at key moments in the Grammatologyreveals that he wishes to
give the self a role in his theory, even though it does not hold
sway over meaning as the logocentrists claim it does. The self,
in Derrida’s account, is “testamentary.” By uttering words that
will signify equally well after I am dead and gone, I recognize
a “relationship with [my] own death.” We are not mere passive
bystanders overshadowed by the work of the trace, but instead
gloomy surveyors of our own mortality. “Spacing as writing,”
Derrida remarks, “is the becoming-absent and the becoming-
unconscious of the subject. By the movement of its drift/
derivation [dérive] the emancipation of the sign constitutes
in return the desire of presence. That becoming—or that drift/
derivation—does not befall the subject which would choose it
or would passively let itself be drawn along by it. As the sub-
ject’s relationship with its own death, this becoming is the con-
stitution of subjectivity. On all levels of life’s organization, that
is to say, ofthe economy of death.All graphemes are of a testa-
mentary essence. And the original absence of the subject of
writing is also the absence of the thing or the referent” ( 69 ).
Here Derrida echoes Heidegger’s Being and Time.In Heideg-
ger, anxiety for its own death defines the self: this is its “consti-
tution of subjectivity.” (Heidegger, though, did not make the
connection between death and writing, as Derrida does.) Der-
rida, in the passage above, is careful to note that the subject
does not “choose” its own becoming; neither, however, does it
simply drift “passively” with the reigning discourse. Instead, it
is called upon to recognize itself as a mortal being.
This passage heralds Derrida’s emphasis, decades later,
on the self that is subject to the great questions (above all,
death and the life-giving obligations we bear to others: the key
themes, respectively, of Heidegger and Lévinas). Already in the
Grammatology,Derrida’s focus on the impersonal force of
86 Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology