Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Derrida blames Rousseau for logocentricism.
The figure of Rousseau stands in for logocentricism and the entire tradition, although Derrida grounds the discussion in terms of a spacial analysis. So to conclude, Derrida ends his close reading of Rousseau with
Rousseau could not think this writing, that takes place before and within speech. To the extent that he belonged to metaphysics of presence he dreamed of the simple exteriority of death to life, evil to good, representation to presence, signifier to signifed, representer to represented, mask to face, writing to speech. But all such oppositions are irreducibly rooted in that metaphysics. Using them, one can only operate by reversals, that is to say by confirmations. The supplement is none of these terms. It is especially not more a signifier than a signified, a representer than a presence, a writing than a speech. None of the terms of this series can, being comprehended within it, dominate the economy of differeance or supplementary. Rousseau’s dream consisted of making the supplement enter the metaphysics by force.
So while it’s difficult for me to suss out where Derrida ends and Rousseau begins at time (because I’ve never read Rousseau directly) it becomes clearer as you read the book that the figure of Grammatology is the centralized arrangement by which we create the space necessary for differance to effectively operate. Much of this text then, is Derrida’s slow etching of the spatial oppositions that create a beyond of language that is inherent to language and contingent on language. Derrida’s point is that this exteriority that exists beyond signification, this metaphysics of presence is constructed out of the natural philosophy of Rousseau. Rousseau seeks with this naturalization narrative to justify his reformulation of an inner sanctum within language. This creation of a dichotomous values of difference sets the stage for our cultural evaluation of everything else. Now that there exists a polarity Derrida shows us how to separate out the lines of value, with the implication to see these kinds of constructions exist as primarily artificial through Rousseau’s claims of naturalism.
Derrida of course, could have been more direct in saying that Rousseau can show us how our conception of what is right and just came from a division of labor, a management that is classist and elitist by dividing up sounds and words, by creating difference to elevate those in the know of such differences and alienate those who do not fit the elevation. He does, some what at the end, but this is a long and laborious effort to encapsulate the western philosophical tradition. Derrida sees what came before as a building up of logocentricism, in order to understand that philosophy within its terms, history and our discourse that creates and limits culture is seen as a literal transaction of the becoming of the episteme through the play of differance.
What’s interesting about differance is that Derrida understands it as being the key structure to the division of the poles and at the same time, less than nothing. Different from Zizek, Derrida understands this basic structure as being wholly created, not transcendentally contingent on a self mediating subjectivity. This writing then, is a fiction created within itself. There is of course, the possibility under which concepts of artifical and natural become devalued. When this occurs, should we continue to understand, as Derrida seems we should like, the artificial process by which Rousseau creates an inner limit to be false? What then becomes a way to value natural over artificial? That judgement remains beyond logocentricism itself, of which Derrida has not yet given us a line (at least not in this book): “No ontology can think its operation”. And in this sense, to step outside the outside is to reject the division of valuation of logocentricism, to make writing atonal and let us give up the thing-in-itself.
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