Writing Itself 1965–1966 159
of any philosophical commitment? I can see, or think I can see,
how one justifi es a choice, but I don’t know how the choice is
made. In my view, one fi rst naturally inclines towards it and
then fi nds reasons for it. [.. .] It’s a problem which you and
your youngest pupils have solved, I’m sure, but I can’t. One day
you’ll have to tell me.^10For Derrida, in 1965, as often, the start of the summer was rather
glum. He had stayed in Fresnes by himself, while Marguerite and
Pierre were in Charente, and he felt that his work was making little
progress. ‘I have the impression that I can see pearls out of reach,
like a fi sherman afraid of the water even though he’s a connoisseur
of pearls,’ he wrote to Althusser.^11 But ‘this little text on writing’ that
he fi nished with diffi culty at the end of August before sending it to
Critique would soon be considered one of his major works.
Jacques and Marguerite agreed for once to take a real holiday
and spent the whole of September in Venice, at the Lido. They went
with Pierre, just turned two, and also with Leïla Sebbar, an Algerian
student who was, so to speak, his offi cial baby-sitter. A few years
later, she became a respected writer. This was Derrida’s fi rst trip to
Italy, one of the countries he would love the most, and one of the
few to which he would often return for non-professional reasons.
On his return, he found a letter from Michel Deguy saying how
much he had enjoyed the article ‘Writing before the letter’. A
few days later, Jean Piel confi rmed that he wished to publish this
‘extremely dense, rich and novel study’^12 in Critique, even though its
length meant that it would need to be published in two parts, in the
issues of December 1965 and January 1966. As Derrida frequently
acknowledged, this article, a sketch of the fi rst part of the book Of
Grammatology, was the ‘matrix’ that would govern the rest of his
work.
Following the prevailing rule at Critique, the text presented itself
to begin with as a review of three works: The Debate on Writing
Systems and Hieroglyphics in the 17th and 18th Centuries by M.-V.
David, Gesture and Speech by André Leroi-Gourhan, and the con-
ference proceedings Writing and the Psychology of Peoples. But
the questions discussed in ‘Writing before the letter’ went much
further. Derrida evoked in premonitory terms ‘the end of the book’,
before introducing the concept of ‘grammatology’, or the science of
writing.
In particular, the article proposes a minute analysis of the presup-
positions behind Saussure’s linguistics, a major reference-point for
all structuralist thinking. While Derrida endorses the central idea of
diff erence as the source of linguistic value, he considers Saussure’s
thought as still too dominated by logocentrism, that ‘metaphysics
of phonetic writing’ which has for too long forced writing into a