Jacques Derrida's Ideas on Writing

Jacques Derrida, French critic and philosopher, argues that a science of writing can never exist because a completely coherent system depends on the what he says is the metaphysical possibility of the full presence of certain fundamental elements, while writing in his view "ruptures" full presence and thus makes a coherent system impossible. Derrida then concludes that simplicity should not be given privilege over difference and that the apprehension of full presence in the interior of the individual soul is merely imaginary.

Derrida begins with the statement that the concept of writing should define the field of a science (Derrida 27), and a science of writing, he says, should look for its object at the roots of scientificity. He says that the history of writing would turn back to the origin of historicity and stand as a science of the possibility of a science. This science would not have the form of logic but the form of grammatics, and this would be grammatology. As can be seen from this, Derrida says that the idea of writing cannot be divorced from the history of writing, and he says that for the grammotologist the question of what is writing means when and where does writing begin, leading to certain responses:

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 theore

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stence of difference, the unnameable movement of difference-itself which I have strategically nicknamed trace, reserve, or difference, can be called writing only within the historical enclosure, that is to say within the boundaries of metaphysics (Derrida 93). Derrida approaches his position on simplicity and difference in terms of the question of writing and of whether a grammatology is possible. The fundamental condition for a grammatology is the undoing of logocentrism, and he says that this condition of possibility proves to be an impossibility: In fact it risks destroying the concept of science as well. Graphematics or grammatography ought no longer to be presented as sciences; their goal should be exorbitant when compared to grammatological knowledge (Derrida 74). A grammatology is possible only within the traditional norms of scientificity and begins with the question of where writing begins, which means that it turns to the history of writing to consider where and when writing developed. The issue of origin is key for Derrida, though this raises further issues to be addressed: But the question of origin is at first confounded with the question of essence. It may just as well be said that it presupposes an onto-ph

Category: Philosophy - J