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The European Legacy: Toward New

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The End of Writing? Grammatology and

Plasticity
a b
Catherine Malabou
a
Dépt. de Philosophie, Université Paris X Nanterre, 200 Avenue de
la République 92001, Nanterre Cedex E-mail:
b
Dept. of Comparative Literature and Humanities — 331UCB,
University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, Colorado 80309,
Annjeanette E-mail:
Published online: 03 Sep 2010.

To cite this article: Catherine Malabou (2007): The End of Writing? Grammatology and Plasticity,
The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms, 12:4, 431-441

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 The European Legacy, Vol. 12, No. 4, pp. 431–441, 2007

The End of Writing? Grammatology and Plasticity

CATHERINE MALABOU
Translated by Annjeanette Wiese
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ABSTRACT The word ‘‘grammatology’’ literally signifies the ‘‘science of writing.’’ One must acknowledge,
however, that this science has never existed. Derrida’s book Of Grammatology proposes to elaborate and to
implement just such a project. Why has this grammatological project never been accomplished? For Derrida,
‘‘writing’’ can no longer simply designate a technique for the notation of speech. A distinction should be made,
then, between ‘‘narrow’’ and ‘‘enlarged’’ meanings of writing. Indeed, is the extension of the concept of
writing the work of writing itself or must one suppose that the ‘‘modifiability’’ of the concept is not of the order
of writing? This essay will propose that an original modifiability, not reducible to the single operation of writing,
is initiated from the beginning as well. I call this modifiability ‘‘plasticity.’’ ‘‘Plasticity of writing’’ would then
be the paradox inherent in the redefinition of writing itself that may explain the ‘‘failure’’ of any
‘‘grammatology.’’

The word ‘‘grammatology,’’ Jacques Derrida recalls in his work of the same name,
literally signifies the ‘‘science of writing.’’1 One must acknowledge, however, as
Derrida himself affirms, that this science has never existed. In fact, under the name of
the science of writing, one only finds histories of writing, concerning its appearance,
its genesis, its transformations, never its essence nor its status as an object.2 There has
also never yet been a ‘‘Course in General Grammatology’’ and grammatology has
never been designated the ‘‘project of a modern science.’’ (323). Of Grammatology
(De la Grammatologie) proposes to elaborate and to implement just such a project.
Derrida would thus lay the foundations for a veritable science: ‘‘the concept of
writing should define the field of a science, a full-fledged ‘positive science’’’ (27).
The title of the third chapter of the book is explicit in this respect: ‘‘Of
Grammatology as a Positive Science.’’ Derrida asserts that the ‘‘constitution of a
science or a philosophy of writing is a . . . difficult’’ but ‘‘necessary task’’ (93).

Dépt. de Philosophie, Université Paris X Nanterre, 200 Avenue de la République 92001, Nanterre Cedex.
Email: cmalabou@club-internet.fr
Dept. of Comparative Literature and Humanities — 331UCB, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, Colorado
80309, Annjeanette. Wiese@colorado.edu

ISSN 1084-8770 print/ISSN 1470-1316 online/07/040431–12 ß 2007 International Society for the Study of European Ideas
DOI: 10.1080/10848770701396254
 432 CATHERINE MALABOU

The question that I want to pose here is the following: why has this grammatological
project never been accomplished? Why has a scientific ‘‘grammatology’’ never seen the
light of day? Why has the ‘‘science of writing,’’ in the new sense that it has to have, never
been constituted? Why does the title ‘‘Of Grammatology’’ only designate one book by
Derrida and not a treatise of universal reach, susceptible of generating—like linguistics, for
example—a scientific posterity?
There are two types of reasons for this ‘‘failure.’’ First are those Jacques Derrida
advances himself. Returning to the work of 1967 in a talk entitled ‘‘For the Love of
Lacan’’ given in 1992, Derrida declared: ‘‘‘Of Grammatology’ was first the title of an
article . . . and—this is one of the numerous mistakes or misrecognitions made by Lacan
and so many others—it never proposed a grammatology, some positive science or
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discipline bearing that name; on the contrary, both the article and later the book of the
same title went to great lengths to demonstrate the impossibility, the conditions of
impossibility, the absurdity, in principle, of any science or any philosophy bearing
the name ‘grammatology.’ The book that treated of grammatology was anything but
a grammatology.’’3
These statements clearly show that the ‘‘failure’’ of grammatology was
programmed . . . by grammatology itself. The Derridean redefinition of writing
constitutes the foundations of grammatology while contradicting the very concept of
science. One needs to recognize, then, that the conditions of the possibility
of grammatology are precisely the reasons for its impossibility.
But there is, in my opinion, a second type of cause for this ‘‘failure,’’ which
has perhaps less to do with the aporetic character of the deconstruction of writing
(which disallows all theory or positive philosophy of writing) than it has with a logical
weakness or a paradox inherent in the redefinition of writing itself and the deconstruction
of its concept. It is to this paradox that I wish to devote myself: let us call it the ‘‘plasticity
of writing,’’ the sense of which will clarify itself in the course of the present analysis.
First let us return to Of Grammatology. Precisely how does Derrida characterize the
science of writing? In the second chapter of the book, ‘‘Linguistics and Grammatology,’’
Derrida argues that we must substitute a grammatology for the general semiology outlined by
Saussure. The latter is governed by the theoretical privilege of the ‘‘sign’’ and only on this
basis can it exceed the limits of a linguistics that it proposes, however, to transgress.
Indeed, semiology presents itself, according to Saussure, as a general theory of signs—and
not only linguistic signs.
If grammatology has become necessary, it is insofar as the thought and knowledge of
language demand precisely to be freed from linguistics, a freedom that semiology is
not able to accomplish. Only grammatology, explains Derrida, can make out of
linguistics-phonology what ‘‘would be only a dependent and circumscribed area’’ (30).
Why? Because grammatology is in some ways a semiology without signs. As long as
one situates oneself within the strict limits of a logic of signs, one remains prisoner of
a phonetic and phonologic determination of language in the midst of which writing is always
secondary.4 As long as one continues to speak of signs, including the written sign, one
remains tributary to an understanding of the signifying referral attached to the model of
the natural link between the voice and the spirit and meaning.
Such a connection presupposes a ‘‘natural bond of the signified (concept or sense) to
the phonic signifier,’’ a natural link between ‘‘the phonè, the glossa, and the logos’’ (29). But
 The End of Writing? Grammatology and Plasticity 433

this natural bond does not exist. The signification in the beginning is immotivated and
grammatology indeed presents itself as a science of immotivation: ‘‘Science of ‘the
arbitrariness of the sign,’ science of the immotivation of the trace, science of writing
before speech and in speech, grammatology would thus cover a vast field within which
linguistics would . . . delineate its own area . . . . By a substitution which would be
anything but verbal, one may replace semiology by grammatology in the program of the
Course in General Linguistics’’ (51).
But, as stated at the beginning, one must acknowledge that such a grammatology has
never ‘‘entered upon the assured path of a science.’’ It has in fact never been constituted
as a ‘‘discipline.’’ Neither in a general way—it has never become a region of full-fledged
knowledge—nor in some particular manner in Derrida’s oeuvre. In his lifework, in
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fact, the grammatological project is not found outside of Of Grammatology.

Of grammatology as a positive science is nowhere else a question in the writing of
Derrida, neither, strangely, in the texts contemporary with it, such as Writing and Difference
(L’Ecriture et la différence), nor after.
There is not, there never has been and there certainly will never be a general
semiology, but there is not, there never has been, and there also certainly will never be a
general grammatology. The word itself is no longer used by the later Derrida except to
recall the work of 1967. Why, then, does grammatology disappear from the moment of
its appearance?
Several responses, as I’ve said, are proposed by Derrida himself. He declares, from
the first pages of the book, that ‘‘such a science of writing runs the risk of never being
established as such and with that name. Of never being able to define the unity of its
project or its object. Of not being able either to write its discourse on method or
to describe the limits of its field’’ (4). In fact, as one knows, Of Grammatology establishes
the limits of the classical epistémè and at the same time the closure of knowledge. In this
sense, there cannot truly be a science of writing. ‘‘Graphematics or grammatography ought no
longer to be presented as sciences; their goal should be exorbitant when compared to grammatological
knowledge’’ (74). As such, grammatology likewise cannot be considered a human science:
‘‘What seems to announce itself now is, on the one hand, that grammatology must not be
one of the sciences of man and, on the other hand, that it must not be just one regional science
among others’’ (83).
Grammatology cannot be a science like other sciences. All of Derrida’s oeuvre
constitutes in a certain sense the deployment of this scientific impossibility. But this
response, too general, leaves in the shadows intentions that all the same are displayed very
clearly in the work: despite everything, grammatology is indeed presented as a science, as a
program, as the successor to linguistics and general semiology. What then can one think
of the strange destiny of the science of writing?
In order to advance the analysis of these problems, let us ask ourselves, for a second
time: in what does the essence of the disruption to which Derrida subjects the traditional
concept of writing reside?
As we have seen, for Derrida, the meaning of the word grammatology has to
change, it has to stop designating the history of writing to become what it is, the title of a
veritable science of writing. This change in meaning clearly applies to a profound change
in the meaning of writing itself. ‘‘Writing’’ can no longer simply designate the technique
of the notation of speech. It can no longer be understood only in its ‘‘common’’ or
 434 CATHERINE MALABOU

‘‘vulgar’’ sense of simple transcription. A distinction needs to be made, then, between

‘‘narrow’’ and ‘‘enlarged’’ meanings of writing.
The first, the ‘‘narrow’’ meaning, up to the present has concealed what Derrida
proposes to name arche-writing, which corresponds to the ‘‘enlarged’’ meaning.
We continue to call arche-writing ‘‘writing,’’ Derrida states,
only because it essentially communicates with the vulgar concept of writing. The latter
could not have imposed itself historically except by the dissimulation of the
arche-writing, by the desire for a speech displacing its other and its double and
working to reduce its difference. If I persist in calling that difference writing, it is
because, within the work of historical repression, writing was, by its situation, destined
to signify the most formidable difference. It threatened the desire for living speech
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from the closest proximity, it breached living speech from within and from the very
beginning (56).

Arche-writing—original trace, variously of presence and living speech—is thus to

be thought of as a generalized writing that ‘‘covers the entire field of
linguistic signs,’’ which is also to say, the entire field of human practice (44). In fact,
to the extent that all societies—including societies said to be ‘‘without writing’’—
defer the selfsame [le propre], if every culture has as its origin the erasure of
presence, then grammatology also covers the field of anthropology, ethnology or
sociology.5
The point we must attend to concerns the passage from the vulgar meaning to the
original meaning of writing. What authorizes such a passage and how does it take place?
This passage is presented as a ‘‘modification.’’ Derrida speaks in effect of a ‘‘modification
of the concept of writing’’ (55). This ‘‘modification’’ is in turn thought of as an
‘‘extension.’’ It is, in fact, according to its enlarged meaning that writing must
be understood as ‘‘arche-writing,’’ a meaning that goes so far as to ‘‘comprise speech.’’
The entire question is to know what renders possible the modification and extension of a
word, the transformation of a concept at a given moment in the history of thought.
What allows a philosopher to increase, to modify, to expand or to deform the
signification of a concept?
These questions allow us to see the paradox that is, in my opinion, inherent in the
Derridean understanding of writing. Indeed, is the extension of the concept of writing
the work of writing itself or must one suppose that the ‘‘modifiability’’ of the concept is
not of the order of writing? In other words, must one suppose that the modification of a concept is
always and necessarily of the order of a rewriting? Is the modification of the concept of writing a
rewriting of writing or must one suppose that the transformation of a concept responds to another
dynamic or another logic than that of writing?
If it is true that writing comprises language in its totality, can one argue, given the extension of
the meaning of writing, that the passage from the common signification to its original signification
may also be ascribed to the work of writing? Or to the contrary, is it necessary to think that an
original modifiability, not reducible to the single operation of writing, is initiated from the
beginning as well? It is this modifiability that I call ‘‘plasticity.’’ Plasticity designates the
double aptitude of being able both to receive a form (clay is plastic) and to give form (as in
the plastic arts or plastic surgery). Must it not be supposed, at the origin of all concepts,
that there is a possibility of plasticity that allows for a change of meaning in history?
 The End of Writing? Grammatology and Plasticity 435

That allows it to receive and to give itself new forms throughout time? The deformability
of a concept would thus be older than the concept itself, and nothing says that this
logic of form and deformation need be identical to the work of the trace and is mixed up
with the work of rewriting. Plasticity, in this sense, is the threat to which the form subjects
the trace.
If this is true, then modification, the operation of enlarging the concept of writing, would escape
the grammatological field: it would be impossible to produce, in the framework of the
science of writing, the conditions of the possibility of the plastic re-elaboration of the
concept of writing. The expansion of the concept of writing is not necessarily, or not uniquely,
a graphic gesture.
One can respond that these arguments are without importance and that the passage
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from the common meaning to the expanded meaning of the concept of writing may
indeed be ascribed to the same work of writing. Isn’t arche-writing precisely understood
by Derrida as a transformation or a plastic surgery of the common meaning of writing?
Then there would be no explanatory principle of modification to look for outside of
writing or outside of grammatology. If the meaning of writing expands, it is perhaps
simply because deconstruction loosens it, frees it from its traditional meaning. What is in
question, Derrida states, is to ‘‘give to the theory of writing the scope needed to counter
logocentric repression’’ (my emphasis). The expansion would be quite simply an
amplification by liberation, an automatic movement of decompression.
Elsewhere, for Derrida, writing perhaps designates only the movement of the
expansion of its meaning, a movement that as such authorizes it to circulate, to display its
plurivocity, its nonlinearity, its dissimilarity, its difference of amplitude: its meaning
sometimes restrained, sometimes enlarged, sometimes vulgar, sometimes original. Writing
mixes itself with the circulation of meaning, including and foremost the meaning of the
concept of writing. At the beginning of the third chapter, ‘‘Of Grammatology as a
Positive Science,’’ Derrida insists on the plurivocity of the concept of writing: ‘‘Where
does writing begin? When does writing begin? Where and when does the trace, writing
in general, common root of speech and writing, narrow itself down into ‘writing’ in the
colloquial sense? Where and when does one pass from one writing to another, from
writing in general to writing in the narrow sense, from the trace to the graphie [and vice
versa]?’’ (74, my emphasis). Grammatology would then be the study of the expansion, the
formations and deformations of meaning. The vocabulary of metamorphosis or of
morphogenesis would not be a stranger to the grammatological lexicon. What’s more,
metamorphosis or morphogenesis would be themselves, in a certain sense, forms
of writing.
It remains to be asked, however, why writing enlarges itself at a certain time.
It remains to be asked to what historic necessity this change of meaning corresponds.
Derrida clearly provides a reason for this necessity. We live, he explains in 1967, in the
‘‘epoch of writing,’’ which already implies a change of meaning of the term itself. It is as
yet hardly perceptible, but nonetheless certain: ‘‘By a slow movement whose necessity is
hardly perceptible, everything that for at least some twenty centuries tended toward and
finally succeeded in being gathered under the name of language is beginning to let itself
be transferred to, or at least summarized under, the name of writing. By a hardly
perceptible necessity, it seems as though the concept of writing—no longer indicating a
 436 CATHERINE MALABOU

particular, derivative, auxiliary form of language . . . is beginning to go beyond the

extension of language’’ (6–7).
We begin, following Derrida, to ‘‘read otherwise,’’ to ‘‘write otherwise’’; we speak
only of writing. Writing is in the air; it is, so to speak, ‘‘l’air du temps’’:
Now we tend to say ‘writing’ for all that and more: to designate not only the physical
gestures of literal pictographic or ideographic inscription, but also the totality of what
makes it possible; and also, beyond the signifying face, the signified face itself. And thus
we say ‘writing’ for all that gives rise to an inscription in general, whether it is literal or
not and even if what it distributes in space is alien to the order of the voice:
cinematography, choreography, of course, but also pictorial, musical, sculptural
‘writing.’ One might also speak of athletic writing, and with even greater certainty of
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military or political writing in view of the techniques that govern those domains today.
All this to describe not only the system of notation secondarily connected with these
activities but the essence and the content of these activities themselves. It is also in this
sense that the contemporary biologist speaks of writing and pro-gram in relation to the
most elementary processes of information within the living cell. And, finally, whether it
has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the
field of writing (9).

Derrida thus affirms here that the semantic expansion of the concept of writing has
resulted not from some arbitrary decision but appeared first in the real, out of a fertile
semantic field pregnant with motifs of the program, of information, of the code, of
the genetic or cybernetic code. In France, the impact of a book like The Logic of Life
(La Logique du vivant), by François Jacob, written a few years after Of Grammatology,
confirms this emergence of writing in all fields of activity and thought, this
grammatological structure of the being of an epoch.6 The ‘‘common’’ meaning was
already, in the real of the sixties and seventies, ‘‘extending’’ itself. Jacob’s book already
bears witness to the graphic power that is in the midst of imposing itself, in biology in
particular, under the title of this privileged hermeneutic instrument: DNA, the genetic
translation of an ontology of the graph that determines from now on the comprehension
and the study of the living being.
Nevertheless, the fact that writing is in the air does not suffice to make it a
grammatological epoch. It is still necessary to construct or elaborate grammatology itself;
it is still necessary to construct or elaborate the meaning of writing as arche-writing; to
help along the automatism, so to speak. This elaboration self-evidently requires the work
and the intervention of the philosopher or, as Derrida stated at the time, of the
‘‘grammatologue.’’ This task and this work themselves consist in constituting writing as a
motor scheme (schème moteur). Without this constitution, writing, even though present
everywhere, can neither designate a specific operation or a specific structure nor, owing
to this fact, can it be seized upon by historical consciousness.
It is thus that, for Derrida, bringing arche-writing to light is not only, contrary to the
hypothesis mentioned above, the result of a liberation from the stranglehold of
metaphysics, the natural end in some sense to a repression. It is also an invention, resulting
from a productive philosophical imagination. All thought has need of a scheme, that is to
say, a motif, product of a rational imagination that allows it not only to harvest the
philosophical fruits of an epoch but also to force the entrance of this very epoch, to open
 The End of Writing? Grammatology and Plasticity 437

the hermeneutic perspectives that drive it to reveal what it is. To think is always to
schematize, to pass from concept to existence while bringing to existence a transformed
concept.
By ‘‘motor scheme,’’ I mean an encounter of a pure image, that is, of a concept—
here arche-writing, or differance—with an existent real, given to intuition—here the
fecundity of the graphic sign in the form of a code, program or inscription. Constituted
in this way, the motor scheme is a kind of tool capable of appropriating the largest
quantity of energy and information from the text of an epoch. It assembles and
elaborates the significations that impregnate the culture at a given moment by way of
floating images or tendencies, which constitute, at once both vaguely and surely, a sort
of ‘‘air of things’’ or of material Stimmung. It imprints on them at the same time the mark
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of the concept.
The constitution of writing as a motor scheme is thus the result of a progressive
movement that begins with structuralism, is continued by the discoveries of linguistics,
cybernetics and genetics, and finds itself conceptually elaborated at the same time as it is
disrupted by the grammatology of Derrida. Grammatology hurries into a scheme the slow
movement of historical maturation.
To summarize, the ‘‘enlarged meaning’’ of writing is at once intuitively given and
conceptually constructed. This double status, rendered possible by the schematization,
allows one to grasp the articulation of the larger meaning of writing and the articulation
of its narrow, derived or vulgar meaning. There are thus three fundamental
grammatological axes: writing as arche-writing, writing as common meaning,
writing as motor scheme. Isn’t it to this scheme that Derrida gives the name
‘‘supplement’’ in the second part of his work? The supplement, in fact, is a ‘‘signifying
structure’’ that the philosopher must produce, between ‘‘what he commands and
what he does not command’’ of the concepts of his epoch and the structures of his
language (158).
But doesn’t this logic of creation and collection of form, of activity and
of passivity, obey the dynamic of another operative register than that of writing?
Doesn’t it appeal to the efficacy of plasticity, that is, of a game of donation and
reception of form that is more original than arche-writing, that permits the
construction of the concept of arche-writing itself? If this is true, then the extension
of the meaning of writing would be the nonwritten part of writing, its plastic part,
which interrupts the trace of the trace to substitute for it for an instant the formation
of the form. The definition of writing as supplement would imply then a supplement of
the meaning of writing. This supplement would be granted to writing by the plasticity
of its concept. The philosophical imagination at work in the constitution
of motor schemes would thus also be ‘‘exorbitant’’ with respect to the
grammatological field.
What does this say? What do we mean by this unwritten plastic part of the
concept of writing? Do we want to return to a presence of form supposed to preside over
the destiny of the trace? Isn’t plasticity always metaphysically delayed in relation to the
game of writing or of dissemination? It is easy to remark, even if Derrida
defines differance as the ‘‘being-imprinted of the imprint’’ and the ‘‘formation of
form,’’ that the latter signification remains, from one end of the work to the other,
subordinated to the first.
 438 CATHERINE MALABOU

In ‘‘Form and Meaning’’ (‘‘La Forme et le vouloir dire’’), Derrida affirms that all
thought of form, even that which critiques the traditional concepts of eidos or of morphē,
remains irreducibly a prisoner of metaphysics:
How could it be otherwise? As soon as we utilize the concept of form—even if to
criticize an other concept of form—we inevitably have recourse to the self-evidence of a
kernel of meaning. And the medium of this self-evidence can be nothing other than
the language of metaphysics. In this language we know what ‘form’ means, how the
possibility of its variations is regulated, what its limit is, and in what field all imaginable
objections to it are to be maintained. The system of oppositions in which something
like form, the formality of form, can be thought, is a finite system. Moreover, it does
not suffice to say that ‘form’ has a meaning for us, a center of self-evidence, or that its
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essence as such is given for us: in truth, this concept cannot be, and never could be,
dissociated from the concept of appearing, of meaning, of self-evidence, of essence.
Only a form is self-evident, only a form has or is an essence, only a form presents itself as
such. This is an assured point, a point that no interpretation of Platonic or Aristotelian
conceptuality can displace. All the concepts by means of which eidos or morphē have
been translated or determined refer to the theme of presence in general. Form is presence
itself. Formality is whatever aspect of the thing in general presents itself, lets itself be
seen, gives itself to be thought.7

To affirm then that there is something nongraphic, that is plastic, in the schematic
construction of writing, isn’t that to stay attached to retrograde values, isn’t that to deploy
again an attack against writing in the name of presence of the self ?
To this I respond with another question: isn’t there a nonmetaphysical working of
form, operative in metaphysics, that also waits for its decompression or its liberation? And
is it not this working that renders possible the decompression or liberation of writing?
If such a question can be posed today, it is perhaps because we are no longer of the
epoch of writing, that writing is no longer ‘‘l’air du temps.’’ Indeed, in the domain of
genetics, for example, the motif of the code is less and less pregnant. In the domain of
neurobiology, the models of ‘‘frayage’’ or facilitation, of the trace, of the imprint, take a
back seat to those of form: neuronal configurations, network formations, emergences of
images. In cybernetics, the program is no longer even the master word. We are witnessing
a decline or a disinvestment of the graphic sign and graphism in general. Plastic images
tend to substitute themselves for graphic images. Thus appears the necessity of
constructing a new motor scheme, precisely that of plasticity.
Yet did Derrida ever consider the possible caducity of the graphic model in general?
Certainly he states that a supplement exists only inside a chain of substitutions, thus
seeming to admit that the supplement ‘‘writing’’ could abandon its place to another.
However, this structure of substitution remains above all and according to him integrable
in the working of writing, and the historical emergence of another supplementarity—for
instance plastic—in no way invalidates the fact that history is a form of writing in its very
principle: ‘‘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 . . . . The history of writing should turn back toward the origin of
historicity.’’8
 The End of Writing? Grammatology and Plasticity 439

This means that writing has the capacity to incorporate the historically non-
grammatological character of its supplements. In my view, however, writing does not have this
capacity. In fact, if grammatology could honor the changing of supplementarity, it would
no longer be a grammatology but a plastology, a genesis of the plastic formation of
schemes. In my view, this impossibility of thinking of the end of writing threatens the
grammatological project from the inside and from the very start of the game.
I have always been surprised to notice that, in his article ‘‘Differance,’’ Derrida
doesn’t sufficiently honor an essential yet banal signification of the world ‘‘differance’’:
‘‘change,’’ ‘‘variation’’ or ‘‘variant.’’ To be different, according to the dictionary, is,
among other possibilities, to be changed, unrecognizable, modified, transformed.
A differentiation can thus also designate a transformation. But this sense does not
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appear clearly in Derrida’s text. He writes: ‘‘We know that the verb différer . . . has two
meanings which seem quite distinct . . . the action of putting off until later, of taking into
account, of taking account of time and of the forces of an operation that implies an
economical calculation, a detour, a delay, a relay, a reserve, a representation—concepts
that I would summarize here in a word I have never used but that could be inscribed in
this chain: temporization.’’ Second: ‘‘to be not identical, to be other, discernible, etc.’’9
The signification of transformation, of becoming other, by metamorphosis for example,
stays in the shadows. ‘‘Differance’’ is never characterized as a change in form. It isn’t
presented as being able to transform itself nor as being able to change supplementarity.
If the trace had an image, in Derrida’s work, it would always be that of the gap or of
erasure, never of rhythm, of the figure, or of the form. Hence, does not the course of
writing finish by being indefatigable, everlasting, always identical to itself ? And does this
not limit the grammatological project in principle? Does this not vitiate it with the same
impossibility as that of the semiological project of Saussure, governed by linguistics? Isn’t
the problem of grammatology that it is limited by a sort of blindness to the nongraphic origin
of the new concept of writing?
There is in fact a power of fabrication of meaning that exceeds the graphic sign. The constitution
of writing as a motor scheme is the result of a power of transformation of which grammatology is
perhaps only an occurrence. There is always something other than writing in writing. This ‘‘other
thing’’ is not inevitably an utterance or a presence. This nongraphic supplement does not
introduce a logocentric residue, but it marks the difference of the grammatological instance from
itself, which is also its end.
Today, the concept of plasticity tends to become at once the dominant motif of
interpretation and the most productive exegetic and heuristic tool of our time. This is the
case, first of all, because plasticity is the systematic law of the deconstructed real, an
organizing mode of the real that comes after metaphysics and today allows itself be
discovered in every domain of human activity. Today, new metamorphic occurrences appear
that impose themselves at the level of social and economic organization, at the level of
‘‘genre’’ or of the sexual identity of individuals, that show that the privileged regime of
change is the continued implosion of form, by which form revises and reforms itself
continually.
Secondly, this is so because we can only have access to these new organizations or
configurations thanks to a tool that is itself in keeping with these forms, in accord with or
adequate to them, which is not the case with writing. Today, one must acknowledge that the
power of the linguistic-graphic scheme is weakening and that this scheme has entered
 440 CATHERINE MALABOU

into a penumbral half light. Indeed, it seems that from now on plasticity imposes
itself, gradually but surely, as the paradigmatic figure of the organization of the real
in general.
In his work Neuronal Man: The Biology of Mind (L’Homme neuronal), Jean-Pierre
Changeux reproaches philosophers for not being sufficiently interested in recent
discoveries concerning neuronal functioning. According to Changeux, this lack of
interest attests to an ignorance or an unacceptable disregard vis-à-vis the extraordinary
revolution that research on the brain has accomplished over the course of the twentieth
century: ‘‘In the last twenty years, our knowledge in this field [in the sciences of the
nervous system] has undergone an expansion matched only by the growth of physics at
the beginning of the century and molecular biology in the 1950s. The impact of the
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discovery of the synapse and its functions is comparable to that of the atom or DNA.’’10
‘‘Plasticity’’ of the brain refers to the capacity of the synapses to modify their efficacy
of transmission. Synapses, in fact, are not fixed; in this respect, they are not simple
transmitters of nerve information, but have in a certain sense, the power to form or reform
this information. This plasticity prompts the hypothesis that neuronal circuits are able
to organize themselves, that is, to modify their connections in the course of perception
and learning.
It is certainly ‘‘the exceptional . . . plasticity of human cerebral organization’’ that,
according to Changeux, most deserves to be the object of philosophical reflection.11
In fact, thanks to the fundamental discoveries of neurobiology, ‘‘[from now on] we have
at our disposal physical traces of how meaning is accessed.’’12 This declaration is of
fundamental importance. The ‘‘traces’’ of which Changeux speaks here are, in fact, first
and foremost images and forms. In truth, new technologies of medical imaging allow for
the observation of the human brain in action. Used in conjunction with electric
recordings of the brain, these techniques represent a fundamental contribution to the
study of cerebral sites underlying specific components of mental activity. We are from
now on capable of photographing the double mode of encoding of these behaviors
(perceptive or other): the topology of nerve connections on the one hand, and the path
of the impulses that correspond to them on the other. The result of this double encoding
is called the graph.13
But, paradoxically, this graph is not writing; this trace proceeds by neither imprint nor
frayage. Hence, the fact that the metaphor employed to describe it is not, paradoxically,
a graphic metaphor. The metaphoric register used is geographical or political: of assemblies,
of formations or of neuronal populations. Changeux writes that ‘‘the concept of assemblies or
cooperative groups of neurons leads directly from one level of organization to another,
from the individual neuron to a population of neurons.’’ These assemblies thus depend
on the appearance of graphs. The model of reformation, of recomposition, substitutes itself for
the model of frayage: ‘‘it becomes plausible that such assemblies, made up of oscillatory
neurons with high spontaneous activity, could recombine among themselves.’’14
‘‘Linkages,’’ ‘‘relationships,’’ ‘‘spider webs,’’ such are the configurations that the networks
of nerve information take. It appears then that the synaptic openings are definitely gaps,
but gaps that are susceptible to taking on form.
The example of neurobiology is only one example of the fecundity of plasticity
in the real. We could surely call together other examples that today show that
traces take on form.
 The End of Writing? Grammatology and Plasticity 441

To conclude, I should insist on the fact that plasticity itself is only a scheme. That is,
it will itself be replaced by another scheme. The manner in which I have here presented
the extension of the meaning of writing as a plastic operation is certainly itself tributary
to a historical understanding and thus destined to be transformed, modified and changed.
In this sense, the present explanation on the basis of plasticity is not definitive. Plasticity,
like writing, is only a supplement. The question is to know whether a science of the
supplement can exist: semiology, grammatology or ‘‘plastology,’’ or whether supplements
always turn away from the paths of their origins, in a more cryptic way even than that
which Derrida so well described.
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NOTES

1. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, corrected ed.

(Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 4. Derrida recalls the definition
of the word ‘‘grammatology’’ given in the Littré dictionary: ‘‘A treatise upon Letters, upon
the alphabet, syllabation, reading, and writing’’ (323 n. 4); subsequent references are cited in
the text.
2. There is one close exception, recognized by Derrida in his reference to I. J. Gelb, A Study of
Writing: The Foundations of Grammatology (Chicago, 1952).
3. Jacques Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and
Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 52.
4. Cf.: ‘‘Even though semiology was in fact more general and more comprehensive
than linguistics, it continued to be regulated as if it were one of the areas of linguistics.
The linguistic sign remained exemplary for semiology, it dominated it as the master-sign and
as the generative model: the pattern [patron]’’ (Of Grammatology, 51).
5. As is shown in Derrida’s powerful analysis of Lévi-Strauss’s treatment of the meaning of
writing in Tristes Tropiques.
6. François Jacob, The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity, trans. Betty E. Spillmann (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1974).
7. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Form and Meaning,’’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1982), 157–58.
8. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 27.
9. Derrida, ‘‘Differance,’’ in Margins of Philosophy, 7–8.
10. Jean-Pierre Changeux, Neuronal Man: The Biology of Mind, trans. Laurence Garey (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1985), xiii.
11. Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricœur, What Makes Us Think, trans. M. B. Bevoise
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 152.
12. Ibid., 107.
13. On this point, see Changeux, Neuronal Man, op. cit. 100.
14. Ibid., 168, 169.