Of Grammatology

Of Grammatology (French: De la grammatologie) is a 1967 book by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. The book, originating the idea of deconstruction, proposes that throughout continental philosophy, especially as philosophers engaged with linguistic and semiotic ideas, writing has been erroneously considered as derivative from speech, making it a "fall" from the real "full presence" of speech and the independent act of writing.

Background

The work was initially unsuccessfully submitted by Derrida as a Doctorat de spécialité thesis (directed by Maurice de Gandillac) under the full title De la grammatologie : Essai sur la permanence de concepts platonicien, aristotélicien et scolastique de signe écrit (Of Grammatology: Essay on the Permanence of Platonic, Aristotelian and Scholastic Concepts of the Written Sign).

Summary

In Of Grammatology, Derrida discusses writers such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Ferdinand de Saussure, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Étienne Condillac, Louis Hjelmslev, Emile Benveniste, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Roman Jakobson, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, André Leroi-Gourhan, and William Warburton. In the course of the work he deconstructs the philosophies of language and the act of writing given by these authors, identifying what he calls phonocentrism, and showing the myriad aporias and ellipses to which this leads them. Derrida avoids describing what he is theorizing as a critique of the work of these thinkers, but he nevertheless calls for a new science of "grammatology" that would explore the questions that he raises about how to theorize the act of writing.

Of Grammatology introduced many of the concepts which Derrida would employ in later work, especially in relation to linguistics and writing.

Saussure and structuralism

The book begins with a reading of Saussure's linguistic structuralism as presented in the Course in General Linguistics, and in particular signs, which for Saussure have the two separate components of sound and meaning. These components are also called signifier (signifiant) and signified (signifié).

Derrida quotes Saussure: "Language and writing are two distinct systems of signs; the second exists for the sole purpose of representing the first." Highlighting the imbalanced dynamic between speech and writing that Saussure uses, Derrida instead offers the idea that written symbols are in fact legitimate signifiers on their own, and should not be considered as secondary, or derivative, relative to oral speech.