Jacques Derrida (1967)

Of Grammatology

Source: Of Grammatology, publ. John Hopkins University Press., 1974. Chapter Two, with
one section deleted.

2 Linguistics and Grammatology

Writing is nothing but the representation of speech; it is bizarre that one gives more care to
the determining of the image than to the object. - J.-J. Rousseau, Fragment inédit d'un essai
sur les langues.

The concept of writing should define the field of a science. But can it be determined by
scholars outside of all the historico-metaphysical predeterminations that we have just situated
so clinically? What can a science of writing begin to signify, if it is granted:

1. that the very idea of science was born in a certain epoch of writing;
2. that it was thought and formulated, as task, idea, project, in a language implying a
certain kind of structurally and axiologically determined relationship between speech
and writing;
3. that, to that extent, it was first related to the concept and the adventure of phonetic
writing, valorised as the telos of all writing, even though what was always the
exemplary model of scientificity — mathematics — constantly moved away from that
goal;
4. that the strictest notion of a general science of writing was born, for nonfortuitous
reasons, during a certain period of the world's history (beginning around the
eighteenth century) and within a certain determined s stem of relationships between
“living” speech and inscription;
5. that writing is not only an auxiliary means in the service of science and possibly its
object — but first, as Husserl in particular pointed out in The Origin of Geometry, the
condition of the possibility of ideal objects and therefore of scientific objectivity.
Before being its object, writing is the condition of the epistémè.
6. that historicity itself is tied to the possibility of writing; to the possibility of writing in
general, beyond those particular forms of writing in the name of which we have long
spoken of peoples without writing and without history. Before being the object of a
history — of an historical science — writing opens the field of history — of historical
becoming. And the former (Historie in German) presupposes the latter (Geschichte).

The science of writing should therefore look for its object at the roots of scientificity,. The
history of writing should turn back toward the origin of historicity. , A science of the
possibility of science? A science of science which would no longer have the form of logic but
that of grammatics? A history of the possibility of history which would no longer be an
archaeology, a philosophy of history or a history of philosophy?

The positive and the classical sciences of writing are obliged to repress this sort of question.
Up to a certain point, such repression is even necessary to the progress of positive
investigation. Beside the fact that it would still be held within a philosophising logic, the
ontophenomenological question of essence, that is to say of the origin of writing, could, by
itself, only paralyse or sterilise the typological or historical research of facts.

My intention, therefore, is not to weigh that prejudicial question, that dry, necessary, and
somewhat facile question of right, against the power and efficacy of the positive researches
which we may witness today. The genesis and system of scripts bad never led to such
profound, extended, and assured explorations. It is not really a matter of weighing the
question against the importance of the discovery; since the questions are imponderable, they
cannot be weighed. If the issue is not quite that, it is perhaps because its repression has real
consequences in the very content of the researches that, in the present case and in a privileged
way, are always arranged around problems of definition and beginning.

The grammatologist least of all can avoid questioning himself about the essence of his object
in the form of a question of origin: “What is writing?” means “where and when does writing
begin?” The responses generally come very quickly. They circulate within concepts that are
seldom criticised and move within evidence which always seems self-evident. It is around
these responses that a typology of and a perspective on the growth of writing are always
organised. All works dealing with the history of writing are composed along the same lines: a
philosophical and teleological classification exhausts the critical problems in a few pages; one
passes next to an exposition of facts. We have a contrast between the theoretical fragility of
the reconstructions and the historical, archaeological, ethnological, philosophical wealth of
information.

The question of the origin of writing and the question of the origin of language are difficult to
separate. Grammatologists, who are generally by training historians, epigraphists, and
archaeologists, seldom relate their researches to the modem science of language. It is all the
more surprising that, among the “sciences of man,” linguistics is the one science whose
scientificity is given as an example with a zealous and insistent unanimity.

Has grammatology, then, the right to expect from linguistics an essential assistance that it has
almost never looked for? On the contrary, does one not find efficaciously at work, in the very
movement by which linguistics is instituted as a science, a metaphysical presupposition about
the relationship between speech and writing? Would that presupposition not binder the
constitution of a general science of writing? Is not the lifting of that presupposition an
overthrowing of the landscape upon which the science of language is peacefully installed? For
better and for worse? For blindness as well as for productivity? This is the second type of
question that I now wish to outlines To develop this question, I should like to approach, as a
privileged example, the project and texts of Ferdinand de Saussure. That the particularity of
the example does not interfere with the generality of my argument is a point which I shall
occasionally — try not merely to take for granted.

Linguistics thus wishes to be the science of language. Let us set aside all the implicit
decisions that have established such a project and all the questions about its own origin that
the fecundity of this science allows to remain dormant. Let us first simply consider that the
scientificity of that science is often acknowledged because of its phonological foundations.
Phonology, it is often said today, communicates its scientificity to linguistics, which in turn
serves as the epistemological model for all the sciences of man. Since the deliberate and
systematic phonological orientation of linguistics (Troubetzkoy, Jakobson, Martinet) carries
out an intention which was originally Saussure's, I shall, at least provisionally, confine my-
self to the latter. Will my argument be equally applicable a fortiori to the most accentuated
forms of phonologism? The problem at least be stated.

The science of linguistics determines language — its field of objectivity — in the last instance
and in the irreducible simplicity of its essence, as the unity of the phonè, the glossa, and the
logos. This determination is by rights anterior to all the eventual differentiations that could
arise within the systems of terminology of the different schools (language/speech
[langue/parole]; code/message; scheme/usage; linguistic/logic;
phonology/phonematics/phonetics/glossematics). And even if one wished to keep sonority on
the side of the sensible and contingent signifier which would be strictly speaking impossible,
since formal identities isolated within a sensible mass are already idealities that are not purely
sensible), it would have to be admitted that the immediate and privileged unity which founds
significance and the acts of language is the articulated unity of sound and sense within the
phonic. With regard to this unity, writing would always be derivative, accidental, particular,
exterior, doubling the signifier: phonetic. “Sign of a sign,” said Aristotle, Rousseau, and
Hegel.

Yet, the intention that institutes general linguistics ,is a science remains in this respect within
a contradiction. Its declared purpose indeed confirms, saying what goes without saying, the
subordination of grammatology, the historico-metaphysical reduction of writing to the rank of
an instrument enslaved to a full and originarily spoken language. But another gesture (not
another statement of purpose, for here what does not go without saying is done without being
said, written without being uttered) liberates the future of a general grammatology of which
linguistics-phonology would be only a dependent and circumscribed area. Let us follow this
tension between gesture and statement in Saussure.

The Outside
and the Inside

On the one hand, true to the Western tradition that controls not only in theory, but in practice
(in the principle of its practice) the relationships between speech and writing, Saussure does
not recognise in the latter more than a narrow and derivative function. Narrow because it is
nothing but one modality among others, a modality of the events which can befall a language
whose essence, as the facts seem to show, can remain forever uncontaminated by writing.
“Language does have an oral tradition that is independent of writing” (Cours de linguistique
générale). Derivative because representative signifier of the first signifier, representation of
the self-present voice, of the immediate, natural, and direct signification of the meaning (of
the signified, of the concept, of the ideal object or what have you). Saussure takes up the
traditional definition of writing which, already in Plato and Aristotle, was restricted to the
model of phonetic script and the language of words. Let us recall the Aristotelian definition:
“Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of
spoken words.” Saussure: “Language and writing are two distinct systems of signs; the second
exists for the sole purpose of representing the first”. This representative determination, beside
communicating without a doubt essentially with the idea of the sign, does not translate a
choice or an evaluation, does not betray a psychological or metaphysical presupposition
peculiar to Saussure; it describes or rather reflects the structure of a certain type of writing:
phonetic writing, which we use and within whose element the epistémè in general (science
and philosophy), and linguistics in particular, could be founded. One should, moreover, say
mode, rather than structure; it is not a question of a system constructed and functioning
perfectly, but of an ideal explicitly directing a functioning which in fact is never completely
phonetic. In fact, but also for reasons of essence to which I shall frequently return. To be sure
this factum of phonetic writing is massive; it commands our entire culture and our entire
science, and it is certainly not just one fact among others. Nevertheless it does not respond to
any necessity of an absolute and universal essence. Using this as a point of departure,
Saussure defines the project and object of general linguistics: “The linguistic object is not
defined by the combination of the written word and the spoken word: the spoken form alone
constitutes the object”.

The form of the question to which he responded thus entailed the response. It was a matter of
knowing what sort of word is the object of linguistics and what the relationships arc between
the atomic unities that are the written and the spoken word. Now the word (vox) is already a
unity of sense and sound, of concept and voice, or, to speak a more rigorously Saussurian
language, of the signified and the signifier. This last terminology was moreover first proposed
in the domain of spoken language alone, of linguistics in the narrow sense and not in the
domain of semiology (“I propose to retain the word sign [signe] to designate the whole and to
replace concept and sound-image respectively by signified [signifié] and signifier
[signifiant]”). The word is thus already, a constituted unity, an effect of “the somewhat
mysterious fact ... that 'thought-sound' implies divisions”. Even if the word is in its turn
articulated, even if it implies other divisions, as long as one poses the question of the
relationships between speech and writing in the light of the indivisible units of the “thought-
sound,” there will always be the ready response. Writing will be “phonetic,” it will be the
outside, the exterior representation of language and of this “thought-sound.” It must
necessarily operate from already constituted units of signification, in the formation of which it
has played no part.