presence--is from the start inhabited by what it seeks to reduce: the non-origin, the trace, and the reference to other. But that does not make the dream of presence therefore simply obsolete.
But let me return to Derrida's observation about the possibility of doing to speech what he did to the voice. I mentioned this not in order to argue that there is a method to deconstraction that, indiscriminately, could be applied from outside to just any subject matter. On the contrary, it was to show that deconstruction is at work universally within, inside, all the forms and contents of metaphysical thought; that it happens everywhere and at all times, and that it is universal in this sense. Nothing is immune from it. Everything, as he later said, stands in a relation of autoimmunity to itself.
But let me also try to respond to your question about when, and at what stage...
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