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 theoretical fragility of the reconstructions and the historical, archaeological, ethnological, philosophical wealth of information (Derrida 28).
Richard Rorty points out that while Derrida talks a great deal about language, he cannot be considered only a philosopher of language with works that might be compared with other investigations of the relations between words and the world. It is also an error to state that Derrida's writing about language is an attemp...