Derrida, Jaques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. Print. Summary:In Of Grammatology, Derrida is concerned with looking at structures and hierarchies and then attempting to deconstruct them by reversing them, making the structure visible of things commonly held as assumptions. So when he wants to discuss grammar, he means this as a system for understanding a reality or for discovering a system of belief or structure. He wants to critique the structure of the binaries he creates, not the content. Derrida also establishes “differance,” and explains that there are times in which one ontology reveals itself through absence or presence of another and this is used to play against one another in order to reveal. He also wants to disrupt logocentrism or the view that speech, not writing was central to language but where writing is more broadly defined that purely textual notation. Response:I thought the most important thing I learned or understood from this reading and talking about Derrida was the idea of critiquing the form and not the content. When we discussed in class that it was like critiquing the vase and not what it inside of it, I had a better understanding of what he meant. I understand now that the he wants to challenge assumptions that may seem invisible until choosing to consciously look for them, like looking and appreciating a bouquet of flowers, rather than the object that contains them. It made me more conscious of what I may privilege when thinking about theory and instead stop to think about what other structures (perhaps invisible) may be present that I’m not initially aware of. Connections/Questions:That piece in the response made me think about how this might be done in a classroom, and ways that I might be already doing this. For example, as we talked about in the Rhetoric & Composition Reading Group about service learning, some people shared about how difficult it is to get students to engage in conversations about society’s structure and how that might be a contributing factor to why some people struggle and are homeless. They wanted to try and help students see that it might not always be as simple as saying that an individual just needs to pull him/herself by the bootstraps and work harder, that there might be other, invisible forces at work as well. |
Quotations: “logocentrism: the metaphysics of phonetic writing (for example, the alphabet) which was fundamentally—for enigmatic yet essential reasons that are inaccessible to a simple historical relativism—nothing but the most original and powerful ethnocentrism, in the process of imposing itself upon the world, controlling in one and the same order: 1. the concept of writing… 2. the history of (the only) metaphysics… 3. the concept of science” (3). “Representation mingles with what it represents, to the point where one speaks as one writes, one thinks as if the represented were nothing more than the shadow or reflection of the representer. A dangerous promiscuity and a nefarious complicity between the reflection and the reflected which lets itself be seduced narcissistically…There is no longer a simple origin. For what is reflected is in itself and not only as an addition to itself of its image” (36). “that we can explain the possibility of speech and writing existing at the same time as expressions of one and the same language. If either of these two substances, the stream of air or the stream of ink, were an integral part of the language itself, it would not be possible to go from one to the other without changing the language” (59). “The end of linear writing is indeed the end of the book, even if, even today it is within the form of a book that new writings—literary or theoretical—allow themselves to be, for better or for worse, encased. It is less a question of confiding new writings to the envelop of a book than of finally reading what wrote itself between the lines in the volumes” (86). |
