Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

(Greg DeLong) #1

coming of being”? If Derrida were right about this, one would
expect generations of thinkers following Socrates, adhering to
conversation and avoiding script. Socrates suggested that true
thought can be transmitted only viva voce, through the face-
to-face initiation of disciples. But the tradition he started
deviates from his prizing of speech. Instead, philosophers
characteristically produce vast tomes (or, nowadays, brief ar-
ticles) that remain mostly alien to colloquial, spoken language.
Nietzsche and J. L. Austin, among others, complained about
this lack of connection to living speech in the philosophical
tradition. These two—along with Wittgenstein, Emerson, and
others—returned the human voice to philosophy, which had
long avoided everyday conversational interaction. Derrida, by
prizing writing over conversation, asserts a traditional philo-
sophical privilege.
Pursuing the defense of writing against speech,Of Gram-
matologycontinues with an attack on Ferdinand de Saussure,
the maverick French linguist who revolutionized his field with
his series of lectures published as the Course in General Lin-
guistics( 1916 ). Saussure pioneered the area of study that later
became known as semiotics: the study of signs. In the Course,
he formulated a hugely influential distinction between the two
halves of the sign: the signifier and the signified. For Saussure,
a word (that is, a verbal sign) consists of two aspects, related to
each other like, in his well-known image, the two sides of a
sheet of paper: the signifier (the sound of the word) and the
signified (the concept or idea implied by the sound). A picture
is also a sign; in this case the signifier is visual rather than
sonic, but it is still paired with a concept.
Saussure championed a system-centered view of lan-
guage, based on the idea that meaning is generated by a net-
work of differences. This is true on the level of the signifier, so


78 Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology

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