demic cadence, that tends to put offthe mandarins. In this de-
bate, Derrida is on the side of the mandarins, intent on prov-
ing that all is writing.
Derrida claims that, since we associate—wrongly—
speech with life, we run in fear from the written word as from
death itself. We desperately wish to disguise writing as speech.
Taking on the role of counsel for the prosecution, Derrida in
theGrammatologymomentarily pretends to be a partisan of
voice. Here is how he sums up what he sees as the usual case
against writing: “What writing itself, in its nonphonetic mo-
ment, betrays, is life. It menaces at once the breath, the spirit,
and history as the spirit’s relationship with itself. It is their end,
their finitude, their paralysis. Cutting breath short, sterilizing
or immobilizing spiritual creation in the repetition of the let-
ter, in the commentary or the exegesis, confined in a narrow
space, reserved for a minority, it is the principle of death and
of difference in the becoming of being” ( 25 ).
In a shaky generalization, Derrida goes on to assert that
nonphonetic writing (for instance, Chinese characters and
Egyptian hieroglyphics) is particularly suspect in the eyes of
European tradition. In fact, both China and Egypt have long
been regarded in the West as age-old sources of wisdom, their
forms of script esteemed as more profound than the ones we
know. Freud used hieroglyphics as a figure for the complex
depths of the unconscious; Ezra Pound revered the Chinese
ideogram. But Derrida argues that we are anxious to subor-
dinate writing to speech, and that we are made particularly un-
easy by forms of writing, like Chinese characters, that do not
seem linked to the human voice. “A war was declared” on non-
linear writing systems like Chinese, he announces ( 85 ).
Is writing really seen by philosophers as (in Derrida’s
phrase) “the principle of death and of difference in the be-
Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology 77