Of Grammatology

Notes
‘Humankind's common desire is for a stable center, and for the assurance of mastery-through knowing
or possessing.’ – Jacques Derrida (Of Grammatology)

‘…And a book, with its ponderable shape and its beginning, middle, and end, stands to satisfy that
desire.’

‘The book is not repeatable in its "identity" : each reading of the book produces a simulacrum
of an "original" that is itself the mark of the shifting and unstable
subject that Proust describes, using and being used by a language that is
also shifting and unstable. Any preface commemorates that difference in
identity by inserting itself between two readings-in our case, my reading
( given of course that my language and I are shifting and unstable ) , my
rereading, my rearranging of the text-and your reading. As Hegel ( and
other defenders of the authority of the text) wrote preface on preface to
match re-editions and revised versions, they unwittingly became a party
to this identity in difference :’

(I write the preface and hence communicate my reading then you read and write a preface on preface
and communicate your reading, I reread and write another one and so on)

Derrida’s notion of ‘sous rature’ (under erasure, as translated by Gayatri Chakrabarty) hints at the
inadequacy of language (pdf page 10-13; book page x-xv)

Trace: Such is the strange "being" of the sign : half of it always "not there" and the other half always
"not that." The structure of the sign is determined by the trace or track of that other which is forever
absent. This other is of course never to be found in its full being. As even such empirical events as
answering a child's question or consulting the dictionary proclaim, one sign leads to another and so on
indefinitely. Derrida quotes Lambert and Peirce: " ' [philosophy should] reduce the theory of things to the
theory of signs.' . . 'The idea of manifestation is the idea of a sign' " ( 72, 49 ) , and contrasts them to
.

Husserl and Heidegger. On the way to the trace/track, the word "sign" has to be put under erasure : "the
sign 􀌓 that ill-named lhfHg; the only one, that escapes the instituting question of philosophy : 'What is . . .
7' "

‘Derrida, then, gives the name "trace" to the part played by the radically other within the structure of
difference that is the sign. ( I stick to "trace" in my translation, because it "looks the same" as Derrida's
word; the reader must remind himself of at least the track, even the spoor, contained within the French
word . ) In spite of itself, Saussurean linguistics recognizes the structure of the sign to be a trace-
structure. And Freud's psychoanalysis, to some extent in spite of itself, recognizes the structure of
experience itself to be a trace-, not a presence-structure. Following an argument analogical to the
argument on the sign, Derrida puts the word "experience" under erasure’

‘It is indeed an ineluctable nostalgia for p-resence heterogeneity a unity by declaring that a sign brings
forth the presence of the signified. Otherwise it would seem clear that the sign is the place where
"the completely other is announced as such-without any simplicity, any identity, any resemblance or
continuity-in that which is not it" ( 69, 47 ) . Word and thing or thought never in fact become one. We are
reminded of, referred to, what the convention of words sets up as thing or thought, by a particular
arrangement of words. The structure of reference works and can go on working not because of the
identity between these two so-called component parts of the sign, but because of their relationship of
difference. The sign marks a place of difference.’

Aside: “Levi-Strauss contrasts the bricoleur to the engineer. ( "The 'bricoleur' has no precise equivalent in
English. He is a man who undertakes odd jobs and is a Jack of all trades or is a kind of professional do-it-
yourself man, but . . he is of a different standing from, for instance, the English 'odd job man' or
handyman." 16) The discourse of anthropology and the other sciences of man must be bricolage : the
discourses of formal logic, and the pure sciences, one presumes, can be those of engineering. The
engineer's "instrument" is "specially adapted to a specific technical need"; the bricoleur makes do with
things that were meant perhaps for other ends. The anthropologist must tinker because, at least as Levi-
Strauss argues in Le cru et Ie cuit, it is in fact impossible for him to master the whole field. Derrida, by an
important contrast, suggests that the field is theoretically, not merely empirically, unknowable. ( ED 419
f., SC 2 59 f.) Not even in an ideal universe of an empirically reduced number of possibilities would
the projected "end" of knowledge ever coincide with its "means." Such a coincidence-"engineering" -is an
impossible dream of plenitude. The reason for bricolage is that there can be nothing else. No engineer
can make the "means" -the sign-and the "end" -meaning-become self-identical.”
‘Like all "useful" words, "bricolage" must also be placed "under erasure." For it can only be defined by its
difference from its opposite-"engineering."’

From XXI onwards: pdf page 19