tense way possible. This dream of an instant, direct line from
thinking to immediate expression is, for the deconstructionist,
metaphysics’ major fault. As metaphysician, I claim that mean-
ing is at my disposal, that I am its master. But, according to
deconstruction, this claim cannot be sustained. In the Gram-
matologyas in his study of Husserl, Derrida repeatedly attacks
our inclination, as he sees it, to assume a reassuring iden-
tification of meaning with the present moment: an assump-
tion he attributes to the speaking subject (who comes offas
something of a metaphysical bully).
In Derrida’s world, as he charts it in the Grammatology,
writing proves superior to speech. Writing plainly lacks the
harmony between the spoken word and the present tense im-
plied by the naïve metaphysics of voice. Because we can’t ask a
dead or inaccessible author what he meant (and even if we
could, we’d probably receive an evasive answer), writing floats
away from its biographical source. This is even the case with
our own writing. I might stumble across a grocery list, or a
diary entry, that I have forgotten I ever wrote. Writing comes
back to haunt us in a way that speech, with its attachment to
the present, does not. A disheveled stack of lecture notes from
college, or a file of old emails, gives perpetual surprises, pleas-
ant or unpleasant, to the author who reads them years later.
But, one may object to Derrida, surely speaking is not
purely, or always, a present-tense activity. We replay our con-
versations on a tape recorder, slip an audiobook in the car CD
player, listen again on our iPods to a downloaded lecture.
Speech might feel archaic; it might, just like writing, be a relic,
a sign of the past. And a conversation with a friend, or an
intimate enemy, can be just as dizzying and intricate as any
postmodern novel.
Derrida in the Grammatologysurmounts these obvious
74 Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology