- Length
- 480 pagesSpivak, Of Grammatology, Johns Hopkins, corrected ed. 1997
- Reading
- SpecialistWritten for a school and normally read with a commentary
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Of Grammatology
The book that launched deconstruction, by reading the philosophical tradition's treatment of writing and finding a preference no one had thought needed defending. Its most famous sentence has been used for fifty years to accuse its author of denying that anything exists.
- Date
- 1967
- Author
- Jacques Derrida
- Region
- Paris
- Language
- French
- 1976 English, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak With a preface longer than many books; corrected 1997, in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Genealogical — History of a concept used as a critique of it
- Transmission
- Translated — Reached its later readers in another language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 67 years
The founding text of deconstruction, and the book most often invoked by people who have not read it, in both admiration and contempt.
What the book says
A book arguing that Western philosophy has consistently treated speech as the natural home of meaning and writing as a secondary, derivative and slightly dangerous substitute - and that this preference is not incidental but structural. Derrida calls the assumption behind it the metaphysics of presence: the conviction that meaning is fully present in the mind of the speaker at the moment of speaking, and that everything else is a copy at one remove. The first half establishes the pattern in Saussure, who founds modern linguistics on the sign and then insists that writing merely represents speech. The second half is a long reading of Rousseau, and turns on a word Rousseau uses without noticing: the supplement, which means both an addition to something complete and the filling of a lack. If writing supplements speech, and education supplements nature, then what was supposed to be self-sufficient needed something - and the whole hierarchy inverts. Derrida's claim is not that writing is really primary but that the structure both terms depend on, which he calls différance, was there before either.
What it argues
That meaning is never fully present and is always constituted by differences and by deferral. A sign works because it is not the other signs and because it can be repeated in the absence of its author and its object - which means the conditions that seem to make writing inferior are the conditions of any sign whatever, speech included. Derrida's coinage for this, différance, is a word that differs from an existing French word only in a letter that cannot be heard, which is the argument performed rather than stated. The method that follows is deconstruction: not demolition but the demonstration that a text's own terms undo the hierarchy it depends on, conducted from inside using nothing the text has not supplied. The famous line about there being nothing outside the text asserts, in his own later gloss, that there is no meaning outside of context - not that the world is unreal.
What it answered
Husserl on self-presence, Saussure on writing, and behind them the whole tradition from Plato's suspicion of written language onward. Derrida is careful that this is not a refutation: he holds that one cannot step outside the metaphysics being examined, only work within it against itself, which is why deconstruction has no positive doctrine and why demands for one miss the point on his account and confirm the emptiness on his critics'.
How it argues
By close reading, which is the part most often overlooked. Derrida's method requires following a text in detail until a term is found doing contradictory work, and the Rousseau section is a piece of literary scholarship as much as philosophy. The prose is difficult by design: he holds that a clear statement of the position would restate the metaphysics of presence, so the writing performs its claims through puns, etymologies and words that cannot settle into a single meaning. This is either the only available method or an unfalsifiable style, and the argument about which has never ended.
The moment
Paris in 1967, in the year before the events of May 1968 and at the height of the structuralist moment which this book both belonged to and undermined. Derrida was Algerian-born, Jewish, and had been expelled from school at twelve under the Vichy racial laws - a fact he wrote about only much later and which readers have connected to the preoccupation with margins and exclusions. He published three books that year and spent the rest of his life as the most famous and most contested philosopher in the world.
How it travelled
Into American literature departments first, which is a fact about the reception rather than the book. Spivak's translation of 1976 and the Yale critics made deconstruction a method of literary criticism, often detached from the philosophical arguments; analytic philosophers largely refused to engage, and the Cambridge honorary degree in 1992 was opposed in a letter signed by philosophers from several countries. The exchange with Searle over Austin, and the failed 1981 encounter with Gadamer, are the standing examples of the divide. Derrida's later work on justice, hospitality, mourning and religion is now more read than this book.
The strongest objection
That the position cannot be stated without relying on what it denies, and that the style prevents anyone from checking. If no text has a determinate meaning, then this text does not either, and the readings of Rousseau and Saussure - which are offered as correct, and are meticulous - presuppose exactly the stability being denied. Derrida's reply is that he never denied determinate meaning, only its final grounding, and that the readings are possible precisely because contexts are relatively stable while never being closed. That answer is available in his later work and is much harder to extract from this book, which is why the misreading is so persistent. The sharper form of the complaint is Searle's: a position that cannot be summarised without distortion cannot be argued with, and its defenders always have the option of saying that the critic has not understood.
Why read it
Not first. Derrida's later essays are clearer and the interviews clearer still; anyone starting here will spend a great deal of effort before anything comes into focus. If you do, the section on the supplement in Rousseau is the demonstration everything else rests on, and it is genuinely brilliant. Spivak's preface is longer than most books and worth reading on its own.
- First printed
- 1967
- First in English
- 1976
- Digitised
- No
Spivak's 1976 English translation carries a long translator's preface that was for many anglophone readers their introduction to Derrida; the 1997 corrected edition is the standard.
Spivak's English is the standard and is in copyright, as is the French. Derrida's central terms are untranslatable by design and are usually left in French.
Where it stands
Live and polarising. Deconstruction is a working method in literary and legal theory and in parts of political philosophy; in analytic philosophy Derrida remains largely unread, and the standoff is now a subject of study in its own right.
On quoting this book
In copyright in French and English, and the most quoted sentence is routinely detached from its context and mistranslated. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
What the famous sentence about the text actually claims has been argued for fifty years and Derrida's own later gloss - that there is nothing outside of context - is treated by critics as a retreat and by defenders as a clarification. Whether deconstruction is a method, a practice or a temperament is unsettled. Whether the analytic refusal to engage was a judgement about quality or a failure of attention is now itself a historical question. And how far the readings of Saussure and Rousseau are accurate as scholarship, independent of the philosophical claims, is disputed by specialists on both.