Humanities_OfGrammatology_1967.txt

Jacques Derrida (1967)

Of Grammatology
Source: Of Grammatology, publ. John Hopkins University Press., 1974. Chapter
Two, with one section deleted.

2 Linguistics and Grammatology
Writing is nothing but the representation of speech; it is bizarre that one gives
more care to the determining of the image than to the object. - J.-J. Rousseau,
Fragment inédit d'un essai sur les langues.
The concept of writing should define the field of a science. But can it be
determined

by

scholars

outside

of

all

the

historico-metaphysical

predeterminations that we have just situated so clinically? What can a science of
writing begin to signify, if it is granted:
1. that the very idea of science was born in a certain epoch of writing;
2. that it was thought and formulated, as task, idea, project, in a language implying a
certain kind of structurally and axiologically determined relationship between
speech and writing;
3. that, to that extent, it was first related to the concept and the adventure of phonetic
writing, valorised as the telos of all writing, even though what was always the
exemplary model of scientificity — mathematics — constantly moved away from
that goal;
4. that the strictest notion of a general science of writing was born, for nonfortuitous
reasons, during a certain period of the world's history (beginning around the
eighteenth century) and within a certain determined s stem of relationships
between “living” speech and inscription;
5. that writing is not only an auxiliary means in the service of science and possibly
its object — but first, as Husserl in particular pointed out in The Origin of
Geometry, the condition of the possibility of ideal objects and therefore of
scientific objectivity. Before being its object, writing is the condition of the
epistémè.
6. that historicity itself is tied to the possibility of writing; to the possibility of
writing in general, beyond those particular forms of writing in the name of which
we have long spoken of peoples without writing and without history. Before being

the object of a history — of an historical science — writing opens the field of
history — of historical becoming. And the former (Historie in German)
presupposes the latter (Geschichte).
The science of writing should therefore look for its object at the roots of
scientificity,. The history of writing should turn back toward the origin of
historicity. , A science of the possibility of science? A science of science which
would no longer have the form of logic but that of grammatics? A history of the
possibility of history which would no longer be an archaeology, a philosophy of
history or a history of philosophy?
The positive and the classical sciences of writing are obliged to repress this sort
of question. Up to a certain point, such repression is even necessary to the
progress of positive investigation. Beside the fact that it would still be held within
a philosophising logic, the ontophenomenological question of essence, that is to
say of the origin of writing, could, by itself, only paralyse or sterilise the
typological or historical research of facts.
My intention, therefore, is not to weigh that prejudicial question, that dry,
necessary, and somewhat facile question of right, against the power and efficacy
of the positive researches which we may witness today. The genesis and system
of scripts bad never led to such profound, extended, and assured explorations. It
is not really a matter of weighing the question against the importance of the
discovery; since the questions are imponderable, they cannot be weighed. If the
issue is not quite that, it is perhaps because its repression has real
consequences in the very content of the researches that, in the present case and
in a privileged way, are always arranged around problems of definition and
beginning.
The grammatologist least of all can avoid questioning himself about the essence
of his object in the form of a question of origin: “What is writing?” means “where
and when does writing begin?” The responses generally come very quickly. They
circulate within concepts that are seldom criticised and move within evidence
which always seems self-evident. It is around these responses that a typology of
and a perspective on the growth of writing are always organised. All works

dealing with the history of writing are composed along the same lines: a
philosophical and teleological classification exhausts the critical problems in a
few pages; one passes next to an exposition of facts. We have a contrast
between the theoretical fragility of the reconstructions and the historical,
archaeological, ethnological, philosophical wealth of information.
The question of the origin of writing and the question of the origin of language are
difficult to separate. Grammatologists, who are generally by training historians,
epigraphists, and archaeologists, seldom relate their researches to the modem
science of language. It is all the more surprising that, among the “sciences of
man,” linguistics is the one science whose scientificity is given as an example
with a zealous and insistent unanimity.
Has grammatology, then, the right to expect from linguistics an essential
assistance that it has almost never looked for? On the contrary, does one not find
efficaciously at work, in the very movement by which linguistics is instituted as a
science, a metaphysical presupposition about the relationship between speech
and writing? Would that presupposition not binder the constitution of a general
science of writing? Is not the lifting of that presupposition an overthrowing of the
landscape upon which the science of language is peacefully installed? For better
and for worse? For blindness as well as for productivity? This is the second type
of question that I now wish to outlines To develop this question, I should like to
approach, as a privileged example, the project and texts of Ferdinand de
Saussure. That the particularity of the example does not interfere with the
generality of my argument is a point which I shall occasionally — try not merely
to take for granted.
Linguistics thus wishes to be the science of language. Let us set aside all the
implicit decisions that have established such a project and all the questions about
its own origin that the fecundity of this science allows to remain dormant. Let us
first simply consider that the scientificity of that science is often acknowledged
because of its phonological foundations. Phonology, it is often said today,
communicates its scientificity to linguistics, which in turn serves as the

epistemological model for all the sciences of man. Since the deliberate and
systematic phonological orientation of linguistics (Troubetzkoy, Jakobson,
Martinet) carries out an intention which was originally Saussure's, I shall, at least
provisionally, confine my-self to the latter. Will my argument be equally applicable
a fortiori to the most accentuated forms of phonologism? The problem at least be
stated.
The science of linguistics determines language — its field of objectivity — in the
last instance and in the irreducible simplicity of its essence, as the unity of the

phonè, the glossa, and the logos. This determination is by rights anterior to all
the eventual differentiations that could arise within the systems of terminology of
the

different

schools

(language/speech

[langue/parole];

code/message;

scheme/usage; linguistic/logic; phonology/phonematics/phonetics/glossematics).
And even if one wished to keep sonority on the side of the sensible and
contingent signifier which would be strictly speaking impossible, since formal
identities isolated within a sensible mass are already idealities that are not purely
sensible), it would have to be admitted that the immediate and privileged unity
which founds significance and the acts of language is the articulated unity of
sound and sense within the phonic. With regard to this unity, writing would
always be derivative, accidental, particular, exterior, doubling the signifier:
phonetic. “Sign of a sign,” said Aristotle, Rousseau, and Hegel.
Yet, the intention that institutes general linguistics ,is a science remains in this
respect within a contradiction. Its declared purpose indeed confirms, saying what
goes without saying, the subordination of grammatology, the historicometaphysical reduction of writing to the rank of an instrument enslaved to a full
and originarily spoken language. But another gesture (not another statement of
purpose, for here what does not go without saying is done without being said,
written without being uttered) liberates the future of a general grammatology of
which linguistics-phonology would be only a dependent and circumscribed area.
Let us follow this tension between gesture and statement in Saussure.

The

Outside

and the Inside
On the one hand, true to the Western tradition that controls not only in theory, but
in practice (in the principle of its practice) the relationships between speech and
writing, Saussure does not recognise in the latter more than a narrow and
derivative function. Narrow because it is nothing but one modality among others,
a modality of the events which can befall a language whose essence, as the
facts seem to show, can remain forever uncontaminated by writing. “Language
does have an oral tradition that is independent of writing” (Cours de linguistique

générale). Derivative because representative signifier of the first signifier,
representation of the self-present voice, of the immediate, natural, and direct
signification of the meaning (of the signified, of the concept, of the ideal object or
what have you). Saussure takes up the traditional definition of writing which,
already in Plato and Aristotle, was restricted to the model of phonetic script and
the language of words. Let us recall the Aristotelian definition: “Spoken words are
the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken
words.” Saussure: “Language and writing are two distinct systems of signs; the
second exists for the sole purpose of representing the first”. This representative
determination, beside communicating without a doubt essentially with the idea of
the sign, does not translate a choice or an evaluation, does not betray a
psychological or metaphysical presupposition peculiar to Saussure; it describes
or rather reflects the structure of a certain type of writing: phonetic writing, which
we use and within whose element the epistémè in general (science and
philosophy), and linguistics in particular, could be founded. One should,
moreover, say mode, rather than structure; it is not a question of a system
constructed and functioning perfectly, but of an ideal explicitly directing a
functioning which in fact is never completely phonetic. In fact, but also for
reasons of essence to which I shall frequently return. To be sure this factum of
phonetic writing is massive; it commands our entire culture and our entire
science, and it is certainly not just one fact among others. Nevertheless it does

not respond to any necessity of an absolute and universal essence. Using this as
a point of departure, Saussure defines the project and object of general
linguistics: “The linguistic object is not defined by the combination of the written
word and the spoken word: the spoken form alone constitutes the object”.
The form of the question to which he responded thus entailed the response. It
was a matter of knowing what sort of word is the object of linguistics and what
the relationships arc between the atomic unities that are the written and the
spoken word. Now the word (vox) is already a unity of sense and sound, of
concept and voice, or, to speak a more rigorously Saussurian language, of the
signified and the signifier. This last terminology was moreover first proposed in
the domain of spoken language alone, of linguistics in the narrow sense and not
in the domain of semiology (“I propose to retain the word sign [signe] to
designate the whole and to replace concept and sound-image respectively by
signified [signifié] and signifier [signifiant]”). The word is thus already, a
constituted unity, an effect of “the somewhat mysterious fact ... that 'thoughtsound' implies divisions”. Even if the word is in its turn articulated, even if it
implies other divisions, as long as one poses the question of the relationships
between speech and writing in the light of the indivisible units of the “thoughtsound,” there will always be the ready response. Writing will be “phonetic,” it will
be the outside, the exterior representation of language and of this “thoughtsound.” It must necessarily operate from already constituted units of signification,
in the formation of which it has played no part.
Perhaps the objection will be made that writing up to the present has not on]y not
contradicted, but indeed, confirmed the linguistics of the word. Hitherto I seem to
have maintained that only the fascination of the unit called word has prevented
giving to writing the attention that it merited. By that I seemed to suppose that, by
ceasing to accord an absolute privilege to the word, modern linguistics would
become that much more attentive to writing and would finally cease to regard it
with suspicion. ...

It is clear that the concepts of stability,, permanence, and duration, which here
assist thinking the relationships between speech and writing, are too lax and
open to every uncritical investiture. They would require more attentive and
minute analyses. The same is applicable to an explanation according to which
“most people pay more attention to visual impressions simply because these are
sharper and more lasting than aural impressions. This explanation of “usurpation”
is not only empirical in its form, it is problematic in its content, it refers to a
metaphysics and to an old physiology, of sensory faculties constantly, disproved
by science, as by the experience of language and by the body proper as
language. It imprudently makes of visibility the tangible, simple, and essential
element of writing. Above all, in considering the audible as the natural milieu
within which language must naturally fragment and articulate its instituted signs,
thus exercising its arbitrariness, this explanation excludes all possibility,, of some
natural relationship between speech and writing at the, very moment that it
affirms it. Instead of deliberately dismissing the notions of nature and institution
that it constantly uses, which ought to be done first, it thus confuses the two. It
finally and most importantly contradicts the principal affirmation according to
which “the thing that constitutes language [l'essentiel de la langue] is . . .
unrelated to the phonic character of the linguistic sign”. This affirmation will soon
occupy us; within it the other side of the Saussurian proposition denouncing the
“illusions of script” comes to the fore.
What do these limits and presuppositions signify? First that a linguistics is not

general as long as it defines its outside and inside in terms of determined
linguistic models; as long as it does not rigorously distinguish essence from fact
in their respective degrees of generality. The system of writing in general is not
exterior to the system of language in general, unless it is granted that the division
between exterior and interior passes through the interior of the interior or the
exterior of the exterior, to the point where the immanence of language is
essentially exposed to the intervention of forces that are apparently alien to its
system. For the same reason, writing in general is not “image” or “figuration” of

language in general, except if the nature, the logic, and the functioning of the
image within the system from which one wishes to exclude it be reconsidered.
Writing is not a sign of a sign, except if one says it of all signs, which would be
more profoundly true. If every sign refers to a sign, and if “sign of a sign” signifies
writing, certain conclusions — which I shall consider at the appropriate moment
will become inevitable. What Saussure saw without seeing, knew without being

able to take into account, following in that the entire metaphysical tradition, is that
a certain model of writing was necessarily but provisionally imposed (but for the
inaccuracy in principle, insufficiency of fact, and the permanent usurpation) as
instrument and technique of representation of a system of language. And that
this movement, unique in style, was so profound that it permitted the thinking,
within language, of concepts like those of the sign, technique, representation,
language. The system of language associated with phonetic-alphabetic writing is
that within which logocentric metaphysics, determining the sense of being as
presence, has been produced. This logocentrism, this epoch of the full speech,
has always placed in parenthesis, suspended, and suppressed for essential
reasons, all free reflection on the origin and status of writing, all science of writing
which was not technology and the history of a technique, itself leaning upon a
mythology and a metaphor of a natural writing. It is this logocentrism which,
limiting the internal system of language in general by a bad abstraction, prevents
Saussure and the majority of his successors from determining fully and explicitly
that which is called “the integral and concrete object of linguistics”
But conversely, as I announced above, it is when he is not expressly dealing with
writing, when he feels be has closed the parentheses on that subject, that
Saussure opens the field of a general grammatology. Which would not only no
longer be excluded from general linguistics, but would dominate it and contain it
within itself. Then one realises that what was chased off limits, the wandering
outcast of linguistics, has indeed never ceased to haunt language as its primary
and most intimate possibility. Then something which was never spoken and
which is nothing other than writing itself as the origin of language writes itself

within Saussure's discourse. Then we glimpse the germ of a profound but indirect
explanation of the usurpation and the traps condemned in Chapter VI. This
explanation will overthrow even the form of the question to which it was a
premature reply.

The

Outside

Is

the Inside
The thesis of the arbitrariness of the sign (so grossly misnamed, and not only for
the reasons Saussure himself recognises) must forbid a radical distinction
between the linguistic and the graphic sign. No doubt this thesis concerns only
the necessity of relationships between specific signifiers and signifieds within an
allegedly natural relationship between the voice and sense in general, between
the order of phonic signifiers and the content of the signifieds (“the only natural
bond, the only true bond, the bond of sound”). Only these relationships between
specific signifiers and signifieds would be regulated by arbitrariness. Within the
“natural” relationship between phonic signifiers and their signifieds in general, the
relationship between each determined signifier and its determined signified would
be “arbitrary”.
Now from the moment that one considers the totality of determined signs,
spoken, and a fortiori written, as unmotivated institutions, one must exclude any
relationship of natural subordination, any natural hierarchy among signifiers or
orders of signifiers. If “writing” signifies inscription and especially the durable
institution of a sign (and that is the only irreducible kernel of the concept of
writing), writing in general covers the entire field of linguistic signs. In that field a
certain sort of instituted signifiers may then appear, “graphic” in the narrow and
derivative sense of the word, ordered by a certain relationship with other
instituted — hence “written,” even if they are “phonic” — signifiers. The very idea
of institution — hence of the arbitrariness of the sign — is unthinkable before the
possibility of writing and outside of its horizon. Quite simply, that is, outside of the
horizon itself, outside the world as space of inscription, as the opening to the

emission and to the spatial distribution of signs, to the regulated play of their
differences, even if they are “phonic.”
Let us now persist in using this opposition of nature and institution, of physis and

nomos (which also means, of course, a distribution and division regulated in fact
by law) which a meditation on writing should disturb although it functions
everywhere as self-evident, particularly in the discourse of linguistics. We must
then conclude that only the signs called natural, those that Hegel and Saussure
call “symbols,” escape semiology as grammatology. But they fall a fortiori outside
the field of linguistics as the region of general semiology. The thesis of the
arbitrariness of the sign thus indirectly but irrevocably contests Saussure's
declared proposition when he chases writing to the outer darkness of language.
This thesis successfully accounts for a conventional relationship between the
phoneme and the grapheme (in phonetic writing, between the phoneme, signifiersignified, and the grapheme, pure signifier), but by the same token it forbids that
the latter be an “image” of the former. Now it was indispensable to the exclusion
of writing as “external system,” that it come to impose an “image,” a
“representation,” or a “figuration,” an exterior reflection of the reality of language.
It matters little, here at least, that there is in fact an ideographic filiation of the
alphabet. This important question is much debated by historians of writing. What
matters here is that in the synchronic structure and systematic principle of
alphabetic writing — and phonetic writing in general — no relationship of
“natural” representation, none of resemblance or participation, no “symbolic”
relationship in the Hegelian-Saussurian sense, no “iconographic” relationship in
the Peircian sense, be implied.
One must therefore challenge, in the very name of the arbitrariness of the sign,
the Saussurian definition of writing as “image” — hence as natural symbol — of
language. Not to mention the fact that the phoneme is the unimaginable itself,
and no visibility can resemble it, it suffices to take into account what Saussure
says about the difference between the symbol and the sign in order to be
completely baffled as to how he can at the same time say of writing that it is an

“Image” or “figuration” of language and define language and writing elsewhere as
“two distinct systems of signs”. For the property of the sign is not to be an image.
By a process exposed by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams, Saussure thus
accumulates contradictory arguments to bring about a satisfactory decision: the
exclusion of writing. In fact, even within so-called phonetic writing, the “graphic”
signifier refers to the phoneme through a web of many dimensions which binds it,
like all signifiers, to other written and oral signifiers, within a “total” system open,
let us say, to all possible investments of sense. We must begin with the
possibility of that total system.
Saussure was thus never able to think that writing was truly an “Image,” a
“figuration,” a “representation” of the spoken language, a symbol. If one
considers that be nonetheless needed these inadequate notions to decide upon
the exteriority of writing, one must conclude that an entire stratum of his
discourse, the intention of Chapter VI (“Graphic Representation of Language”),
was not at all scientific. When I say this, my quarry is not primarily Ferdinand de
Saussure's intention or motivation, but rather the entire uncritical tradition which
he inherits. To what zone of discourse does this strange functioning of
argumentation belong, this coherence of desire producing itself in a near-oneiric
way — although it clarifies the dream rather than allow itself to be clarified by it
— through a contradictory logic? How is this functioning articulated with the
entirety of theoretical discourse, throughout the history of science? Better yet,
bow does it work from within the concept of science itself? It is only when this
question is elaborated if it is some day — when the concepts required by this
functioning are defined outside of all psychology (as of all sciences of man),
outside metaphysics (which can now be “Marxist” or “structuralist”); when one is
able to respect all its levels of generality and articulation — it is only then that
one will be able to state rigorously the problem of the articulated appurtenance of
a text (theoretical or otherwise) to an entire set: I obviously treat the Saussurian
text at the moment only as a telling example within a given situation, without
professing to use the concepts required by the functioning of which I have just

spoken. My justification would be as follows: this and some other indices (in a
general way the treatment of the concept of writing) already give us the assured
means of broaching the de-construction of the greatest totality — the concept of
the epistémè and logocentric metaphysics — within which are produced, without
ever posing the radical question of writing, all the Western methods of analysis,
explication, reading, or interpretation.
Now we must think that writing is at the same time more exterior to speech, not
being its “image” or its “symbol,” and more interior to speech, which is already in
itself a writing. Even before it is linked to incision, engraving, drawing, or the
letter, to a signifier referring in general to a signifier signified by it, the concept of
the graphic [unit of a possible graphic system] implies the framework of the

instituted trace, as the possibility common to all systems of signification. My
efforts will now be directed toward slowly detaching these two concepts from the
classical discourse from which I necessarily borrow them. The effort will be
laborious and we know a priori that its effectiveness will never be pure and
absolute.
The instituted trace is “unmotivated” but not capricious. Like the word “arbitrary”
according to Saussure, it “should not imply that the choice of the signifier is left
entirely to the speaker”. Simply, it has no “natural attachment” to the signified
within reality. For us, the rupture of that “natural attachment” puts in question the
idea of naturalness rather than that of attachment. That is why the word
“institution” should not be too quickly interpreted within the classical system of
oppositions.
The instituted trace cannot be thought without thinking the retention of difference
within a structure of reference where difference appears as such and thus
permits a certain liberty of variations among the full terms. The absence of
another here-and-now, of another transcendental present, of another origin of the
world appearing as such, presenting itself as irreducible absence within the
presence of the trace, is not a metaphysical formula substituted for a scientific
concept of writing. This formula, beside the fact that it is the questioning of

metaphysics itself, describes the structure implied by the “arbitrariness of the
sign,” from the moment that one thinks of its possibility short of the derived
opposition between nature and convention, symbol and sign, etc. These
oppositions have meaning only after the possibility of the trace. The
“unmotivatedness” of the sign requires a synthesis in which the completely other
is announced as such without any simplicity, any identity, any resemblance or
continuity — within what is not it. Is announced as such: there we have all
history,

from

what

metaphysics

has

defined

as

“non-living”

up

to

“consciousness,” passing through all levels of animal organisation. The trace,
where the relationship with the other is marked, articulates its possibility, in the
entire field of the entity [étant], which metaphysics has defined as the beingpresent starting from the occulted movement of the trace. The trace must be
thought before the entity. But the movement of the trace is necessarily occulted,
it produces itself as self-occultation. When the other announces itself as such, it
presents itself in the dissimulation of itself. This formulation is not theological, as
one might believe somewhat hastily. The “theological” is a determined moment in
the total movement of the trace. The field of the entity, before being determined
as the field of presence, is structured according to the diverse possibilitiesgenetic and structural — of the trace. The presentation of the other as such, that
is to say the dissimulation of its “as such,” has always already begun and no
structure of the entity escapes it.
That is why the movement of “unmotivatedness” passes from one structure to the
other when the “sign” crosses the stage of the “symbol.” It is in a certain sense
and according to a certain determined structure of the as such” that one is
authorised to say that there is vet no immotivation in what Saussure calls
“symbol” and which, according to him, does not at least provisionally — interest
semiology. The general structure of the unmotivated trace connects within the
same possibility, and they cannot be separated except by abstraction, the
structure of the relationship with the other, the movement of temporalisation, and
language as writing. Without referring back to a “nature,” the immotivation of the

trace has always become. In fact, there is no unmotivated trace: the trace is
indefinitely its own becoming-unmotivated. In Saussurian language, what
Saussure does not say would have to be said: there is neither symbol nor sign
but a becoming-sign of the symbol.
Thus, as it goes without saving, the trace whereof I speak is not more natural (it
is not the mark, the natural sign, or the index in the Husserlian sense) than
cultural, not more physical than psychic, biological than spiritual. It is that starting
from which a becoming-unmotivated of the sign, and with it all the ulterior
oppositions between physis and its other, is possible.
In his project of semiotics, Peirce seems to have been more attentive than
Saussure to the irreducibility of this becoming-unmotivated. In his terminology,
one must speak of a becoming-unmotivated of the symbol, the notion of the
symbol playing here a role analogous to that of the sign which Saussure opposes
precisely to the symbol:
Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other signs,
particularly from icons, or from mixed signs partaking of the nature of icons and
symbols. We think only in signs. These mental signs are of mixed nature; the
symbol parts of them are called concepts. If a man makes a new symbol, it is by
thoughts involving concepts. So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol can
grow. Omne symbolum de symbolo. [Elements of Logic, Hartshorne and Weiss]
Peirce complies with two apparently incompatible exigencies. The mistake here
would be to sacrifice one for the other. It must be recognised that the symbolic (in
Peirce's sense: of “the arbitrariness of the sign”) is rooted in the non-symbolic, in
an anterior and related order of signification: “Symbols grow. They come into
being by development out of other signs, particularly from icons, or from mixed
signs.” But these roots must not compromise the structural originality of the field
of symbols, the autonomy of a domain, a production, and a play: “So it is only out
of symbols that a new symbol can grow. Omne symbolum de symbolo.”
But in both cases, the genetic root-system refers from sign to sign. No ground of
nonsignification — understood as insignificance or an intuition of a present truth

— stretches out to give it foundation under the play and the coming into being of
signs. Semiotics no longer depends on logic. Logic, according to Peirce, is only a
semiotic: “Logic, in its general sense, is, as I believe I 'have shown, only another
name for semiotics (semeiotike), the quasi-necessary, or formal, doctrine of
signs.” And logic in the classical sense, logic “properly speaking,” nonformal logic
commanded by the value of truth, occupies in that semiotics only a determined
and not a fundamental level. As in Husserl (but the analogy, although it is most
thought-provoking, would stop there and one must apply it carefully), the lowest
level, the foundation of the possibility of logic (or semiotics) corresponds to the
project of the Grammatica speculative of Thomas d'Erfurt, falsely attributed to
Duns Scotus. Like Husserl, Peirce expressly refers to it. It is a matter of
elaborating, in both cases, a formal doctrine of conditions which a discourse must
satisfy, in order to have a sense, in order to “mean,” even if it is false or
contradictory. The general morphology of that meaning (Bedeutung, vouloir-dire)
is independent of all logic of truth.
The science of semiotic has three branches. The first is called by Duns Scotus

grammatica speculative. We may term it pure grammar. It has for its task to
ascertain what must be true of the representamen used by every scientific
intelligence in order that they may embody any meaning. The second is logic
proper. It is the science of what is quasi-necessarily true of the representamina of
any scientific intelligence in order that they may hold good of any object, that is,
may be true. Or say, logic proper is the formal science of the conditions of the
truth of representations, The third, in imitation of Kant's fashion of preserving old
associations of words in finding nomenclature for new conceptions, I call pure

rhetoric. Its task is to ascertain the laws by which in every scientific intelligence
one sign gives birth to another, and especially one thought brings forth another.
[Peirce]
Peirce goes very far in the direction that I have called the de-construction of the
transcendental signified, which, at one time or another, would place a reassuring
end to the reference from sign to sign. I have identified logocentrism and the

metaphysics of presence as the exigent, powerful, systematic, and irrepressible
desire for such a signified. Now Peirce considers the indefiniteness of reference
as the criterion that allows us to recognise that we are indeed dealing with a
system of signs. What broaches the movement of signification is what makes its

interruption impossible. The thing itself is a sign. An unacceptable proposition for
Husserl, whose Phenomenology remains therefore — in its “principle of
principles” — the most radical and most critical restoration of the metaphysics of
presence. The difference between Husserl's and Peirce's phenomenologies is
fundamental since it concerns the concept of the sign and of the manifestation of
presence, the relationships between the re-presentation and the originary
presentation of the thing itself (truth). On this point Peirce is undoubtedly closer
to the inventor of the word phenomenology: Lambert proposed in fact to “reduce

the theory of things to the theory of signs.” According to the “phaneoroscopy” or
“Phenomenology” of Peirce, manifestation itself does not reveal a presence, it
makes a sign. One may read in the Principle of Phenomenology that “the idea of

manifestation is the idea of a sign.” There is thus no phenomenality reducing the
sign or the representer so that the thing signified may be allowed to glow finally in
the luminosity of its presence. The so-called “thing itself” is always already a
representamen shielded from the simplicity of intuitive evidence. The
representamen functions only by giving rise to an interpretant that itself becomes
a sign and so on to infinity. The self-identity of the signified conceals itself
unceasingly and is always on the move. The property of the representamen is to
be itself and another, to be produced as a structure of reference, to be separated
from itself. The property of the representamen is not to be proper [propre], that is
to say absolutely proximate to itself (prope, proprius). The represented is always
already a representamen. Definition of the sign:
Anything which determines something else (its interpretant) to refer to an object
to which itself refers (its object) in the same way, this interpretant becoming in
turn a sign, and so on ad infinitum. . . . If the series of successive interpretants

comes to an end, the sign is thereby rendered imperfect, at least. [Elements of

Logic]
From the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We think
only in signs. Which amounts to ruining the notion of the sign at the very moment
when, as in Nietzsche, its exigency is recognised in the absoluteness of its right.
One could call play the absence of the transcendental signified as limitlessness
of play, that is to say as the destruction of ontotheology and the metaphysics of
presence. It is not surprising that the shock, shaping and undermining
metaphysics since its origin, lets itself be named as such in the period when,
refusing to bind linguistics to semantics (which all European linguists, from
Saussure to Hjemslev, still do), expelling the problem of meaning outside of their
researches, certain American linguists constantly refer to the model of a game.
Here one must think of writing as a game within language. (The Phaedrus
condemned writing precisely as play — paidia — and opposed such childishness
to the adult gravity [spoudè] of speech), This play, thought as absence of the
transcendental signified, is not a play in the world, as it has always been defined,
for the purposes of containing it, by the philosophical tradition and as the
theoreticians of play also consider it (or those who, following and going beyond
Bloomfield, refer semantics to psychology or some other local discipline). To
think play radically the ontological and transcendental problematics must first be
seriously exhausted; the question of the meaning of being, the being of the entity
and of the transcendental origin of the world — of the world-ness of the world —
must be patiently and rigorously worked through, the critical movement of the
Husserlian and Heideggerian questions must be effectively followed to the very
end, and their effectiveness and legibility must be conserved. Even if it were
crossed out, without it the concepts of play and writing to which I shall have
recourse will remain caught within regional limits and an empiricist, positivist, or
metaphysical discourse. The counter-move that the holders of such a discourse
would oppose to the precritical tradition and to metaphysical speculation would
be nothing but the worldly representation of their own operation. It is therefore

the game of the world that must be first thought; before attempting to understand
all the forms of play in the world.
From the very opening of the game, then, we are within the becomingunmotivated of the symbol. With regard to this becoming, the opposition of
diachronic and synchronic is also derived. It would not be able to command a
grammatology pertinently. The immotivation of the trace ought now to be
understood as an operation and not as a state, as an active movement, a
demotivation, and not as a given structure. Science of “the arbitrariness of the
sign,” science of the immotivation of the trace, science of writing before speech
and in speech, grammatology would thus cover a vast field within which
linguistics would, by abstraction, delineate its own area, with the limits that
Saussure prescribes to its internal system and which must be carefully reexamined in each speech/writing system in the world and history.
By a substitution which would be anything but verbal, one may replace semiology
by grammatology in the program of the Course in General Linguistics:
I shall call it [grammatology] .... Since the science does not yet exist, no one can
say what it would be; but it has a right to existence, a place staked out in
advance. Linguistics is only a part of [that] general science . . . ; the laws
discovered by [grammatology] will be applicable to linguistics.
The advantage of this substitution will not only be to give to the theory of writing
the scope needed to counter logocentric repression and the subordination to
linguistics. It will liberate the semiological project itself from what, in spite of its
greater theoretical extension, remained governed by linguistics, organised as if
linguistics were at once its center and its telos. Even though semiology was in

fact more general and more comprehensive than linguistics, it continued to be
regulated as if it were one of the areas of linguistics. The linguistic sign remained
exemplary for semiology, it dominated it as the master-sign and as the
generative model: the pattern [patron].
One could therefore say that signs that are wholly arbitrary realise better than the
others the ideal of the semiological process; that is why language, the most

complex and universal of all systems of expression, is also the most
characteristic; in this sense linguistics can become the master-pattern for all

branches of semiology although language is only one particular semiological
system (italics added).
Consequently, reconsidering the order of dependence prescribed by Saussure,
apparently inverting the relationship of the part to the whole, Barthes in fact
carries out the profoundest intention of the Course:
From now on we must admit the possibility of reversing Saussure's proposition
some day: linguistics is not a part, even if privileged, of the general science of
signs, it is semiology that is a part of linguistics. [Communications]
This coherent reversal, submitting semiology to a “translinguistics,” leads to its
full explication a linguistics historically dominated by logocentric metaphysics, for
which in fact there is not and there should not be “any meaning except as
named” (ibid.). Dominated by the so-called “civilisation of writing” that we inhabit,
a civilisation of so-called phonetic writing, that is to say of the logos where the
sense of being is, in its telos, determined as parousia. The Barthesian reversal is
fecund and indispensable for the description of the fact and the vocation of
signification within the closure of this epoch and this civilisation that is in the
process of disappearing in its very globalisation.
Let us now try to go beyond these formal and architectonic considerations. Let us
ask in a more intrinsic and concrete way, how language is not merely a sort of
writing, “comparable to a system of writing” — Saussure writes curiously — but a
species of writing. Or rather, since writing no longer relates to language as an
extension or frontier, let us ask bow language is a possibility founded on the
general possibility of writing. Demonstrating this, one would give at the same
time an account of that alleged “usurpation” which could not be an unhappy
accident. It supposes on the contrary a common root and thus excludes the
resemblance of the “image,” derivation, or representative reflexion. And thus one
would bring back to its true meaning, to its primary possibility, the apparently
innocent and didactic analogy which makes Saussure say:

Language is [comparable to] a system of signs that express ideas, and is
therefore comparable to writing, the alphabet of deaf-mutes, symbolic rites, polite
formulas, military signals, etc. But it is the most important of all these systems
(italics added).
Further, it is not by chance that, a hundred and thirty pages later, at the moment
of explaining phonic difference as the condition of linguistic value (“from a
material viewpoint”) he must again borrow all his pedagogic resources from the
example of writing:
Since an identical state of affairs is observable in writing, another system of
signs, we, shall use writing to draw some comparisons that will clarify the whole
issue.
Four demonstrative items, borrowing pattern and content from writing, follow.
Once more, then, we definitely have to oppose Saussure to himself. Before being
or not being “noted,” “represented,” “figured,” in a “graphie,” the linguistic sign
implies an originary writing. Henceforth, it is not to the thesis of the arbitrariness
of the sign that I shall appeal directly, but to what Saussure associates with it as
an indispensable correlative and which would seem to me rather to lay the
foundations for it: the thesis of difference as the source of linguistic value.
What are, from the grammatological point of view, the consequences of this
theme that is now so well-known (and upon which Plato already reflected in the

Sophist)?
By definition, difference is never in itself a sensible plenitude. Therefore, its
necessity contradicts the allegation of a naturally phonic essence of language. It
contests by the same token the professed natural dependence of the graphic
signifier. That is a consequence Saussure himself draws against the premises
defining the internal system of language. He must now exclude the very thing
which had permitted him to exclude writing: sound and its “natural bond” [lien

naturel] with meaning. For example: “The thing that constitutes language is, as I
shall show later, unrelated to the phonic character of the linguistic sign”. And in a
paragraph on difference:

It is impossible for sound alone, a material element, to belong to language. It is
only a secondary thing, substance to be put to use. All our conventional values
have the characteristic of not being confused with the tangible element which
supports them. . . . The linguistic signifier . . . is not [in essence] phonic but
incorporeal — constituted not by its material substance but the differences that
separate its sound-image from all others. The idea or phonic substance that a
sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it.
Without this reduction of phonic matter, the distinction between language and
speech, decisive for Saussure, would have no rigour. It would be the same for
the oppositions that happened to descend from it: between code and message,
pattern and usage, etc. Conclusion: “Phonologythis bears repeating — is only an
auxiliary discipline [of the science of language] and belongs exclusively to
speaking”. Speech thus draws from this stock of writing, noted or not, that
language is, and it is here that one must meditate upon the complicity between
the two “stabilities.” The reduction of the phonè reveals this complicity. What
Saussure says, for example, about the sign in general and what he “confirms”
through the example of writing, applies also to language: “Signs are governed by
a principle of general semiology: continuity in time is coupled to change in time;
this is confirmed by orthrographic systems, the speech of deaf-mutes, etc.”.
The reduction of phonic substance thus does not only permit the distinction
between phonetics on the one hand (and a fortiori acoustics or the physiology of
the phonating organs) and phonology on the other. It also makes of phonology
itself an “auxiliary discipline.” Here the direction indicated by Saussure takes us
beyond the phonologism of those who profess to follow him on this point: in fact,
Jakobson believes indifference to the phonic substance of expression to be
impossible and illegitimate. He thus criticises the glossematic. — of Hjelmslev
which requires and practices the neutralising of sonorous substance. And in the
text cited above, Jakobson and Halle maintain that the “theoretical requirement”
of a research of invariables placing sonorous substance in parenthesis (as an
empirical and contingent content) is:

1. impracticable since, as “Eli Fischer-Jorgensen exposes [it]”, “the sonorous
substance [is taken into account] at every step of the analysis.” [Jakobson and
Halle] But is that a “troubling discrepancy,” as Jakobson and Halle would have it?
Can one not account for it as a fact serving as an example, as do the
phenomenologists who always need, keeping it always within sight, an exemplary
empirical content in the reading of an essence which is independent of it by right?
2. inadmissible in principle since one cannot consider “that in language form is
opposed to substance as a constant to a variable.” It is in the course of this second
demonstration that the literally Saussurian formulas reappear within the question
of the relationships between speech and writing; the order of writing is the order
of exteriority of the “occasional,” of the accessory,” of the “auxiliary,” of the
“parasitic” (italics added). The argument of Jakobson and Halle appeals to the
factual genesis and invokes the secondariness of writing in the colloquial sense:
“Only after having mastered speech does one graduate to reading and writing.
Even if this commonsensical proposition were rigorously proved — something
that I do not believe (since each of its concepts harbours an immense problem) —
one would still have to receive assurance of its pertinence to the argument. Even
if “after” were here a facile representation, if one knew perfectly well what one
thought and stated while assuring that one learns to write after having learned to
speak, would that suffice to conclude that what thus comes “after” is parasitic?
And what is a parasite? And what if writing were precisely that which makes us
reconsider our logic of the parasite?
In another moment of the critique, Jakobson and Halle recall the imperfection of
graphic representation; that imperfection is due to “the cardinally dissimilar
patterning of letters and phonemes:”
Letters never, or only partially, reproduce the different distinctive features on
which the phonemic pattern is based and unfailingly disregard the structural
relationship of these features.
I have suggested it above: does not the radical dissimilarity of the two elementsgraphic and phonic-exclude derivation? Does not the inadequacy of graphic
representation concern only common alphabetic writing, to which glossematic
formalism does not essentially refer? Finally, if one accepts all the phonologist
arguments thus presented, it must still be recognised that they oppose a
“scientific” concept of the spoken word to a vulgar concept of writing. What I
would wish to show is that one cannot exclude writing from the general
experience of “the structural relationship of these features.” Which amounts, of
course, to reforming the concept of writing.

In short, if the Jakobsonian analysis is faithful to Saussure in this matter, is it not
especially so to the Saussure of Chapter VI? Up to what point would Saussure
have maintained the inseparability of matter and form, which remains the most
important argument of Jakobson and Halle? The question may be repeated in the
case of the position of André Martinet who, in this debate, follows Chapter VI of
the Course to the letter. And only Chapter VI, from which Martinet expressly
dissociates the doctrine of what, in the Course, effaces the privilege of phonic
substance. After having explained why “a dead language with a perfect
ideography,” that is to say a communication effective through the system of a
generalised script, “could not have any real autonomy,” and why nevertheless,
“such a system would be something so particular that one can well understand
why linguists want to exclude it from the domain of their science” (La linguistique

syncronique, p. i8; italics added), Martinet criticises those who, following a certain
trend in Saussure, question the essentially phonic character of the linguistic sign:
“Much will be attempted to prove that Saussure is right when he announces that
'the thing that constitutes language [1'essentiel de la langue] is . . . unrelated to
the phonic character of the linguistic sign,' and, going beyond the teaching of the
master, to declare that the linguistic sign does not necessarily have that phonic
character”.
On that precise point, it is not a question of “going beyond” the master's teaching
but of following and extending it. Not to do it is to cling to what in Chapter VI
greatly limits formal and structural research and contradicts the least contestable
findings of Saussurian doctrine. To avoid “going beyond,” one risks returning to a
point that falls short.
I believe that generalised writing is not just the idea of a system to be invented,
an hypothetical characteristic or a future possibility. I think on the contrary that
oral language already belongs to this writing. But that presupposes a modification
of the concept of writing that we for the moment merely anticipate. Even
supposing that one is not given that modified concept, supposing that one is
considering a system of pure writing as an hypothesis for the future or a working

hypothesis, faced with that hypothesis, should a linguist refuse himself the
means of thinking it and of integrating its formulation within his theoretical
discourse? Does the fact that most linguists do so create a theoretical right?
Martinet seems to be of that opinion. After having elaborated a purely
“dactylological” hypothesis of language, he writes, in effect:
It must be recognised that the parallelism between this “dactylology” and
phonology is complete as much in synchronic as in diachronic material, and that
the terminology associated with the latter may be used for the former, except of
course when the terms refer to the phonic substance. Clearly, if we do not desire
to exclude from the domain of linguistics the systems of the type we have just
imagined, it is most important to modify traditional terminology relative to the
articulation of signifiers so as to eliminate all reference to phonic substance; as
does Louis Hjelmslev when he uses “ceneme” and “cenematics” instead of
“phoneme” and “phonematics.” Yet it is understandable that the majority of

linguists hesitate to modify completely the traditional terminological edifice for the
only theoretical advantages of being able to include in the field of their science
some purely hypothetical systems. To make them agree to engage such a

revolution, they must be persuaded that, in attested linguistic systems, they have
no advantage in considering the phonic substance of units of expression as to be
of direct interest (italics added).
Once again, we do not doubt the value of these phonological arguments, the
presuppositions behind which I have attempted to expose above. Once one
assumes these presuppositions, it would be absurd to reintroduce confusedly a
derivative writing, in the area of oral language and within the system of this
derivation. Not only would ethnocentrism not be avoided, but all the frontiers
within the sphere of its legitimacy would then be confused. It is not a question of
rehabilitating writing in the narrow sense, nor of reversing the order of
dependence when it is evident. Phonologism does not brook any objections as
long as one conserves the colloquial concepts of speech and writing which form
the solid fabric of its argumentation. Colloquial and quotidian conceptions,

inhabited besides — uncontradictorily enough — by an old history, limited by
frontiers that are hardly visible yet all the more rigorous by that very fact.
I would wish rather to suggest that the alleged derivativeness of writing, however
real and massive, was possible only on one condition: that the original,” “natural,”
etc. language had never existed, never been intact and untouched by writing,
that it bad itself always been a writing. An archewriting whose necessity and new
concept I wish to indicate and outline here; and which I continue to call writing
only because it essentially communicates with the vulgar concept of writing. The
latter could not have imposed itself historically except by the dissimulation of the
arche-writing, by the desire for a speech displacing its other and its double and
working to reduce its difference. If I persist in calling that difference writing, it is
because, within the work of historical repression, writing was, by its situation,
destined to signify the most formidable difference. It threatened the desire for the
living speech from the closest proximity, it breached living speech from within
and from the very beginning. And as we shall begin to see, difference cannot be
thought without the trace.
This arche-writing, although its concept is invoked by the themes of “the
arbitrariness of the sign” and of difference, cannot and can never be recognised
as the object of a science. It is that very thing which cannot let itself be reduced
to the form of presence. The latter orders all objectivity of the object and all
relation of knowledge. That is why what I would be tempted to consider in the
development of the Course as “progress,” calling into question in return the
uncritical positions of Chapter VI, never gives rise to a new “scientific” concept of
writing.
Can one say as much of the algebraism of Hjelmslev, which undoubtedly drew
the most rigorous conclusions from that progress?
The Principes de grammaire générale (1928) separated out within the doctrine of
the Course the phonological principle and the principle of difference: It isolated a
concept of form which permitted a distinction between formal difference and

phonic difference, and this even within “spoken” language. Grammar is
independent of semantics and phonology.
That independence is the very principle of glossematics as the formal science of
language. Its formality supposes that “there is no necessary connection between
sounds and language.” [On the Principles of Phnomatics] That formality is itself
the condition of a purely functional analysis. The idea of a linguistic function and
of a purely linguistic unit — the glosseme — excludes then not only the
consideration of the substance of expression (material substance) but also that of
the substance of the content (immaterial substance). Since language is a form
and not a substance (Saussure), the glossemes are by definition independent of
substance, immaterial (semantic, psychological and logical) and material (phonic,
graphic, etc.).” [Hjelmslev and Uldall] The study of the functioning of language, of
its play, presupposes that the substance of meaning and, among other possible
substances, that of sound, be placed in parenthesis. The unity of sound and of
sense is indeed here, as I proposed above, the reassuring closing of plan,.
Hjelmslev situates his concept of the scheme or play of language within
Saussure's heritage of Saussure's formalism and his theory of value. Although he
prefers to compare linguistic value to the “value of exchange in the economic
sciences” rather than to the “purely logico-mathematical value,” he assigns a limit
to this analogy.
An economic value is by definition a value with two faces: not only does it play
the role of a constant vis-á-vis the concrete units of money, but it also itself plays
the role of a variable vis-á-vis a fixed quantity of merchandise which serves it as
a standard. In linguistics on the other hand there is nothing that corresponds to a
standard. That is why the game of chess and not economic fact remains for
Saussure the most faithful image of a grammar. The scheme of language is in
the last analysis a game and nothing more. [Langue et parole, Essais

linguistiques]
In the Prolegomena to a Theory of Language (1943), setting forth the opposition

expression/content, which he substitutes for the difference signifier/signified, and

in which each term may be considered from the point of view of form or

substance, Hjelmslev criticises the idea of a language naturally bound to the
substance of phonic expression. It is by mistake that it has hitherto been
supposed “that the substance-expression of a spoken language should consist of
'sounds':”
Thus, as has been pointed out by the Zwirners in particular, the fact has been
overlooked that speech is accompanied by, and that certain components of
speech can be replaced by, gesture, and that in reality, as the Zwirners say, not
only the so-called organs of speech (throat, mouth, and nose), but very nearly all
the striate musculature cooperate in the exercise of “natural” language. Further, it
is possible to replace the usual sound-and-gesture substance with any other that
offers itself as appropriate under changed external circumstances. Thus the
same linguistic form may also be manifested in writing, as happens with a
phonetic or phonemic notation and with the so-called phonetic orthographies, as
for example the Finnish. Here is a “graphic” substance which is addressed
exclusively to the eve and which need not be transposed into a phonetic
“substance” in order to be grasped or understood. And this graphic “substance”
can, precisely from the point of view of the substance, be of quite various sorts.
[Prolegomena to A Theory of Language, 1943]
Refusing to presuppose a “derivation” of substances following from the
substance of phonic expression, Hjelmslev places this problem outside the area
of structural analysis and of linguistics.
Moreover it is not always certain what is derived and what not; we must not
forget that the discovery of alphabetic writing is hidden in prehistory [n.: Bertrand
Russell quite rightly calls attention to the fact that we have no means of deciding
whether writing or speech is the older form of human expression (An Outline of

Philosophy , so that the assertion that it rests on a phonetic analysis is only one
of the possible diachronic hypotheses; it may, also be rested on a formal analysis
of linguistic structure. But in any case, as is recognised by modern linguistics,
diachronic considerations are irrelevant for synchronic descriptions.

H. J. Uldall provides a remarkable formulation of the fact that glossematic
criticism operates at the same time thanks to Saussure and against him; that, as
I suggested above, the proper space of a grammatology is at the same time
opened and closed by The Course in General Linguistics. To show that Saussure
did not develop “all the theoretical consequences of his discovery” he writes:
It is even more curious when we consider that the practical consequences have
been widely drawn, indeed had been drawn thousands of years before Saussure,
for it is only through the concept of a difference between form and substance that
we can explain the possibility of speech and writing existing at the same time as
expressions of one and the same language. If either of these two substances, the
stream of air or the stream of ink, were an integral part of the language itself, it
would not be possible to go from one to the other without changing the language.
[Speech and Writing, 1938]
Undoubtedly the Copenhagen School thus frees a field of research: it becomes
possible to direct attention not only to the purity of a form freed from all “natural”
bonds to a substance but also to everything that, in the stratification of language,
depends on the substance of graphic expression. An original and rigorously
delimited description of this may thus be promised. Hjelmslev recognises that an
“analysis of writing without regard to sound has not yet been undertaken”. While
regretting also that “the substance of ink has not received the same attention on
the part of linguists that they have so lavishly bestowed on the substance of air,”
H. J. Uldall delimits these problems and emphasises the mutual independence of
the substances of expression. He illustrates it particularly by the fact that, in
orthography, no grapheme corresponds to accents of pronunciation (for
Rousseau this was the misery, and the menace of writing) and that, reciprocally,
in pronunciation, no phoneme corresponds to the spacing between written words.
Recognising the specificity of writing, glossematics did not merely give itself the
means of describing the graphic element. It showed bow to reach the literary
element, to what in literature passes through an irreducibly graphic text, tying the
play of form to a determined substance of expression. If there is something in

literature which does not allow itself to be reduced to the voice, to epos or to
poetry, one cannot recapture it except by rigorously isolating the bond that links

the play of form to the substance of graphic expression. (It will by the same token
be seen that “pure literature,” thus respected in its irreducibilty, also risks limiting
the play, restricting it. The desire to restrict play is, moreover, irresistible.) This
interest in literature is effectively manifested in the Copenhagen School. It thus
removes the Rousseauist and Saussurian caution with regard to literary arts. It
radicalises the efforts of the Russian formalists, specifically of the O.PO.IAZ,
who, in their attention to the being-literary of literature, perhaps favoured the
phonological instance and the literary models that it dominates. Notably poetry.
That which, within the history of literature and in the structure of a literary text in
general, escapes that framework, merits a type of description whose norms and
conditions of possibility glossematics has perhaps better isolated. It has perhaps
thus better prepared itself to study the purely graphic stratum within the structure
of the literary text within the history of the becoming-literary of literality, notably in
its “modernity.”
Undoubtedly a new domain is thus opened to new and fecund researches. But I
am not primarily interested in such a parallelism or such a recaptured parity of
substances of expression. It is clear that if the phonic substance lost its privilege,
it was not to the advantage of the graphic substance, which lends itself to the
same substitutions. To the extent that it liberates and is irrefutable, glossematics
still operates with a popular concept of writing. However original and irreducible it
might be, the “form of expression” linked by correlation to the graphic “substance
of expression” remains very determined. It is very dependent and very derivative
with regard to the arche-writing of which I speak. This arche-writing would be at
work not only in the form and substance of graphic expression but also in those
of non-graphic expression. It would constitute not only the pattern uniting form to
all substance, graphic or otherwise, but the movement of the sign-function linking
a content to an expression, whether it be graphic or not. This theme could not
have a place in Hjelmslev's system.

It is because arche-writing, movement of difference, irreducible archesynthesis,
opening in one and the same possibility, temporalisation as well as relationship
with the other and language, cannot, as the condition of all linguistic systems,
form a part of the linguistic system itself and be situated as an object in its field.
(which does not mean it has a real field elsewhere, another assignable site.) Its
concept could in no way enrich the scientific, positive, and “immanent” (in the
Hjelmslevian sense) description of the system itself. Therefore, the founder of
glossematics would no doubt have questioned its necessity, as be rejects, en
bloc and legitimately, all the extra-linguistic theories which do not arise from the
irreducible immanence of the linguistic system. He would have seen in that
notion one of those appeals to experience which a theory should dispense with.
He would not have understood why the name writing continued — to be used for
that X which becomes so different from what has always been called “writing.”
I have already begun to justify this word, and especially the necessity of the
communication between the concept of arche-writing and the vulgar concept of
writing submitted to deconstruction by it. I shall continue to do so below. As for
the concept of experience, it is most unwieldy here. Like all the notions I am
using here, it belongs to the history of metaphysics and we can only use it under
erasure [sous rature]. “Experience” has always designated the relationship with a
presence, whether that relationship bad the form of consciousness or not. At any
rate, we must, according to this sort of contortion and contention which the
discourse is obliged to undergo, exhaust the resources of the concept of
experience before attaining and in order to attain, by deconstruction, its ultimate
foundation. It is the only way to escape “empiricism” and the “naive” critiques of
experience at the same time. Thus, for example, the experience whose “theory,”
Hjelmslev says, ,'must be independent” is not the whole of experience. It always
corresponds to a certain type of factual or regional experience (historical,
psychological, physiological, sociological, etc.), giving rise to a science that is
itself regional and, as such, rigorously outside linguistics. That is not so at all in
the case of experience as arche-writing. The parenthesising of regions of

experience or of the totality of natural experience must discover a field of
transcendental experience. This experience is only accessible in so far as, after
having, like Hjelmslev, isolated the specificity of the linguistic system and
excluded all the extrinsic sciences and metaphysical speculations, one asks the
question of the transcendental origin of the system itself, as a system of the
objects of a science, and, correlatively, of the theoretical system which studies it:
here of the objective and “deductive” system which glossematics wishes to be.
Without that, the decisive progress accomplished by a formalism respectful of the
originality of its object, of “the immanent system of its objects,” is plagued by a
scientificist objectivism, that is to say by another unperceived or unconfessed
metaphysics. This is often noticeable in the work of the Copenhagen School. It is
to escape falling back into this naive objectivism that I refer here to a
transcendentality that I elsewhere put into question. It is because I believe that
there is a short-of and a beyond of transcendental criticism. To see to it that the
beyond does not return to the within is to recognise in the contortion the
necessity of a pathway [parcours]. That pathway must leave a track in the text.
Without that track, abandoned to the simple content of its conclusions, the ultratranscendental text will so closely resemble the precritical text as to be
indistinguishable from it. We must now form and meditate upon the law of this
resemblance. What I call the erasure of concepts ought to mark the places of that
future meditation. For example, the value of the transcendental arche [archie]
must make its necessity felt before letting itself be erased. The concept of archetrace must comply with both that necessity and that erasure. It is in fact
contradictory and not acceptable within the logic of identity. The trace is not only
the disappearance of origin — within the discourse that we sustain and according
to the path that we follow it means that the origin did not even disappear, that it
was never constituted except reciprocally by a non-origin, the trace, which thus
becomes the origin of the origin. From then on, to wrench the concept of the
trace from the classical scheme, which would derive it from a presence or from
an originary non-trace and which would make of it an empirical mark, one must

indeed speak of an originary trace or arche-trace. Yet we know that that concept
destroys its name and that, if all begins with the trace, there is above all no
originary trace. We must then situate, as a simple moment of the discourse, the
phenomenological reduction and the Husserlian reference to a transcendental
experience. To the extent that the concept of experience in general — and of
transcendental experience, in Husserl in particular — remains governed by the
theme of presence, it participates in the movement of the reduction of the trace.
The Living Present (lebendige Gegenwart) is the universal and absolute form of
transcendental experience to which Husserl refers us. In the descriptions of the
movements of temporalisation, all that does not torment the simplicity and the
domination of that form seems to indicate to us how much transcendental
phenomenology belongs to metaphysics. But that must come to terms with the
forces of rupture. In the originary temporalisation and the movement of
relationship

with

the

outside,

as

Husserl

actually

describes

them,

nonpresentation or depresentation is as “originary” as presentation. That is why a

thought of the trace can no more break with a transcendental phenomenology
than be reduced to it. Here as elsewhere, to pose the problem in terms of choice,
to oblige or to believe oneself obliged to answer it by a yes or no, to conceive of
appurtenance as an allegiance or non-appurtenance as plain speaking, is to
confuse very different levels, paths, and styles. In the deconstruction of the
arche, one does not make a choice.
Therefore I admit the necessity of going through the concept of the arche-trace.
How does that necessity direct us from the interior of the linguistic system? How
does the path that leads from Saussure to Hjelmslev forbid us to avoid the
originary trace?
In that its passage through form is a passage through the imprint. And the
meaning of difference in general would be more accessible to us if the unity of
that double passage appeared more clearly.
In both cases, one must begin from the possibility of neutralising the phonic
substance.

On the one band, the phonic element, the term, the plenitude that is called
sensible, would not appear as such without the difference or opposition which
gives them form. Such is the most evident significance of the appeal to difference
as the reduction of phonic substance. Here the appearing and functioning of
difference presupposes an originary synthesis not preceded by any absolute
simplicity. Such would be the originary trace. Without a retention in the minimal
unit of temporal experience, without a trace retaining the other as other in the
same, no difference would do its work and no meaning would appear. It is not the
question of a constituted difference here, but rather, before all determination of
the content, of the pure movement which produces difference. The (pure) trace is

difference. It does not depend on any sensible plenitude, audible or visible,
phonic or graphic. It is, on the contrary, the condition of such a plenitude.
Although it does not exist, although it is never a being-present outside of all
plenitude, its possibility is by rights anterior to all that one calls sign
(signified/signifier, content/expression, etc.), concept or operation, motor or
sensory. This difference is therefore not more sensible than intelligible and it
permits the articulation of signs among themselves within the same abstract
order — a phonic or graphic text for example — or between two orders of
expression. It permits the articulation of speech and writing — in the colloquial
sense — as it founds the metaphysical opposition between the sensible and the
intelligible, then between signifier and signified, expression and content, etc. If
language were not already, in that sense, a writing, no derived “notation” would
be possible; and the classical problem of relationships between speech and
writing could not arise. Of course, the positive sciences of signification can only
describe the work and the fact of differance, the determined differences and the
determined presences that they make possible. There cannot be a science of
difference itself in its operation, as it is impossible to have a science of the origin
of presence itself, that is to say of a certain non-origin.
Differance is therefore the formation of form. But it is on the other hand the
being-imprinted of the imprint. It is well-known that Saussure distinguishes

between the “sound-image” and the objective sound. He thus gives himself the
right to “reduce,” in the phenomenological sense, the sciences of acoustics and
physiology at the moment that he institutes the science of language. The soundimage is the structure of the appearing of the sound [l'apparaître du son] which is
anything but the sound appearing [le son apparaissant]. It is the sound-image
that be calls signifier, reserving the name signified not for the thing, to be sure (it
is reduced by the act and the very ideality of language), but for the “concept,”
undoubtedly an unhappy notion here; let us say for the ideality of the sense. “I
propose to retain the word sign [signe] to designate the whole and to replace
concept and sound-image respectively by signified [signifé] and signifier
[signifiant].” The sound-image is what is heard; not the sound heard but the
being-beard of the sound. Being-heard is structurally phenomenal and belongs to
an order radically dissimilar to that of the real sound in the world. One can only
divide this subtle but absolutely decisive heterogeneity by a phenomenological
reduction. The latter is therefore indispensable to all analyses of being-heard,
whether they be inspired by linguistic, psychoanalytic, or other preoccupations.
Now the “sound-image,” the structured appearing [l'apparaître] of the sound, the
“sensory matter” lived and informed by difference, what Husserl would name the

hylè/morphé structure, distinct from all mundane reality, is called the “psychic
image” by Saussure: “The latter [the sound-image] is not the material sound, a
purely physical thing, but the psychic imprint of the sound, the impression that it
makes on our senses [la représentation que nous en donne le témoignage de

nos sens]. The sound-image is sensors,, and if I happen to call it 'material,' it is
only in that sense, and by way of opposing it, to the other term of the association,
the concept, which is generally more abstract”. Although the word “psychic” is not
perhaps convenient, except for exercising in this matter a phenomenological
caution, the originality of a certain place is well marked.
Before specifying it, let us note that this is not necessarily what Jakobson and
other linguists could criticise as “the mentalist point of view”:

In the oldest of these approaches, going back to Baudouin de Courtenay and still
surviving, the phoneme is a sound imagined or intended, opposed to the emitted
sound as a “psychophonetic” phenomenon to the “physiophonetic” fact. It is the
psychic equivalent of an exteriorised sound.
Although the notion of the “psychic image” thus defined (that is to say according
to a pre-phenomenological psychology of the imagination) is indeed of this
mentalist inspiration, it could be defended against Jakobson's criticism by
specifying: (i) that it could be conserved without necessarily affirming that “our
internal speech is confined to the distinctive features to the exclusion of the
configurative, or redundant features;” (2) that the qualification psychic is not
retained if it designates exclusively another natural reality, internal and not
external. Here the Husserlian correction is indispensable and transforms even
the premises of the debate. Real (reell and not real) component of lived
experience, the hylè/morphé structure is not a reality (Realität). As to the
intentional object, for example, the content of the image, it does not really (reall)
belong either to the world or to lived experience: the non-real component of lived
experience. The psychic image of which Saussure speaks must not be an
internal reality copying an external one. Husserl, who criticises this concept of
“portrait” in Idee shows also in the Krisis how phenomenology should overcome
the naturalist opposition whereby psychology and the other sciences of man
survive — between internal” and “external” experience. It is therefore
indispensable to preserve the distinction between the appearing sound [le son

apparaissant] and the appearing of the sound [l'apparaître du son] in order to
escape the worst and the most prevalent of confusions; and it is in principle
possible to do it without “attempt[ing] to overcome the antinomy between
invariance and variability by assigning the former to the internal and the latter to
the external experience” (Jakobson). The difference between invariance and
variability does not separate the two domains from each other, it divides each of
them within itself. That gives enough indication that the essence of the phonè

cannot be read directly and primarily in the text of a mundane science, of a
psycho-physiophonetics.
These precautions taken, it should be recognised that it is in the specific zone of
this imprint and this trace, in the temporalisation of a lived experience which is
neither in the world nor in “another world,” which is not more sonorous than
luminous, not more in time than in space, that differences appear among the
elements or rather produce them, make them emerge as such and constitute the
texts, the chains, and the systems of traces. These chains and systems cannot
be outlined except in the fabric of this trace or imprint. The unheard difference
between the appearing and the appearance [I'apparaissant et I'apparaître]
(between the “world” and “lived experience”) is the condition of all other
differences, of all other traces, and it is already a trace. This last concept is thus
absolutely and by rights “anterior” to all physiological problematics concerning
the nature of the engramme [the unit of engraving], or metaphysical problematics
concerning the meaning of absolute presence whose trace is thus opened to
deciphering. The trace is in fact the absolute origin of sense in general. Which

amounts to saying once again that there is no absolute origin of sense in general.
The trace is the difference which opens appearance [I'apparaître] and
signification. Articulating the living upon the non-living in general, origin of all
repetition, origin of ideality, the trace is not more ideal than real, not more
intelligible than sensible, not more a transparent signification than an opaque
energy and no concept of metaphysics can describe it. And as it is a fortiori
anterior to the distinction between regions of sensibility, anterior to sound as
much as to light, is there a sense in establishing a “natural” hierarchy between
the sound-imprint, for example, and the visual (graphic) imprint? The graphic
image is not seen; and the acoustic image is not heard. The difference between
the full unities of the voice remains unheard. And, the difference in the body of
the inscription is also invisible.

The Hinge [La Brisure]

You have, I suppose, dreamt of finding a single word for designating difference
and articulation. I have perhaps located it by chance in Robert['s Dictionary] if I
play on the word, or rather indicate its double meaning. This word is brisure [joint,
break] “ — broken, cracked part. Cf. breach, crack, fracture, fault, split, fragment,

[bréche, cassure, fracture, faille, fente, fragment.] — Hinged articulation of two
parts of wood- or metal-work. The hinge, the brisure [folding-joint] of a shutter.
Cf. joint.” — Roger Laporte (letter)
Origin of the experience of space and time, this writing of difference, this fabric of
the trace, permits the difference between space and time to be articulated, to
appear as such, in the unity of an experience (of a “same” lived out of a “same”
body proper [corps propre]). This articulation therefore permits a graphic (“visual”
or “tactile,” “spatial”) chain to be adapted, on occasion in a linear fashion, to a
spoken (“phonic,” “temporal”) chain. It is from the primary possibility of this
articulation that one must begin. Difference is articulation.
This is, indeed, what Saussure says, contradicting Chapter VI:
The question of the vocal apparatus obviously takes a secondary place in the
problem of language. One definition of articulated language might confirm that
conclusion. In Latin, articulus means a member, part, or subdivision of a
sequence; applied to speech [langage], articulation designates either the
subdivision of a spoken chain into syllables or the subdivision of the chain of
meanings into significant units. . . . Using the second definition, we can say that
what is natural to mankind is not spoken language but the faculty of constructing
a language; i.e., a system of distinct signs Corresponding to distinct ideas (italics
added).
The idea of the “psychic imprint” therefore relates essentially to the idea of
articulation. Without the difference between the sensory appearing [apparaissant]
and its lived appearing [apparaître] (“mental imprint”), the temporalising
synthesis, which permits differences to appear in a chain of significations, could
not operate. That the “imprint” is irreducible means also that speech is originarily
passive, but in a sense of passivity that all intramundane metaphors would only

betray. This passivity is also the relationship to a past, to an always-already-there
that no reactivation of the origin could fully master and awaken to presence. This
impossibility of reanimating absolutely the manifest evidence of an originary
presence refers us therefore to an absolute past. That is what authorised us to
call trace that which does not let itself be summed up in the simplicity of a
present. It could in fact have been objected that, in the indecomposable
synthesis of temporalisation, protection is as indispensable as retention. And
their two dimensions are not added up but the one implies the other in a strange
fashion. To be sure, what is anticipated in protention does not sever the present
any less from its self-identity than does that which is retained in the trace. But if
anticipation were privileged, the irreducibility of the always-already-there and the
fundamental passivity that is called time would risk effacement. On the other
hand, if the trace refers to an absolute past, it is because it obliges us to think a
past that can no longer be understood in the form of a modified presence, as a
present-past. Since past has always signified present-past, the absolute past that
is retained in the trace no longer rigorously merits the name “past.” Another
name to erase, especially since the strange movement of the trace proclaims as
much as it recalls: difference defers-differs [differs]. With the same precaution
and under the same erasure, it may be said that its passivity is also its
relationship with the “future.” The concepts of present, past, and future,
everything in the concepts of time and history which implies evidence of them —
the metaphysical concept of time in general — cannot adequately describe the
structure of the trace. And deconstructing the simplicity of presence does not
amount only to accounting for the horizons of potential presence, indeed of
“dialectic of protention and retention that one would install in the heart of the
present instead of surrounding it with it. It is not a matter of complicating the
structure of time while conserving its homogeneity and its fundamental
successivity, by demonstrating for example that the past present and the future
present constitute originarily, by dividing it, the form of the living present. Such a
complication, which is in effect the same that Husserl described, abides, in spite

of an audacious phenomenological reduction, by the evidence and presence of a
linear, objective, and mundane model. Now B would be as such constituted by
the retention of Now A and the protention of Now C; in spite of all the play that
would follow from it, from the fact that each one of the three Now-s reproduces
that structure in itself, this model of successivity would prohibit a Now X from
taking the place of Now A, for example, and would prohibit that, by a delay that is
inadmissible to consciousness, an experience be determined, in its very present,
by a present which would not have preceded it immediately but would be
considerably “anterior” to it. It is the problem of the deferred effect
(Nachträglichkeit) of ,which Freud speaks. The temporality to which he refers
cannot be that which lends itself to a phenomenology of consciousness or of
presence and one may indeed wonder by what right all that is in question here
should still be called time, now, anterior present, delay, etc.
In its greatest formality, this immense problem would be formulated thus: is the
temporality described by a transcendental phenomenology as “dialectical” as
possible, a ground which the structures, let us say the unconscious structures, of
temporality would simply modify? Or is the phenomenological model itself
constituted, as a warp of language, logic, evidence, fundamental security, upon a
woof that is not its own? And which — such is the most difficult problem — is no
longer at all mundane? For it is not by chance that the transcendental
phenomenology of the internal time-consciousness, so careful to place cosmic
time

within

brackets,

must,

as

consciousness

and

even

as

internal

consciousness, live a time that is an accomplice of the time of the world.
Between consciousness, perception (internal or external), and the “world,” the
rupture, even in the subtle form of the reduction, is perhaps not possible.
It is in a certain “unheard” sense, then, that speech is in the world, rooted in that
passivity which metaphysics calls sensibility in general. Since there is no nonmetaphoric language to oppose to metaphors here, one must, as Bergson
wished, multiply antagonistic metaphors. “Wish sensibilised,” is bow Maine de
Biran, with a slightly different intention, named the vocalic word. That the logos is

first imprinted and that that imprint is the writing-resource of language, signifies,
to be sure, that the logos is not a creative activity, the continuous full element of
the divine word, etc. But it would not mean a single step outside of metaphysics if
nothing more than a new motif of “return to finitude,” of “God's death,” etc., were
the result of this move. It is that conceptuality and that problematics that must be
deconstructed. They belong to the onto-theology they fight against. Differance is
also something other than finitude.
According to Saussure, the passivity of speech is first its relationship with
language. The relationship between passivity and difference cannot be
distinguished from the relationship between the fundamental unconsciousness of
language (as rootedness within the language) and the spacing (pause, blank,
punctuation, interval in general, etc.) which constitutes the origin of signification.
It is because “language is a form and not a substance” that, paradoxically, the
activity of speech can and must always draw from it. But if it is a form, it is
because “in language there are only differences”. Spacing (notice that this word
speaks the articulation of space and time, the becoming-space of time and the
becoming-time of space) is always the unperceived, the non-present, and the
non-conscious. As such, if one can still use that expression in a nonphenomenological way; for here we pass the very limits of phenomenology.
Arche-writing as spacing cannot occur as such within the phenomenological
experience of a presence. It marks the dead time within the presence of the living
present, within the general form of all presence. The dead time is at work. That is
why, once again, in spite of all the discursive resources that the former may
borrow from the latter, the concept of the trace will never be merged with a
phenomenology of writing. As the phenomenology of the sign in general, a
phenomenology of writing is impossible. No intuition can be realised in the place
where “the 'whites' indeed take on an importance” (Preface to Coup de dés).
Perhaps it is now easier to understand why Freud savs of the dreamwork that it
is comparable rather to a writing than to a language, and to a hieroglyphic rather
than to a phonetic writing. And to understand why Saussure savs of language

that it “is not a function of the speaker”. With or without the complicity of their
authors, all these propositions must be understood as more than the simple

reversals of a metaphysics of presence or of conscious subjectivity. Constituting
and dislocating it at the same time, writing is other than the subject, in whatever
sense the latter is understood. Writing can never be thought under the category
of the subject; however it is modified, however it is endowed with consciousness
or unconsciousness, it will refer, by the entire thread of its history, to the
substantiality of a presence unperturbed by accidents, or to the identity of the
selfsame [le propre] in the presence of self-relationship.
And the thread of that history clearly does not run within the borders of
metaphysics. To determine an X as a subject is never an operation of a pure
convention, it is never an indifferent gesture in relation to writing.
Spacing as writing is the becoming-absent and the becoming-unconscious of the
subject. By the movement of its drift/derivation [dérive] the emancipation of the
sign constitutes in return the desire of presence. That becoming-or that
drift/derivation-does not befall the subject which would choose it or would
passively let itself be drawn along by it. As the subject's relationship with its own
death, this becoming is the constitution of subjectivity. On all levels of life's
organisation, that is to say, of the economy of death. All graphemes are of a
testamentary essence. And the original absence of the subject of writing is also
the absence of the thing or the referent.
Within the horizontality of spacing, which is in fact the precise dimension I have
been speaking of so far, and which is not opposed to it as surface opposes
depth, it is not even necessary to say that spacing cuts, drops, and causes to
drop within the unconscious: the unconscious is nothing without this cadence and
before this caesura. This signification is formed only within the hollow of
difference: of discontinuity and of discreteness, of the diversion and the reserve
of what does not appear. This hinge [brisure] of language as writing, this
discontinuity, could have, at a given moment within linguistics, run up against a
rather precious continuist prejudice. Renouncing it, phonology must indeed

renounce all distinctions between writing and the spoken word, and thus
renounce not itself, phonology, but rather phonologism. What Jakobson
recognises in this respect is most important for us:
The stream of oral speech, physically continuous, originally confronted the
mathematical theory of communication with a situation “considerably more
involved” [The Mathematical Theory of Communication, Urbana, 1949] than in
the case of a finite set of discrete constituents, as presented by written speech.
Linguistic analysis, however, came to resolve oral speech into a finite series of
elementary informational units. These ultimate discrete units, the so-called
“distinctive features,” are aligned into simultaneous bundles termed “phonemes,”
which in turn are concatenated into sequences. Thus form in language has a
manifestly granular structure and is subject to a quantal description. [Linguistique

et théorie de la communication]
The hinge [brisure] marks the impossibility that a sign, the unity of a signifier and
a signified, be produced within the plenitude of a present and an absolute
presence. That is why there is no full speech, however much one might wish to
restore it by means or without benefit of psychoanalysis. Before thinking to
reduce it or to restore the meaning of the full speech which claims to be truth,
one must ask the question of meaning and of its origin in difference. Such is the
place of a problematic of the trace.
Why of the trace? What led us to the choice of this word? I have begun to answer
this question. But this question is such, and such the nature of my answer, that
the place of the one and of the other must constantly be in movement. If words
and concepts receive meaning only in sequences of differences, one can Justify
one's language, and one's choice of terms, only within a topic [an orientation in
space] and an historical strategy. The justification can therefore never be
absolute and definitive. It corresponds to a condition of forces and translates an
historical calculation. Thus, over and above those that I have already defined, a
certain number of givens belonging to the discourse of our time have
progressively imposed this choice upon me. The word trace must refer to itself to

a certain number of contemporary discourses whose force I intend to take into
account. Not that I accept them totally,. But the word trace establishes the
clearest connections with them and thus permits me to dispense with certain
developments which have already demonstrated their effectiveness in those
fields. Thus, I relate this concept of trace to what is at the center of the latest
work of Emmanuel Levinas and his critique of ontology: relationship to the illeity
as to the alterity of a past that never was and can never be lived in the originary
or modified form of presence. Reconciled here to a Heideggerian intention, — as
it is not in Levinas's thought — this notion signifies, sometimes beyond
Heideggerian discourse, the undermining of an ontology which, in its innermost
course, has determined the meaning of being as presence and the meaning of
language as the full continuity of speech. To make enigmatic what one thinks one
understands by the words “proximity,” “immediacy,” “Presence” (the proximate
[proche], the own [propre], and the pre- of presence), is my final intention in this
book. This deconstruction of presence accomplishes itself through the
deconstruction of consciousness, and therefore through the irreducible notion of
the trace (Spur), as it appears in both Nietzschean and Freudian discourse. And
finally, in all scientific fields, notably in biology, this notion seems currently to be
dominant and irreducible.
If the trace, arche-phenomenon of “memory,” which must be thought before the
opposition of nature and culture, animality and humanity, etc., belongs to the very
movement of signification, then signification is a priori written, whether inscribed
or not, in one form or another, in a “sensible” and “spatial” element that is called
“exterior.” Arche-writing, at first the possibility of the spoken word, then of the

“graphie” in the narrow sense, the birthplace of “usurpation,” denounced from
Plato to Saussure, this trace is the opening of the first exteriority in general, the
enigmatic relationship of the living to its other and of an inside to an outside:
spacing. The outside, “spatial” and “objective” exteriority which we believe we
know as the most familiar thing in the world, as familiarity itself, would not appear
without the grammé, without difference as temporalisation, without the

nonpresense of the other inscribed within the sense of the present, without the
relationship with death as the concrete structure of the living present. Metaphor
would be forbidden. The presence-absence of the trace, which one should not
even call its ambiguity but rather its play (for the word “ambiguity” requires the
logic of presence, even when it begins to disobey that logic), carries in itself the
problems of the letter and the spirit, of body and soul, and of all the problems
whose primary affinity I have recalled. All dualisms, all theories of the immortality
of the soul or of the spirit, as well as all monisms, spiritualist or materialist,
dialectical or vulgar, are the unique theme of a metaphysics whose entire history
was compelled to strive toward the reduction of the trace. The subordination of
the trace to the full presence summed up in the logos, the humbling of writing
beneath a speech dreaming its plenitude, such are the gestures required by an
onto-theology determining the archaeological and eschatological meaning of
being as presence, as parousia, as life without difference: another name for
death, historical metonymy where God's name holds death in check. That is why,
if this movement begins its era in the form of Platonism, it ends in infinitist
metaphysics. Only infinite being can reduce the difference in presence. In that
sense, the name of God, at least as it is pronounced within classical rationalism,
is the name of indifference itself. Only a positive infinity can lift the trace,
“sublimate” it (it has recently been proposed that the Hegelian Aufhebung be
translated as sublimation; this translation may be of dubious worth as translation,
but the juxtaposition is of interest here). We must not therefore speak of a
“theological prejudice,” functioning sporadically when it is a question of the
plenitude of the logos; the logos as the sublimation of the trace is theological.
Infinitist theologies are always logocentrisms, whether they are creationisms or
not. Spinoza himself said of the understanding — or logos — that it was the
immediate infinite mode of the divine substance, even calling it its eternal son in
the Short Treatise. [Spinoza] It is also to this epoch, “reaching completion” with
Hegel, with a theology of the absolute concept as logos, that all the non-critical
concepts accredited by linguistics belong, at least to the extent that linguistics

must confirm — and how can a science avoid it? — the Saussurian decree
marking out “the internal system of language.”
It is precisely these concepts that permitted the exclusion of writing: image or
representation, sensible and intelligible, nature and culture, nature and technics,
etc. They are solidary with all metaphysical conceptuality and particularly with a
naturalist, objectivist, and derivative determination of the difference between
outside and inside.
And above all with a “vulgar concept of time.” I borrow this expression from
Heidegger. It designates, at the end of Being and Time, a concept of time
thought in terms of spatial movement or of the now, and dominating all
philosophy from Aristotle's Physics to Hegel's Logic. This concept, which
determines all of classical ontology, was not born out of a philosopher's
carelessness or from a theoretical lapse. It is intrinsic to the totality of the history
of the Occident, of what unites its metaphysics and its technics. And we shall see
it later associated with the linearisation of writing, and with the linearist concept of
speech. This linearism is undoubtedly inseparable from phonologism; it can raise
its voice to the same extent that a linear writing can seem to submit to it.
Saussure's entire theory of the “linearity of the signifier” could be interpreted from
this point of view.
Auditory signifiers have at their command only the dimension of time. Their
elements are presented in succession; they form a chain. This feature becomes
readily apparent when they are represented in writing.... The signifier, being
auditory, is unfolded solely in time from which it gets the following characteristics:
(a) it represents a span, and (b) the span is measurable in a single dimension; it
is a line.
It is a point on which Jakobson disagrees with Saussure decisively by
substituting for the homogeneousness of the line the structure of the musical
staff, “the chord in music.” What is here in question is not Saussure's affirmation
of the temporal essence of discourse but the concept of time that guides this
affirmation and analysis: time conceived as linear successivity, as “consecutivity.”

This model works by itself and all through the Course, but Saussure is seemingly
less sure of it in the Anagrams. At any rate, its value seems problematic to him
and an interesting paragraph elaborates a question left suspended:
That the elements forming a word follow one another is a truth that it would be
better for linguistics not to consider uninteresting because evident, but rather as
the truth which gives in advance the central principle of all useful reflections on
words. In a domain as infinitely special as the one I am about to enter, it is
always by virtue of the fundamental law of the human word in general that a
question like that of consecutiveness or non-consecutiveness may be posed.
[Mercure de France, 1964]
This linearist concept of time is therefore one of the deepest adherences of the
modem concept of the sign to its own history. For at the limit it is indeed the
concept of the sign itself, and the distinction, however tenuous, between the
signifying and signified faces, that remain committed to the history of classical
ontology. The parallelism and correspondence of the faces or the planes change
nothing. That this distinction, first appearing in Stoic logic, was necessary for the
coherence of a scholastic thematics dominated by infinitist theology, forbids us to
treat today's debt to it as a contingency or a convenience. I suggested this at the
outset, and perhaps the reasons are clearer now. The signatum always referred,
as to its referent, to a res, to an entity created or at any rate first thought and
spoken, thinkable and speakable, in the eternal present of the divine logos and
specifically in its breath. If it came to relate to the speech of a finite being
(created or not; in any case of an intracosmic entity) through the intermediary of
a signans, the signatum had an immediate relationship with the divine logos
which thought it within presence and for which it was not a trace. And for modem
linguistics, if the signifier is a trace, the signified is a meaning thinkable in
principle within the full presence of an intuitive consciousness. The signfied face,
to the extent that it is still originarily distinguished from the signifying face, is not
considered a trace; by rights, it has no need of the signifier to be what it is. It is at
the depth of this affirmation that the problem of relationships between linguistics

and semantics must be posed. This reference to the meaning of a signified
thinkable and possible outside of all signifiers remains dependent upon the
ontotheo-teleology that I have just evoked. It is thus the idea of the sign that must
be deconstructed through a meditation upon writing which would merge, as it
must, with the undoing [sollicitation] of onto-theology, faithfully repeating it in its
totality and making it insecure in its most assured evidences. One is necessarily
led to this from the moment that the trace affects the totality of the sign in both its
faces. That the signified is originarily and essentially (and not only for a finite and
created spirit) trace, that it is always already in the position of the signifier, is the
apparently innocent proposition within which the metaphysics of the logos, of
presence and consciousness, must reflect upon writing as its death and its
resource.
Further

Reading:

Speech & Writing according to Hegel, Derrida 1971 | Spectres of Marx, Derrida
1994 | Biography | Rousseau | Saussure | Jakobson | Barthes | Foucault |
Althusser | Rorty | Chomsky | Vygotsky
Philosophy Archive @ marxists.org