1210 JACQUESDERRIDA
(London: Continuum, 2006) are more recent specialized studies. Gary A. Olson
and Irene Gale, eds.,(Inter)view: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Rhetoric
and Literacy(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991); Jacques
Derrida,Points...:Interview 1974–1994,edited by Elisabeth Weber (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1995); John Caputo, ed.,Deconstruction in a
Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida(New York: Fordham University
Press, 1997); and Jacques Derrida,Positions: Revised Edition,translated and
annotated by Alan Bass (London: Continuum, 2004) include discussions with
Derrida. For a feminist reading of Derrida, see Ellen K. Feder, Mary C.
Rawlinson, and Emily Zakin, eds.,Derrida and Feminism(Oxford: Routledge,
1997). General collections of critical essays include John Sallis, ed.,
Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida(Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987); David Wood, ed.,Derrida: A Critical Reader
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992); Harold Coward and Toby Foshay, eds.,Derrida
and Negative Theology(Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992); Gary B. Madison, ed.,
Working through Derrida(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993);
and Jack Reynolds and Jon Roffe, eds.,Understanding Derrida(London:
Continuum, 2004). Finally, in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida,Jacques
Derrida(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), the top two-thirds of each
page give Bennington’s comment on Derrida’s thought, whereas Derrida himself
writes “in the margin” along the bottom of each page.OF GRAMMATOLOGY (in part)
CHAPTER1: THEWRITTENBEING/THEBEINGWRITTEN
The reassuring evidence within which Western tradition had to organize itself and must
continue to live would therefore be as follows: the order of the signified is never con-
temporary, is at best the subtly discrepant inverse or parallel—discrepant by the time of
a breath—from the order of the signifier. And the sign must be the unity of a hetero-
geneity, since the signified (sense or thing, noeme or reality) is not in itself a signifier, a
trace:in any case is not constituted in its sense by its relationship with a possible trace.
The formal essence of the signified is presence,and the privilege of its proximity to the
logos as phonèis the privilege of presence. This is the inevitable response as soon as
one asks: “what is the sign?,” that is to say, when one submits the sign to the question of
essence, to the “ti esti.” The “formal essence” of the sign can only be determined in
terms of presence. One cannot get around that response, except by challenging the very
form of the question and beginning to think that the sign is that ill-named thing, the only
one, that escapes the instituting question of philosophy: “what is...?*
*I attempt to develop this theme elsewhere (Speech and Phenomena).University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Of Grammatology. Corrected Edition. pp 18-26.
1974, 1976, 1997 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission Johns Hopkins©