Jacques Derrida - Of Grammatology

Of Grammatology

BY

Jacques Derrida

Corrected Edition

Translated by
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Copyright 1974, 1976, 1997 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First American edition, 1976

Originally published in France

under the title De la Grammatologie

Copyright 1967 by Les Editions de Minuit

Johns Hopkins Paperbacks edition, 1976

Corrected edition, 1997

17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9

The Johns Hopkins University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Derrida, Jacques.
Of grammatology.

Translation of De la grammatologie.

Includes bibliographical references.

1. LanguagesPhilosophy. I. Title
P105.D53131976 410 7617226
ISBN 0801818419 (hardcover)
ISBN 0801818796 (paperback)

ISBN 0801858305 (corrected edition)

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

I thank Angelo Bertocci for having given me the idea for this translation. I thank Paul de Man for his patient and penetrating criticism of the Translators Preface and the text, at a time when his own schedule was so thoroughly besieged. I thank J. Hillis Miller for his advice, his active encouragement, and his acute comments on the Translators Preface. I owe him particular thanks for having introduced me to Derrida himself after I had been working on this book for a year. I am grateful to John Brenkmen, Leone Stein, and Paul M. Wright for their support during the early stages of the work. In the preparation of the translation, I have been particularly helped by four painstaking and indefatigable bilingual readers: Jessie L. Hornsby, Dori Katz, Richard Laden, Talbot Spivak. Pierre de Saint-Victor, the late Alexander Aspel, Jacques Bourgeacq and Donald Jackson untied occasional knots. To all of them, a considerable debt of gratitude is due. (The whole book is a gift for Talbot Spivak.) I thank also the Carver Foundation at the University of Iowa for making it possible for me to go to France in the summer of 1973 to discuss this book with Jacques Derrida. To Robert Scholes I am grateful for having made it possible for me to teach a seminar on Derrida at Brown University in the fall of 197475. At that seminar, especially through active exchange with Bella Brodzky and Tom Claire, I staked out the ground for my Preface.

I am grateful to Peter Bacon for typing the first half of the manuscript and the Preface from sometimes indecipherable copy. Pauline Grimson not only typed the rest, but always delivered material at very short notice without complaint, and conscientiously copy-edited my pages. I believe she came to feel a personal responsibility for the making of this book, and for that I am most grateful. I thank Timothy Shipe for his able assistance.

Without Dominick Franco, my research assistant, the manuscript would not have gone to press. Michael Ryan criticized each version of the Translators Preface with a sharp and inspired eye and helped untiringly with library materials. I cannot thank him enough for his incredibly meticulous and informed reading of the final proofs. And Catty, indifferent yet devoted companion through a season of solitary labor.

I am grateful to Grammatology for having brought me the friendship of Marguerite and Jacques Derrida.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

If you have been reading Derrida, you will know that a plausible gesture would be to begin with a consideration of the question of the preface. But I write in the hope that for at least some of the readers of this volume Derrida is new; and therefore take it for granted that, for the moment, an introduction can be made.

Jacques Derrida is matre-assistant in philosophy these places and now more and more of the intellectual centers all over the United States are returning his affection.

Derridas first book was a translation of Edmund Husserls Origin of Geometry, with a long critical introduction. This was followed by La voix et le phnomne, a critique of Husserls theory of meaning. In between appeared a collection of essays entitled Lcriture et la diffrence.

Jacques Derrida is also this collection of texts.

In an essay on the Preface to Hegels Phenomenology of the Mind, Jean Hyppolite writes:

It is clear that, as it is commonly understood, the preface harbors a lie. Prae-fatio is a saying before-hand (Oxford English DictionaryOED). Yet it is accepted as natural by Hyppolite, as indeed by all of us, that Hegel reflected retrospectively on his philosophic enterprise and wrote his Preface. We may see this as no more than the tacit acceptance of a fiction. We think of the Preface, however, not as a literary, but as an expository exercise. It involves a norm of truth, although it might well be the insertion of an obvious fiction into an ostensibly true discourse. (Of course, when the preface is being written by someone other than the author, the situation is yet further complicated. A pretense at writing before a text that one must have read before the preface can be written. Writing a postface would not really be differentbut that argument can only be grasped at the end of this preface.)

Hegels own objection to the Preface seems grave. Further,

let [modern man] read reviews of philosophical works, and even go to the length of reading the prefaces and first

Yet, as Hyppolite points out, Hegel damns the preface in general even as he writes his own Preface. And Derrida suggests that a very significant part of Hegels work was but a play of prefaces (Dis 15f). Whereas Hegels .

Aufhebung is a relationship between two terms where the second at once annuls the first and lifts it up into a higher sphere of existence; it is a hierarchial concept generally translated sublation and now sometimes translated sublimation. A successful preface is aufgehoben into the text it precedes, just as a word is aufgehoben into its meaning. It is as if, to use one of Derridas structural metaphors, the son or seed (preface or word), caused or engendered by the father (text or meaning) is recovered by the father and thus justified.

But, within this structural metaphor, Derridas cry is dissemination, the seed that neither inseminates nor is recovered by the father, but is scattered abroad. And he makes room for the prefatory gesture in quite another way:

The preface is a necessary the text) wrote preface on preface to match re-editions and revised versions, they unwittingly became a party to this identity in difference:

From the moment that the circle turns, that the book is wound back upon itself, that the book repeats itself, its self-identity receives an imperceptible difference which allows us to step effectively, rigorously, and thus discreetly, out of the closure. Redoubling the closure, one splits it. Then one escapes it furtively, between two passages through the same book, through the same line, following the same bend. This departure outside of the identical within the same remains very slight, it weighs nothing, it thinks and weighs the book as such. The return to the book is also the abandoning of the book. (