Of Grammatology

1 Of Grammatology ; , of Granunatology BY Jacques Derrida Corrected Edition Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak The Johns Hopkins [/niversity Press Baltimore and London Copyright 1974, 1976, 1997 by The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper First American edition, 1976 Originally published in France under the title De la Grammatologie Copyright 1967 by Les Editions de Minuit Johns Hopkins Paperbacks edition, 1976 Corrected edition, 1997 9 876 5 4 3 The Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Derrida, Jacques.]

2 Of Grammatology . Translation of De la grammatologie. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Languages-Philosophy. I. Title P1OS DS313-1976-410 76-17226 ISBN 0-8018-1841--9 (hardcover) ISBN 0-8018-1879-6 (paperback) ISBN 0-8018-S83<>-S (corrected edition) A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Acknowledgmen ts Translator's Preface Preface Part I Writing before the Letter Exergue Contents 1. The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing The Program The Signifier and Truth The vV ritten Being/The Being Written 2. Linguistics and Grammatology The Outside and the Inside The Outside the Inside The Hinge [La Brisure] 3-Of Grammatology as a Positive Science Algebra: Arcanum and Transparence Science and the Name of Man The Rebus and the Complicity of Origins Part II Vll ix lxxxix 1 3 6 6 Nature, Culture, Writing 95 Introduction to the HAge of Rousseau" 97 1.

3 The Violence of the Letter: From Levi-Strauss to Rousseau 101 The Battle of Proper Names 107 Writing and Man's Exploitation by Man 118 2. " .. That Dangerous Supplement .. " 141 From/Of Blindness to the Supplement 144 The Chain of Supplements 152 The Exorbitant. Question of Method 157 3. Genesis and Structure of the Essay on the Origin of Languages 165 I. The Place of the" Essay" 165 Writing, Political Evil, and Linguistic Evil 167 The Present Debate : The Economy of Pity 171 The Initial Debate and the Composition of the Essay 192 v VI Contents II. Imitation 195 The Interval and the Supplement 195 The Engraving and the Ambiguities of Formalism 200 The Turn of Writing 216 III.

4 Articulation 229 "That Movement of the Wand .. " 229 The Inscription of the Origin 242 The Neume 247 That "Simple Movement of the Finger." Writing and the Prohibition of Incest 255 4. From/Of the Supplement to the Source: The Theory of Writing 269 The Originary Metaphor 270 The History and System of Scripts 280 The Alphabet and Absolute Representation 295 The Theorem and the Theater 302 The Supplement of (at) the Origin 313 Notes Index 317 355 Acknowledgments I thank Angelo Bertocci for having given me the idea for this transla tion. I thank Paul de 1an for his patient and penetrating criticism of the Translator's Preface and the text, at a time when his own schedule was so thoroughly besieged.

5 I thank J. Hillis Miller for his advice, his active en couragement, and his acute comments on the Translator's Preface. lowe him particular thanks for having introduced me to Derrida himself after I had been working on this book for a year. I am grateful to John Brenkmen, Leone Stein, and Paul M. \Vright for their support during the early stages of thework. In the preparation of the translation, I have been particularly helped by four painstaking and indefatigable bilingual readers: Jessie L. Hornsby, Dori Katz, Richard Laden, Talbot Spivak. pierre de Saint-Victor, the late Alexander Aspel, Jacques Bourgeacq and Donald Jackson untied occasional knots.

6 To all of them, a considerable debt of gratitude is due. (The whole book is a gift for Talbot Spivak. ) I thank also the Carver Foundation at the University of Iowa for making it possible for me to go to France in the summer of 1973 to discuss this book with Jacques Derrida. To Robert Scholes I am grateful for having made it possible for me to teach a seminar on Derrida at Brown University in the fall of 1974-75. At that seminar, especially through active exchange with Bella Brodzky and Tom Claire, I staked out the ground for my Preface. I am grateful to Peter Bacon for typing the first half of the manuscript and the Preface from sometimes indecipherable copy.

7 Pauline Crimson not only typed the rest, but always delivered material at very short notice with out complaint, and conscientiously copy-edited my pages. I believe she came to feel a personal responsibility for the making of this book, and for that I am most grateful. I thank Timothy Shipe for his able assistance. Without Dominick Franco, my research assistant, the manuscript would not have gone to press. Michael Ryan criticized each version of the Trans lator's Preface with a sharp and inspired eye and helped untiringly with library materials. I cannot thank him enough for his incredibly meticulous and informed reading of the final proofs.

8 And Catty, indifferent yet devoted companion through a season of solitary labor. I am grateful to Grammatology for having brought me the friendship of 1arguerite and Jacques Derrida. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Vll Translator's Preface If you have been reading Derrida, you will know that a plausible gesture would be to begin with a consideration of "the question of the preface." But I write in the hope that for at least some of the readers of this volume Derrida is new; and therefore take it for granted that, for the moment, an introduction can be made. Jacques Derrida is maitre-assistant in philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris.

9 He was born forty-five years ago of Sephardic Jewish parents in Algiers.! At nineteen, he came to France as a student. He was at Harvard on a scholarship in 1956-57. In the sixties he was among the young intellectuals writing for the avant-garde journal Tel He is now associated with GREPH (Groupe de Recherche de l'Enseignement Philosophique) -a student movement that engages itself with the prob lems of the institutional teaching of philosophy. He was for a time a visit ing professor on a regular basis at the Johns Hopkins University, and now occupies a similar position at Yale. He has an affection for some of the intellectual centers of the Eastern seaboard-Cambridge, New York, Balti more-in his vocabulary, "America.

10 " And it seems that at first these places and now more and more of the intellectual centers all over the United States are returning his affection. Derrida's first book was a translation of Edmund Husserl's "Origin of Geometry," with a long critical introduction. This was followed by La voix et Ie phenomene, a critique of Husserl's theory of meaning. In between appeared a collection of essays entitled L' ecriture et la difference. De la grammatologie came next, followed by two more collections-La dissemina tion and Marges de la philosophie. There was a little noticed introduction to the Essai sur l' o rigine des connaissances humaines by Condillac, en titled "L'archeologie du frivole," and Positions, a collection of interviews.