of his best-known work,Of Grammatology.He later recalled
his visit to Venice that summer with his wife, Marguerite. Der-
rida remarked to her as they rode the vaporetto that he had
discovered something very big (Derrida 111 ). This summer was
his breakthrough, the real beginning of his championing of
writing as the hidden presence in Western metaphysics. In a
miracle of invention, Derrida had come upon the basic idea of
deconstruction.Of Grammatology,the book that spread the
deconstructionist word, would not appear for another two
years, but Derrida was already set to assume his evangelical
duties.
The title page of the Grammatologywas featured in one
of Jean-Luc Godard’s movies, flitting by in the course ofLe Gai
Savoir( 1967 ). A brief moment in a rapid-fire montage se-
quence was sufficient to give Derrida the hip, revolutionary
imprimatur of Godard, the avant-garde hero of the counter-
culture. Indeed, Derrida at the time ofGrammatologywas in-
creasingly associating himself with the cutting-edge aesthetic
experimentation ofTel Quel,the intellectual journal that pub-
lished, in the winter of 1967 , his brilliant, lengthy essay “Plato’s
Pharmacy” (discussed in chapter 3 ).
In keeping with Derrida’s association with Tel Quel, Of
Grammatologyleans heavily on the rhetoric of avant-garde
polemic. In the opening pages of his book, Derrida sees him-
self as the midwife of a monstrous, apocalyptic birth, world-
wide in its dimensions and earthshaking in significance: “The
science of writing—grammatology—shows signs of liberation
all over the world, as a result of decisive efforts....The future
can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is
that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and
can only be proclaimed,presented,as a sort of monstrosity”
(Grammatology 5 ).
Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology 71