Dec 21, 2012 Derrida s Of Grammatology Benot Peeters In Derrida: A Biography, the first in-depth account of the life

of the iconoclas tic French postmodern philosopher, Benot Peeters looks at the dawn of a semiotic analysis that would dominate Western thought for the second half of the 20th cen tury. For Derrida, in 1965, as often, the start of the summer was rather glum. He had stayed in Fresnes by himself, while his wife Marguerite and his son Pierre were in Charente, and he felt that his work was making little progress. I have the imp ression that I can see pearls out of reach, like a fisherman afraid of the water even though he s a connoisseur of pearls, he wrote to Louis Althusser. But this lit tle text on writing that he finished with difficulty at the end of August before sending it to Critique would soon be considered one of his major works. Jacques and Marguerite agreed for once to take a real holiday and spent the whol e of September in Venice, at the Lido. They went with Pierre, just turned 2, and also with Lela Sebbar, an Algerian student who was, so to speak, his official ba bysitter. A few years later, she became a respected writer. This was Derrida s fir st trip to Italy, one of the countries he would love the most, and one of the fe w to which he would often return for nonprofessional reasons. On his return, he found a letter from Michel Deguy saying how much he had enjoy ed the article Writing Before the Letter. A few days later, Jean Piel confirmed th at he wished to publish this extremely dense, rich, and novel study in Critique, e ven though its length meant that it would need to be published in two parts, in the issues of December 1965 and January 1966. As Derrida frequently acknowledged , this article, a sketch of the first part of the book Of Grammatology, was the m atrix that would govern the rest of his work. Following the prevailing rule at Critique, the text presented itself to begin wi th as a review of three works: The Debate on Writing Systems and Hieroglyphics i n the 17th and 18th Centuries by M.-V. David, Gesture and Speech by Andr Leroi-Go urhan, and the conference proceedings Writing and the Psychology of Peoples. But the questions discussed in Writing Before the Letter went much further. Derrida e voked in premonitory terms the end of the book, before introducing the concept of g rammatology, or the science of writing. In particular, the article proposes a minute analysis of the presuppositions beh ind Ferdinand de Saussure s linguistics, a major reference point for all structura list thinking. While Derrida endorses the central idea of difference as the sour ce of linguistic value, he considers Saussure s thought as still too dominated by logocentrism, that metaphysics of phonetic writing which has for too long forced w riting into a subsidiary role. But the ambition announced in these pages is not limited to questions of linguistics or anthropology. Derrida extends the methods of Martin Heidegger, leading to the undermining of an ontology which, in its inn ermost course, has determined the meaning of being as presence and the meaning o f language as the full continuity of speech, and working to make enigmatic what on e thinks one understands by the words proximity, immediacy, presence. One major concept, the one by which Derrida s thought will often be designated, al so appears in the article: that of deconstruction. It is in his Letter to a Japan ese Friend a friend who could not find a satisfactory equivalent in his own languag and the Birth of Deconstruction

e that Derrida gave the clearest explanation for his choice of word: When I chose this word, or when it imposed itself upon me I little thought it wo uld be credited with such a central role in the discourse that interested me at the time. Among other things I wished to translate and adapt to my own ends the Heideggerean words Destruktion or Abbau. Both words signified in this context an operation bearing on the structure or traditional architecture of the fundament al concepts of ontology or of Western metaphysics. But in French the term destruc tion too obviously implied an annihilation or a negative reduction much closer pe rhaps to Nietzschean demolition than to the Heideggerean interpretation or to the type of reading I was proposing. So I ruled that out. I remember having looked t o see if the word dconstruction (which came to me it seemed quite spontaneously) was good French. I found it in Littr. The grammatical, linguistic, or rhetorical senses [portes] were, I found, bound up with a mechanical sense [porte machinique ]. Th is association appeared very fortunate Contrasting works of a very different level and style, attentive to their least details, Derrida proposed a new type of reading, which might be likened to the f ree-floating attention of psychoanalytical listening. (Here is the definition of the word deconstruct (dconstruire) in the Littr French di ctionary: 1. To disassemble the parts of a whole. Deconstruct a machine so as to transport it elsewhere. 2. Grammatical term. To carry out a deconstruction. To d econstruct lines of poetry, suppressing meter so as to make them similar to pros e 3. To deconstruct oneself. To lose one s structure. Modern erudition attests that , in a region of the ancient Orient, a language that had reached its perfection had deconstructed and deformed itself by the sole law of change, a law natural t o the human mind. Villemain, Preface to the Dictionary of the French Academy. ) On a more anecdotal level, we may note that the verb to deconstruct had not been e ntirely forgotten when Derrida started to give it new life. In 1960, it was used in a popular song by Gilbert Bcaud, The Absent One, to words by Louis Armade, a po et and high-ranking official: How heavy it is to bear the absence of a friend The friend who every evening came to this table And who will never return, death is miserable As it stabs you in the heart and deconstructs you. On the publication of its first part in Critique, Writing Before the Letter create d a real stir in intellectual circles. Michel Foucault expressed his enthusiasm for such a liberating text : In the order of contemporary thought, it is the most ra dical text I have ever read. Emmanuel Levinas assured Derrida that he too had bee n captivated by these incandescent, arborescent pages : In spite of all your loyalty to Heidegger, the vigor of your point of departure announces the first new book since his own works. According to Franois Dosse, the author of a monumental History of Structuralism, 1966 marked the high tide of this new paradigm. It was the year of The Order of Things by Foucault an unexpected bestseller of the violent polemic between Roland Ba rthes and Raymond Picard on the Nouvelle Critique, and of the huge volume of the crits in which Jacques Lacan brought together texts hitherto dispersed. While De rrida did not publish a book that year, and was still unknown to the public at l arge, several articles and lectures confirmed that he was a highly significant f igure, one of the great minds of the century, as Franois Chtelet was so bold as to s ay in Le Nouvel Observateur. In 1967, Marguerite and Jacques returned to Fresnes at the start of August to aw ait the birth of their second child. Jean-Louis Emmanuel Derrida was born on Sep t. 4, 1967, a little earlier than expected, which did not stop him from seeming healthy and tranquil. The choice of these three first names was no coincidence: Jean was Genet s first name, Louis that of Althusser s, Emmanuel that of Levinas s. Du ring the days following the birth, Derrida had to take over domestic responsibil ities, something to which he was not used to. With two children, the Fresnes apa

rtment was becoming really cramped. Jacques and Marguerite started to think abou t buying a new house. Even though the state of their finances was soon to improv e, thanks to the seminar that Derrida started giving a small group of American s tudents, they soon realized that they would need to move a bit further away from Paris. 1967 was definitely a year of births, for two new books by Derrida were publishe d in the autumn. Speech and Phenomena was published by Presses Universitaires de France, in Jean Hyppolite s series. This short work presented itself as a mere introduction to the problem of the sign in Husserl s phenomenology. But in actual fact, the book develo ped the questions discussed in Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology, focus ing, in another way, on the privilege granted to presence and voice throughout t he history of the West. As Derrida explains in the introduction: "We have thus a prescription for the most general form of our question: do not p henomenological necessity, the rigor and subtlety of Husserl s analysis, the exige ncies to which is responds and which we must first recognize, nonetheless concea l a metaphysical presupposition? What is at issue, then, in the privileged example of the concept of sign, is to see the phenomenological critique of metaphysics betray itself as a moment withi n the history of metaphysical assurance. Better still, our intention is to begin to confirm that the recourse to phenomenological critique is metaphysics itself , restored to its original purity in its historical achievement." The problem, in Derrida s view, is in short the deepest ambition driving Edmund Hu sserl s investigations: the desire to liberate an original lived experience and reac h the thing itself, in its pure presence. In Speech and Phenomena he endeavors to br ing out the philosophical implications of the interdependency that one must accep t between what is called thinking and a certain interplay of signs, marks or tra ces. In the eyes of several philosophers, Speech and Phenomena is one of Derrida s majo r works. Georges Canguilhem and lisabeth de Fontenay expressed their admiration t o him on their first reading. The great Belgian phenomenologist Jacques Taminiau x has also professed a passion for this work, placing it on the same level as Le vinas s Totality and Infinity. And Jean-Luc Nancy considers it even today as one o f the peaks of Derrida s oeuvre: Speech and Phenomena remains in my view the most magisterial and in many respect s the most exciting of his books, since it contains the heart of his whole opera tion: moving away from self-presence; and diffrance with an a in its difficult rela tion between infinite and finite. For me this is really the heart, the driving f orce, the energy of his thinking. Of Derrida s 1967 works, however, it was Of Grammatology that was to remain the mo st famous. In particular, it was through this work that he thought he would star t to make a name for himself in the United States. On Derrida s own admission, the book is, however, composed of two heterogeneous passages put together somewhat a rtificially. The first part, Writing Before the Letter, was an enlarged version of the article published in Critique: it was here that the fundamental concepts wer e put in place. The second, Nature, Culture, Writing, began with an analysis as pa tient as it was implacable of a chapter in Claude Lvi-Strauss s Tristes Tropiques, with The Writing Lesson showing the stratagems used by the author to link the appe arance of violence among the Nambikwara with that of writing. Subjecting Lvi-Strauss s ethnological discourse to critique just after questioning Saussure s linguistics was a deliberate move on Derrida s part. They were the two pi llars of structuralist discourse, a discourse which Derrida judged to be at the time dominant in the field of Western thought, but which was in his view trapped by an entire layer, sometimes the most fecund, of its stratification, in the met aphysics logocentrism which at the same time one claims rather precipitately to have gone beyond.

Lvi-Strauss made no attempt to conceal his irritation. Shortly after the first pu blication of this chapter in the fourth issue of the Cahiers pour l analyse, he se nt a caustic letter to the review s editors: "Do I need to tell you how grateful I was for the interest shown me in your rece nt publication? And yet I can t shake off an awkward feeling: aren t you playing a p hilosophical farce by scrutinizing my texts with a care that would be more justi fied if they had been written by Spinoza, Descartes or Kant? Frankly, I don t thin k that what I write is worth so much fuss, especially Tristes Tropiques, in whic h I didn t claim to be setting out any truths, merely the daydreams of an ethnogra pher in the field I d be the last to say there is any coherence in them. So I can t avoid the impression that, by dissecting these clouds, M. Derrida is ha ndling the excluded middle with all the delicacy of a bear In short, I m surprised that minds as agile as yours, supposing they have deigned to read the pages of m y books, didn t ask themselves why I make such a casual use of philosophy, instead of rebuking me for so doing." But Lvi-Strauss occupied only one chapter of the book. The crucial section of the second part of Of Grammatology was devoted to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, especially the Essay on the Origin of Languages, a short and at the time almost forgotten work that Derrida boldly linked to certain passages of the Confessions. Contrast ing works of a very different level and style, attentive to their least details, Derrida proposed a new type of reading, which might be likened to the free-floa ting attention of psychoanalytical listening. Following the traces of the word su pplement, often associated with the adjective dangerous, Derrida showed how Roussea u linked it sometimes to writing and sometimes to masturbation, for both of whic h he showed a fascinated mistrust. Reading of the kind Derrida practices must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the schemata of the language that he uses. It is a signifying structure that r eading must produce, even when the work pretends to efface itself behind the sign ified contents that it transmits. At the polar opposite of the academic traditio n, the discourse of philosophy or of the human sciences is approached as a text in the full sense of the word. The publication of Of Grammatology more than confirmed the interest aroused by t he double article in Critique. On Oct. 31, in La Quinzaine littraire, Franois Chtel et reviewed it, devoting an enthusiastic full page to it under the title Death of the book? On Nov. 18, Jean Lacroix, in charge of the philosophical coverage in L e Monde since 1944, devoted an entire article to Derrida, half a page long. The first lines were a real accolade: "Philosophy is in crisis. This crisis is also a renewal. In France, a whole cons tellation of (relatively) young thinkers are transforming it: Foucault, Althusse r, Deleuze, etc. We now need to add to these names that of Jacques Derrida. Know n to a small group of enthusiastic normaliens, he has just revealed his talent t o a wider public by publishing three books in six months, including Of Grammatol ogy. Through the attention he brings to bear on the problem of language, he seem s close to the 'structuralists.' He does them justice and acknowledges that thin king, across the world, has been given a formidable impetus by a sense of disqui et over language, which can only be a disquiet of language and within language. He distances himself from this tendency, however, insofar as like the iconoclast h e is far from deriving inspiration from a scientific model, he is still in thrall to the philosophical demon Derrida s aim is not the destruction, but the 'deconstru ction' of metaphysics. The foundational concepts of philosophy enclose the logos , and reason, within a sort of 'closure.' This 'closure' needs to be smashed, we need to attempt a break-out." The concept of diffrance was also introduced in this reliable, positive analysis, a s were those of gramme and trace. Jean Lacroix underlined the crucial link between D errida s philosophy and those of Nietzsche and Heidegger, while avoiding several o

f the misunderstandings that would later come about. Derrida, he emphasized, does n ot want to privilege writing at the expense of speech. Three days previously, in La Tribune de Genve, Alain Penel had enthusiastically h ailed an author who questions Western thought. This time, the emphasis was on Writ ing and Difference. The praise was unreserved and sometimes uncritical: After him, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud, Saussure, Jakobson, Lvi-Strauss, et c, appear dull. This is because Derrida shows himself to be more radical than th ey are, insofar as his thinking puts all others to the test, aiming successfully to be a reflection on contemporary reflection. By showing thereby that metaphys ics continues to poison Western thought, Jacques Derrida makes his mark as the b oldest contemporary thinker. His works cannot fail to constitute a new, superior field for the reflections of all those critics, philosophers, teachers, students wh o are interested by developments in our culture. The book had been eagerly awaited and brought its author a huge postbag. Philipp e Sollers, who had already read the complete manuscript in the summer, had immed iately called it a quite brilliant text. Julia Kristeva was very touched to have r eceived a signed copy of the book, as a sign of complicity : she thanked Derrida fo r all that she already owed to his work and for all that she would continue to d raw from it. She would soon be sending him a series of questions, which he would answer at length in writing, under the title Semiology and Grammatology. As for B arthes, he was in Baltimore when he thanked Derrida warmly: Of Grammatology was, in this place, like a book by Galileo in the land of the Inquisition, or more si mply a civilized book in Barbary! A judgment which, in retrospect, seems quite pi quant. For it was also from the United States that another warm letter arrived, announc ing an equally fruitful relationship: that in which Paul de Man told Derrida how much he had been thrilled and interested by Of Grammatology. He expected this wor k to help in the clarification and progression of [his] own thinking, something wh ich Derrida s Baltimore paper, and their first conversations, had already suggeste d. As they talked over the breakfast table at the conference the previous year, the two men had realized that they were both interested in their different ways in the Essay on the Origin of Languages. This was the origin of a friendship whi ch became deep and enduring: after this first encounter, Derrida would say, noth ing ever separated them, not even a hint of disagreement. From the book Derrida: A Biography by Benot Peeters. Excerpted by arrangement wit h Polity. Copyright 2012 Benot Peeters. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/12/21/derrida-s-of-grammatology-and-t he-birth-of-deconstruction.html -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Comments: gspotgps "By showing thereby that metaphysics continues to poison Western thought, Jacque s Derrida makes his mark as the boldest contemporary thinker." The attack on metaphysics attributed to Derrida began with Hume and reached its zenith with Nietzsche. Deconstruction is entirely a derivative of Nietzschean pe rspectives. Nietzsche was a linguist. He mercilessly exposed the folly of metaph ysics and the limitations of language. Is metaphysics even necessary as an affir mation of life? Is art the supreme expression of existence? Nietzsche's trencha nt psychological observations have left a whole century of scholars aspiring to

deconstruct the human experience. Derrida made a great contribution. To downplay Nietzsche's influence merely prolongs teleological pretension and an unpreceden ted affirmation of life. Has anyone seen the ubermensch?