written word works to ensure social stratification. He dis-
agrees, however, with what he sees as Lévi-Strauss’s narrow,
conventional definition of writing, a definition most of us
share. Derrida wants to assert that writing is everywhere, in
some unexpected form. The Nambikwara, he points out, draw
family trees in the sand: isn’t that a form of writing? Most read-
ers would say that it is not: that writing consists of expressive
sentences inscribed in script form (rather than, say, diagrams
or sketches). But Derrida is undeterred. The zigzags that the
Nambikwara etch on their calabashes are, for him, another
form of writing. So too is body language: the flesh writes in
Derrida as well.
Derrida’s point, again, is that our lives are dependent on
the trace, that crucial concept. While the trace may become
more explicit when writing (in the conventional sense) arrives,
in fact it has always been there. Moments in our experience are
best pictured as scribbles in a notepad that are then amended
or covered over by other scribbles as we get older. Medieval
scribes, short of vellum, would sometimes rub out the traces of
a text and write another on top of it, making what was called a
palimpsest (a favorite image of Derrida’s). Life, he suggests, is
a multilayered collection of traces, a palimpsest rather than a
continuous, linear plotline. (Derrida’s influential essay on
Freud from Writing and Difference,which I discuss later on in
this chapter, describes the unconscious as a palimpsest.)
Derrida’s attack on Lévi-Strauss in Grammatologypre-
pares him for his duel with Lévi-Strauss’s great ancestor,
Rousseau. Rousseau denounces the “non-self-presence” ( 17 ) of
the man artificially isolated from nature, swaddled in the cor-
rupting habits of European industrial society. He wants “self-
presence in the senses, in the sensible cogito” ( 17 ): a return to
the nature we can feel within ourselves, if only we attend to it
Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology 91