Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: John
Hopkins University Press, 1976.

“But, within this structural metaphor, Derrida’s cry is ‘dissemination’ the seed that neither inseminates nor is recovered by the father, but is scattered abroad” (Spivak xi).

“So do the two readins of the ‘same’ book show an identity that can only be defined as a difference. The book is not repeatable in its ‘identity’: each reading of the book produces a simulacrum of an ‘original’ that is itself the mark of the shifting and unstable subject that Proust describes, using and being used by a language that is also shifting and unstable” (Spivak xii).

“The text has no stable identity, no stable origin, no stable end. Each act of reading the ‘text’ is a preface to the next. The reading of a self-professed preface is no exception to this rule” (Spivak xii).

“There is, then, always already a preface between two hands holding open a book. And the ‘prefacer,’ of the same or another proper name as the ‘author,’ need not apologize for ‘repeating’ the text” (Spivak xiii).

“(Since the word is inaccurate, it is crossed out. Since it is necessary, it remains legible)” (Spivak xiv).

“so Heidegger, establishing a definition, philosophically confronts the problem of definitions: in order for the nature of anything in particular to be defined as an entity, the question of Being in general must always already be broached and answered in the affirmative. That something is, presupposes that anything can be” (Spivak xiv).

“Now there is a certain difference between what Heidegger puts under erasure and what Derrida does, ‘Being” is the master-word that Heidegger crosses out. Derrida does not reject this. But his word is ‘trace’ (the French word carries strong implications of track, footprint, imprint), a word that cannot be a master-word, that presents itself as the mark of an anterior presence, origin, master. For ‘trace’ one can substitute ‘arche-writing’ (‘archi-ecriture’), or ‘difference,’ or in fact quite a few other words that Derrida uses in the same way. But I shall begin with ‘trace/track,’ for it is a simple word” (Spivak xv-xvi).

“But Heidegger makes it clear that Being cannot be contained by, is always prior to, indeed transcends, signification. It is therefore a situation where the signified commands, and is yet free of, all signifiers—a recognizably theological situation” (Spivak xvi).

“Derrida seems to show no nostalgia for a lost presence” (Spivak xvi).

“It is indeed an ineluctable nostalgia for presence makes of this heterogeneity a unity by declaring that a sign brings forth the presence of the signified” (Spivak xvi).

“The sign marks a place of difference” (Spivak xvi).

“The structure of the sign is determined by the trace or track of that other which is forever absent” (Spivak xvii).

“Heidegger’s Being [erasure] might point at an inarticulable presence. Derrida’s trace [erasure] is the mark of the absence of a presence, an always already absent present, of the lack of the origin that is the condition of thought and experience” (Spivak xvii).

“At once inside and outside a certain Hegelian and Heideggarian tradition, Derrida, then, is asking us to change certain habits of mind: the authority of the text is provisional, the origin is a trace; contradicting logic, we must learn to use and erase our language at the same time” (Spivak xviii).

“Derrida in particular is acutely aware that it is a question of strategy. It is the strategy of using the only language while not subscribing to its premises, or ‘operat[ing] according to the vocabulary of the very thing that one delimits’ (MP 18, SP 147)” (Spivak xviii).

“the bricoleur makes do with things that were meant perhaps for other ends” (Spivak xix).

“The reason for bricolage is that there can be nothing else. No engineer can make the ‘means’—the sign—and the ‘end’—meaning—become self-identical. Sign will always lead to sign, one substituting the other (playfully, since ‘sign’ is ‘under erasure’) as signifier and signified in turn. Indeed, the notion of play is important here. Knowledge is not a systematic tracking down of a truth that is hidden but may be found. It is rather the field ‘of freeplay, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions in the closure of a finite ensemble’ (ED 423, SC 260)” (Spivak xix).

“He remarks that Levi-Strauss, like Heidegger, is afflicted with nostalgia: ‘one . . . perceives in his work a sort of ethic of presence, an ethic of nostalgia for origins, an ethic of archaic and natural innocence, of a purity of presence and self-presence in speech—an ethic, nostalgia, and even remorse which he often presents as the motivation of the ethnological project when he moves toward archaic societies—exemplary societies in his eyes’ (ED 427, SC 264)” (Spivak xix-xx).

“All knowledge, whether one knos it or not, is a species of bricolage, with its eye on the myth of ‘engineering.’ But that myth is always totally other, leaving an orignary trace within ‘bricolage.’ Like all ‘useful’ words, ‘bricolage’ must be placed ‘under erasure.’ For it can only be defined by its difference from its opposite—‘engineering.’ Yet that opposite, a metaphysical norm, can in fact never be present and thus, strictly speaking, there is no concept of ‘bricolage’ (that which is not engineering). Yet the concept must be used—untenable but necessary” (Spivak xx).

“Derrida uses the word ‘metaphysics’ very simply as shorthand for any science of presence” (Spivak xxi).

“In this important respect, ‘without him [Nietzsche] the ‘question’ of the text would never have erupted, at least in the precise sense that it has taken today.’ In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche reads the history of morality as a text” (Spivak xxiii).

“Derrida criticizes Neitzsche precisely because what Nietzsche deciphers he holds decipherable and because metaphor (or figure) so vastly expanded could simply become the name of the process of signification rather than a critique of that process” (Spivak xxiv).

“Purpose and accident, death and life: ‘Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident, for it is only beside a world of purposes that the word ‘accident has meaning” (Spivak xxix).

“Nietzsche’s undoing of opposite is a version of Derrida’s practice of undoing them through the concept of ‘difference’ (deferment-difference)” (Spivak xxix).

“Heidegger stands between Derrida and Nietzsche” (Spivak xxxiii).

“The strategy of deconstruction, as we shall see later, often fastens upon such a small but tell-tale moment” (Spivak xxxv).

“And, inaugurating for us an attitude that I shall develop later in this Preface, Derrida writes: ‘The text can always remain at the same time open, proffered and indecipherable, even without our knowing that it is indecipherable’ (QS 286)” (Spivak xxxvii).

“For his purposes, in other words, it is not a science that necessarily provides a correct picture of the psychic norm and prescribes cures for the abnormal, but rather teaches, thorugh its own use thereof, a certain method of deciphering any text. Whether he acknowledges it or not, Freud implies that the psyche is a sign-structure ‘sous rature,’ for, like the sign, it is inhabited by a radical alterity, what is totally other—‘Freud gives it [this radical alterity] a metaphysical name, the unconscious (MP 21, SP 151).

“Something that carries within itself the trace of a perennial alterity: the structure of the psyche, the structure of the sign. To this structure Derrida gives the name ‘writing’” (Spivak xxxix).

“‘Writing,’ then, is the name of the structure always already inhabited by the trace” (Spivak xxxix).

“What we think of as ‘perception’ is always already an inscription” (Spivak xl).

“Freud’s slow discovery of the metaphor of writing is so fascinating for Derrida because it does not have the usual strings attached. In the section ‘The Signifier and Truth’ of the Grammatology, Derrida discusses one curious characteristic of the general usage of the metaphor of writing: even as it is used, it is contrasted to writing in the literal sense. ‘Writing in the common sense is the dead letter, it is the carrier of death [because it signifies the absence of the speaker] . . . From another point of view, on the other face of the same proposition, writing in the metaphoric sense, natural, divine, and living writing, is venerated; it is equal in dignity to the origin of value, to the voice of conscience as divine law, to the heart, to sentiment and so forth.’ (19, 17) Because human beings need to comfort themselves with notions of presence, writing in the ‘literal’ sense, signifying the absence of the actual author, must be ‘rejected,’ even when it is ‘accepted’ as a metaphor” (Spivak xli).

“Neitzsche puts ‘knowing’ under erasure; Freud ‘the psyche,’ and Heidegger, explicitly, ‘Being.’ As I have argued, the name of this gesture effacing the presence of a thing and yet keeping it legible, in Derrida’s lexicon, is ‘writing,’—the gesture that both frees us from and guards us within, the metaphysical enclosure” (Spivak xli).

“This differance—being the structure (a structure never quite there, never by us perceived, itself deferred and different) of our psyche—is also the structure of ‘presence,’ a term itself under erasure. For differance, producing the differential structure of our hold on ‘presence,’ never produces presence as such” (Spivak xliii).

“Since the difference between ‘difference’ and ‘differance’ is inaudible, this ‘neographism’ reminds us of the importance of writing as a structure” (Spivak xliii).

“Freud allowed Derrida to think that the philosophic move did not necessarily require a Nietzschean violence. Simply to recognize that one is shaped by differance, to recognize that the ‘self’ is constituted by its never-fully-to-be-recognized-ness, is enough. We do not have to cultivate forgetfulness or the love of chance; we are the play of chance and necessity” (Spivak xliv).

“Perhaps, as I have argued, in the long run what sets ‘Derrida’ apart is that he knows that he is always already surrendered to writing as he writes. His knowledge is, after all, his power” (Spivak xlv).

“Once important distinction between the Heideggerean method of ‘destruction’ (see page xlviii), and Derrida’s ‘de-construction’ is the latter’s attention to the minute detailing of a text, not only to the syntax but to the shapes of the words in it. Derrida is fascinated by Freud’s notion that dreams may treat ‘words’ as ‘things’” (Spivak xlv).

“Derrida’s description of the text in general: ‘A dream is a conglomerate which, for purposes of investigation, must be broken up once more into fragments. . . . A psychical force is at work [is displayed, aussert] in dreams which creates this apparent connectedness, which . . . submits the material produced by the dream-work to a ‘secondary revision’’ (GW II-III. 451-52)” (Spivak xlvi).

“Freud suggests further that where the subject is not in control of the text, where the text looks super-smooth or superclumsy, is where the reader should fix his gaze, so that he does not merely read but deciphers the text, and sees its play within the open textuality of thought, language, and so forth within which it has only a provisionally closed outline” (Spivak xlvi).

“that passage is where we can provisionally locate the text’s moment of transgressing the laws it apparently sets up for itself, and thus unravel—deconstruct—the very text” (Spivak xlvi).

“Paul de man gives us something very close to these Heideggerian passages: ‘His text, as he pus it so well, is the unmasking of a construct. However negative it may sound, deconstruction implies the possibility of rebuilding’” (Spivak xlix).

“In Derrida’s words: ‘Reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the schemata of the language that he uses. This relationship is not a certain quantitative distribution of shadow and light, of weakness and force, but a signifying structure that critical reading must produce. . . . [Without] all the instruments of traditional criticism, . . . critical production would risk developing in any direction and authorize itself to say almost anything. But this indispensable guard-rail has always only protected, never opened, a reading (227, 158)” (Spivak xlix).

“To take apart, to produce a reading, to open the textuality of a text” (Spivak xlix).

“the moment in the text that seems to transgress its own system of values. The desire for unity and order compels the author and the reader to balance the equation that is the text’s system” (Spivak xlix).

“by locating the moment in the text which harbors the unbalancing of the equation, the sleight of hand at the limit of a text which cannot be dismissed simply as a contradiction” (Spivak xlix).

“Perhaps all texts are at least double, containing within themselves the seeds of their own deconstruction” (liii-liv).

“Each proper name pretends that it is the origin and end of certain collocation of thoughts that may be unified: ‘The names of authors or of doctrines have here no substantial value. They indicate neither identities nor causes. It would be frivolous to think that ‘Descartes,’ ‘Leibniz,’ ‘Rousseau,’ etc. are names of authors, of the authors of movements or displacements that we thus designate. The indicative value that I attribute to them is first the name of a problem’ (147-48, 99). Proper names are no more than serviceable ‘metonymic contractions’” (Spivak liv).

“A structure is a unit composed of a few elements that are invariably found in the same relationship within the ‘activity’ being described” (Spivak lv).

“Derrida, like Nietzsche, would find it merely symptomatic of the human desire for control to isolate such ‘units’ in an ‘object’ in any but the most provisional way: ‘. . . a structural study of the historical ensemble—notions, institutions . . . How are these elements in ‘the historical ensemble’ organized? What is a ‘notion’? do philosophical notions have a privilege? How do they relate to scientific concepts?’ (ED 70)” (Spivak lv).

“For Derrida, however, a text, as we recall, whether ‘literary,’ ‘psychic,’ ‘anthropological,’ or otherwise, is a play of presence and absence, a place of the effaced trace” (Spivak lvii).

“And textuality is not only true of the ‘object’ of study but also true of the ‘subject’ that studies. It effaces the neat distinction between subject and object. The grammatological structure as a tool of description is that structure which forever eludes answering the question ‘what is . . . ?’—the basis of objective description. Even as it remains legible as a structure, it erases the aim of structuralism—to provide objective descriptions” (Spivak lvii).

“Whereas Derrida sees ‘truth’ (if one can risk that word) as being constituted by ‘fiction’ (if one can risk that word), Lacan seems to use fiction as a clue to truth. There is a fairly detailed discussion of this in Derrida’s ‘Le facteur de la verite’: ‘Once one had distinguished, as does the entire philosophical tradition, between truth and reality, it goes without saying that truth ‘establishes itself in the structure of a fiction’” (Spivak lxiv).

“Derrida’s second point of disagreement with Lacan relates to the ‘transcendental signifier.’ In a note on page 32 (page 324) of the Grammatology Derrida cautions us that, when we teach ourselves to reject the notion of the primacy of the signified—of meaning over word—we should not satisfy our longing for transcendence by giving primacy to the signifier—word over meaning. And, Derrida feels that Lacan might have perpetrated precisely this” (Spivak lxiv).

“To repeat our catechism: for Derrida, by contrast to all this, the signifier and signified are interchangeable; one is the differance of the other; the concept of the sign itself is no more than a legible yet effaced, unavoidable tool. Repetition leads to a simulacrum, not to the ‘same’” (Spivak lxv).

“Within this sexual fable of the production of meaning, Derrida’s term is dissemination. Exploiting a false etymological kinship between semantics and semen, Derrida offers this version of textuality: A sowing that does not produce plants, but is simply infinitely repeated. A semination that is not insemination but dissemination, seed spilled in vain, an emission that cannot return to its origin in the father. Not an exact and controlled polysemy, but a proliferation of always different, always postponed meanings. Speaking of the purloined letter as signifier, Lacan writes ‘. . . a letter always arrives at its destination.’ (Ec 41, FF 72) It ‘always might not’ (FV 115) is the mode of Derrida’s answer” (Spivak lxv).

“Lacan does abundantly present himself as the prophet who is energetically unveiling the ‘true’ Freud. Such a vocation offends Derrida the deconstructor, for whom the critic’s selfhood is as vulnerable with textuality as the text itself” (Spivak lxvii).

“In the Grammatology Derrida suggests that this rejection of writing as an appendage, a mere technique, and yet a menace built into speech—in effect, a scapegoat—is a symptom of a much broader tendency. He relates this phonocentricism to logocentricism—the belief that the first and last things are the Logos, the Word, the Divine Mind, the infinite understanding of God, an infinitely creative subjectivity, and, closer to our time, the self-presence of full self-consciousness” (Spivak lxviii).

“The suggestion is, then, that this phonocentrism-logocentrism relates to centrism itself—the human desire to posit a ‘central’ presence at beginning and end:” (Spivak lxviii). [Follows is a long quote by Derrida ending in:] “Logocentrism would thus support the determination of the being of the entity as presence (23, 11-12)”

“It is this longing for a center, an authorizing pressure, that spawns hierarchized oppositions” (Spivak lxix).

“bequeathing their burden to modern linquistics’ opposition between meaning and word. The opposition between writing and speech takes its place within this pattern” (Spivak lxix).

“the name ‘writing’ is given here to an entire structure of investigation, not merely to ‘writing in the narrow sense,’ graphic notation on tangible material. Thus Of Grammatology is not a simple valorization of wring over speech, a simple reversal of the hierarchy” (Spivak lxix).

“Yet the choice of ‘writing’ is also polemical, against the manifest phonocentrism of structuralism” (Spivak lxix).

“Derrida points out, rather, that speech too—grafted within an empirical context, within the structure of speaker-listener, within the general context of the language, and the possibility of the absence of the speaker-listener (see page liii)—is structured as writing, that in the general sense, there is ‘writing in speech’ (ED 294).

“But if there is no structural distinction between writing and speech, the choice of ‘writing’ as an operative term is itself suspect, and a candidate for legible erasure, Derrida puts it this way: ‘This common root, which is not a root but the concealment of origin and which is not common because it does not come to the same thing except with the unmotononous insistence of difference, the unnamable movement of difference-itself which I have strategically nicknamed trace, reserve, or differance, can be called writing only within the historical enclosure, that is to say within the boundaries of metaphysics’ (142, 93)” (Spivak lxx).

“What is written is read as speech or the surrogate of speech. ‘Writing’ is the name ow what is never named. Given differance, however, it is a violence event o name it thus, or name it with a proper name. Once can tolerate nothing more than the nick-naming of bricolage” (Spivak lxx).

“Derrida’s vocabulary is forever on the move. He does not relinquish a term altogether. He simply reduces it to the lower case of a common noun, where each context establishes its provisional definition yet once again” (Spivak lxxi).

“Once this is grasped, it may be noted that the awareness of the need for deconstruction seems more congenial to the ‘irresponsible’ discourse of what is conventionally called literature. ‘The natural tendency of theory—of what unites philosophy and science in the episteme [the accepted description of how one knows]—will push rather toward filling in the breach than toward forcing the enclosure. It was normal that the breakthrough was more secure and more penetrating in the areas of literature and poetry.’ (139, 92)” (Spivak lxxii).

“(It is not enough, however, simply to exclaim over the presence of two seemingly contradictory arguments within a text and declare a text satisfactorily disunified, and one’s critical approach satisfactorily grammatological. If conventional criticism took pleasure in establishing the ‘unified’ meaning of at ext, this brand of criticism would derive a matching sense of mastery in disclosing a lack of unity. Such a critical method, relying heavily on polysemy, would not face the radical playfulness of dissemination. And the critical conclusions themselves, disclosing opposites, would imply their reconciliation in the text)” (Spivak lxxii).

“then Derrida points at that equation-balancing at work” (Spivak lxxiii).

“Derrida is doing more here than simply commenting on philosophy’s circular project. He is describing of the mainstays of this project—the opposition between metaphor and truth—metaphor as a detour to truth, truth as ‘outside itself’ in the borrowed dwelling of a metaphor, but also ‘itself,’ since the metaphor points at its own truth. Traditional textual interpretation founds itself on this particular understanding of metaphor: a detour to truth” (Spivak lxxiv).

“We do not usually examine the premises of this familiar situation. If we did, ,we would find, of course, that not only is there no pure language that is free from metaphor—the metaphor ‘is therefore involved in the field it would be the purpose of a general ‘metaphorology’ to subsume’ (MP 261, WM 18)” (Spivak lxxiv).

“Although we customarily say that the text is autonomous and self-sufficient, there would be no justification for our activity if we did not feel that the text needed interpretation. The so-called secondary material is not a simply adjunct to the so-called primary text. The latter inserts itself within the interstices of the former, filling holes that are always already there. Even as it adds itself to the text, criticism supplies a lack in the text and the gaps in the chain of criticism anterior to it” (Spivak lxxiv).

“The text belongs to language, not to the sovereign and generating author” (Spivak lxxiv).

“Derrida, questioning the unity of language itself, and putting metaphor under erasure, radically opens up textuality. Curiously enough, deconstructive criticism must take the ‘metaphoric’ structure of a text very seriously. Since metaphors are not reducible to truth, their own structures ‘as such’ are part of the textuality (or message) of the text” (Spivak lxxiv).

“And to the awareness that both literature and its criticism must open itself to a deconstructive reading, that criticism does not reveal the ‘truth’ of literature, just as literature reveals no ‘truth’” (Spivak lxxv).

“A reading that produces rather than protects. That description of deconstruction we have already entertained. Here is another: ‘ . . . the task is . . . to dismantle [deconstruire] the metaphysical and rhetorical structures which are at work in [the text], not in order to reject or discard them, but to reinscribe them in another way.’ (MP 256, WM 13)” (Spivak lxxv).

“If in the process of deciphering a text in the traditional way we come across a word that seems to harbor an unresolvable contradiction, and by virtue of being one word is made sometimes to work in one way and sometimes in another and thus is made to point away from the absence of a unified meaning, we shall catch at the word. If a metaphor seems to suppress its implications, we shall catch at that metaphor. We shall follow its adventures through the text and see the text coming undone as a structure of concealment, revealing its self-transgression, its undecidability” (Spivak lxxv).

“It must be emphasized that I am not speaking simply of locating a moment of ambiguity or irony ultimately incorporated into the text’s system of unified meaning but rather a moment that genuinely threatens to collapse that system” (Spivak lxxv).

“Derrida himself often devotes his attention to the text in its margins, so to speak. He examines the minute particulars of an undecidable moment, nearly imperceptible displacements, that might otherwise escape the reader’s eye” (Spivak lxxvi).

“It is not enough ‘simply to neutralize the binary oppositions of metaphysics.’ We must recognize that, within the familiar philosophical oppositions, there is always ‘a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms controls the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), holds the superior position. To deconstruct the opposition is first . . . to overthrow [reverser] the hierarchy.’ (POS F 57, POS E. I. 36) To fight violence with violence” (Spivak lxxvii).

“To locate the promising marginal text, to disclose the undecidable moment, to pry it loose with the positive lever of the signifier; to reverse the resident hierarchy, only to displace it; to dismantle in order to reconstitute what is always inscribed. Deconstruction in a nutshell. But take away the assurance of the text’s authority, the critic’s control, and the primacy of meaning, and the possession of the formula does not guarantee much” (Spivak lxxvii).

“In other words, the critic provisionally forgets that her own text is necessarily self-deconstructed, always already a palimpsest” (Spivak lxxvii).

“Deconstruction seems to offer a way out of the closure of knowledge. By inaugurating the open-ended indefiniteness of textuality—by thus ‘placing in the abyss’ (mettre en abime), as the French expression would literally have it—it shows us the lure of the abyss as freedom. The fall into the abyss of deconstruction inspires us with as much pleasure as fear. We are intoxicated with the prospect of never hitting bottom” (Spivak lxxvii).

“Thus a further deconstruction deconstructs deconstruction, both as the search for a foundation (the critic behaving as if she means what she says in her text), and as the pleasure of the bottomless. The tool for this, as indeed for any deconstruction, is our desire, itself a deconstructive and grammatological structure that forever differs from (we only desire what is not ourselves) and defers (desire is never fulfilled) the text of our selves” (Spivak lxxviii).

“For we are in a bind, in a ‘double (read abyssal) bind,’ Derrida’s newest nickname for the schizophrenia of the ‘sous rature.’ We must do a thing and its opposite, and indeed we desire to do both, and so on indefinitely” (Spivak lxxviii).

“No text is every fully deconstructing or deconstructed” (Spivak lxxviii).

“The single act of critical deconstruction is as necessary yet pointless, arrogant yet humble, as all human gestures” (Spivak lxxviii).

“And he takes Levi-Strauss to task for slackness of method, for sentimental ethnocentrism, for an oversimplified reading of Rousseau. He criticizes Levi-Strauss for conceiving of writing only in the narrow sense, for seeing it as a scapegoat for all the exploitative evils of ‘civilization,’ and for conceiving of the violent Nambikwara as an innocent community ‘without writing’” (Spivak lxxxiii).

“Perhaps the most interesting reason given for the impossibility of a community without writing is that the bestowing of the proper name, something no society can avoid, is itself inhabited by the structure of writing. For the phrase ‘proper name’ signifies a classification, an institution carrying the trace of history, into which a c ertain sort of sign is made to fit. Thus the proper name, as soon as it is understood as such, is no longer fully unique and proper to the holder. The proper name is always already common by virtue of belonging to the category ‘proper.’ It is always already under erasure: ‘When within consciousness, the name is called proper, it is already classified and is obliterated in being named. It is already no more than a so-called proper name’ (161, 109)” (Spivak lxxxiii).

“In a way, Derrida’s chief concern might be summarized thus: to problematize the proper name and proper (literal) meaning, the proper in gender” (Spivak lxxxiv).

“The argument points also to the theme of the play of desire around the proper name: the narcissistic desire to make one’s own ‘proper’ name ‘common,’ to make it enter and be at one with the body of the mother-tongue; and, at the same time, the oedipal desire to preserve one’s proper name, to see it as the analogue of the name of the father” (Spivak lxxxiv).

“The Future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity. For that future world and for that within it which will have put into question the values of sign, word, and writing, for that which guides our future anterior, there is as yet no exergue” (Derrida 5).

“There the signified always already functions as a signifier. The secondarity that it seemed possible to ascribe to writing alone affects all signifieds in general, affects them always already, the moment they enter the game” (Derrida 7).

“With an irregular and essentially precarious success, this movement would apparently have tended, as toward its telos, to confine writing to a secondary and instrumental function: translator of a full speech that was fully present (present to itself, to its signified, to the other, the very condition of the theme of presence in general), technics in the service of language, spokesman, interpreter of an originary speech itself shielded from interpretation” (Derrida 8).

“one says ‘language’ for action, movement, thought, reflection, consciousness, unconsciousness, experience, affectivity, etc” (Derrida 9).

“And thus we say ‘writing’ for all that gives rise to an inscription in general, whether it is literal or not and even if what it distributes in space is alien tot the order of the voice: cinematography, choreography, of course, but also pictorial, musical, sculptural ‘writing’” (Derrida 9).

“If, for Aristotle, for example, ‘spoken words (ta en te phone) are the symbols of mental experience (pathemata tes psyches) and written words are the symbols of spoken words (De interpretatione, 1, 16a 3) it is because the voice, producer of the first symbols, has a relationship of essential and immediate proximity with the mind” (Derrida 11).

“In every case, the voice is closest to the signified, whether it is determined strictly as sense (thought or lived) or more loosely as thing” (Derrida 11).

“Hegel demonstrates very clearly the strange privilege of sound in idealization, the production of the concept and the self-presence of the subject” (Derrida 12).

“The epoch of the logos thus debases writing considered as mediation of mediation and as a fall into the exteriority of meaning” (Derrida 13).

“The exteriority of the signifier is the exteriority of writing in general, and I shall try to show later that there is no linguistic sign before writing” (Derrida 14).

“Thus, within this epoch, reading and writing, the production or interpretation of signs, the text in general as fabric of signs, allow themselves to be confined within secondariness. They are preceded by a truth, or a meaning already constituted by and within the element of the logos” (Derrida 14).

“The paradox to which attention must be paid is this: natural and universal writing, intelligible and nontemporal writing, is thus named by metaphor. A writing that is sensible, finite, and so on, is designated as writing in the literal sense; it is thus thought on the side of culture, technique, and artifice; a human procedure, the ruse of being accidentally incarnated or a finite creature” (Derrida 15).

“It is not, therefore, a matter of inverting the literal meaning and the figurative meaning but of determining the ‘literal’ meaning of writing as metaphoricity itself” (Derrida 15).

“Writing in the common sense is the dead letter, it is the carrier of death. It exhausts life. On the other hand, on the other face of the same proposition, writing in the metaphoric sense, natural, divine, and living writing, is venerated; it is equal in dignity to the origin of value, to the voice of conscience as divine law, to the heart, to sentiment, and so forth” (Derrida 17).

“There is therefore a good and a bad writing: the good and natural is the divine inscription in the heart and the soul; the perverse and artful is technique, exiled in the exteriority of the body” (Derrida 17).

“The logos of being, ‘Thought obeying the Voice of Being,’ is the first and the last resroce fo the sign, of the difference between signans and signatum. There has to be a transcendental signified for the difference between signifier and signified to be somewhere absolute and irreducible” (Derrida 20).

“Under its strokes the presence of a transcendental signified is effaced while still remaining legible. Is effaced while still remaining legible, is destroyed while making visible the very idea of the sign” (Derrida 23).

“differance, an economic concept designating the production of differing/deferring” (Derrida 23).

“the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work” (Derrida 24).

“What writing itself, in its nonphonetic moment, betrays, is life. It menaces at once the breath, the spirit, and the history as the spirit’s relationship with itself. It is their end, their finitude, their paralysis. Cutting breath short, sterilizing or immobilizing spiritual creation in the repetition of the letter, in the commentary or the exegesis, confined in a narrow space, reserved for a minority, it is the principle of death and of difference in the becoming of being” (Derrida 25).

“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 later (Geschichte).

“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’ (p. 45; italics added)” (Derrida 30).

“If writing is nothing but the ‘figuration’ (p. 44) [p. 23] of the language, one has the right to exclude it from the interiority of the system (for it must be believed that these is an inside of the language), as the image may be excluded without damage from the system of reality. Proposing as his theme ‘the representation of languge by writing’ Saussure thus begins by positing that writing is ‘unrelated to [the] . . . inner system’ of language (p. 44), 44), [p. 23]. Externa/internal, image/reality, representation/presence, such is the old grid to which is given the task of outlining the domain of a science” (Derrida 33).

“Writing would thus have the exteriority that one attributes to utensils; to what is even an imperfect tool and a dangerous, almost maleficent technique” (Derrida 34).

“It has sometimes been contested that speech clothed thought. Husserl, Saussure, Lavelle have all questioned it. But has it ever been doubted that writing was the clothing of speech?” (Derrida 35).

“One already suspects that if writing is ‘image’ and exterior ‘figuration,’ this ‘representation’ is not innocent.” The outside bears with the inside a relationship that is, as usual, anything but simple exteriority. The meaning of the outside was always present within the inside, imprisoned outside the outside, and vice versa” (Derrida 35).

“It seems then as if Saussure wishes at the same time to demonstrate the corruption of speech by writing, to denounce the harm that the latter does to the former, and to underline the inalterable and natural independence of language” (Derrida 41).

“Let us cite the entire conclusion of Chapter VI of the Course (“Graphic Representation of Language”), which must be compared to Rousseau’s text on Pronunciation: ‘But the tyranny of writing goes even further. By imposing itself upon the masses, spelling influences and modifies language. This happens only in highly literary languages where written texts play an important role. Then visual images lead to wrong [vicieuses] pronunciations; such mistakes are really pathological” (Derrida 41).

“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” (Derrida 43).

“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 that inaccuracy in principle insufficiency of fact, and the permanent usurpation) as instrument and technique of presentation 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” (Derrida 43).

“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 technique, itself leaning upon a mythology and a metaphor of a natural writing” (Derrida 43).

“Let us ask in amore intrinsic and concrete way, how language is not merely a sort of writing, ‘comprarable to a system of writing’ (p. 33) [p. 16]—Sausure writes curiously—but how a species of writing. Or rather, since writing no longer relates to language as an extension or frontier, let us ask how language is a possibility founded on the general possibility of writing” (Derrida 52).

“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” (Derrida 54).

“I believe that generalized 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” (Derrida 55).

“I would wish rather to suggest that the alleged derivativeness of writing, however real and massive, was possible only on the one condition: that the ‘original,’ ‘natural,’ etc. language had never existed, never been intact and untouched by writing, that it had itself always been a writing. An arche-writing 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” (Derrida 56-57).

“The study of the function 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 play” (Derrida 57).

“What I call the erasure of concepts ought to mark the places of that future mediation. For example, the value of the transcendental arche [archie] must make it necessity felt before letting itself be erased. The concept of arche-trace 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 the we follow it means that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by a nonorigin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin” (Derrida 61).

“The (pure) trace is difference. It does not depend on any sensible plentitude, audible or visible, phonic or graphic. It is, on the contrary, the condition of such a plentitude” (Derrida 62).

“Difference is therefore the formation of form. But it is on the other hand the being-imprinted of the imprint” (Derrida 63).

“It is the sound-image that he 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 sing [signe] to designate the whole and to replace concept and sound-image respectively by signified [signifie] and signifier [signifiant].’ The sound-image is what is heard; not the sound heard by the being-heard of the sound” (Derrida 63).

“The unheard difference between the appearing and the appearance [l’apparaissant et l’aparaitre] (between the ‘world’ and ‘lived expereince’) is the condition of all other differences, of al other traces, and it is already a trace” (Derrida 65).

“This impossibility of reanimating absolutely the manifest evidence of an originary presence refers us therefore to an absolute past. That is what authorized us to call trace that which does not let itself be summed up in the simplicity of a present” (Derrida 66).

“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” (Derrida 70).

“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 themes of metaphysics whose entire history was compelled to strive toward the reduction of the trace” (Derrida 71).

“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” (Derrida 73).

“On what conditions is a grammatology possible? Its fundamental consition is certainly the undoing [solicitation] of logocentrism” (Derrida 74).

“But a meditation upon the trace should undoubtedly teach us that there is no origin, that is to say simple origin; that the questions of origin carry with them a metaphysics of presence” (Derrida 74).

“The trace is nothing, it is not an entity, it exceeds the question What is? And contingently makes it possible” (Derrida 75).

“Actually, the people’s said to be ‘without writing’ lack only a certain type of writing” (Derrida 83).

“Simultaneity coordinates two absolute presents, two points or instants of presence, and it remains a linearist concept” (Derrida 85).

“For over a century, this uneasiness has been evident in philosophy, in science, in literature. All the revolutions in these fields can be interpreted as shocks that are gradually destroying the linear model” (Derrida 87).

“The access to pluri-dimensionality and to a delinearized temporarily is not a simple regression toward the ‘mythogram;’ on the contrary, it makes all the rationality subjected to the linear model appear as another form and another age of mythography” (Derrida 87).

“Writing did not reduce the voice to itself, it incorporated it into a system” (Derrida 90).

“This common root, which is not a root but the concealment of the origin and which into common because it does not amount to the same thing except with the unomontonous insistence of difference, this unnameable movement of difference-itself, that I have strategically nicknamed trace, reserve, or differance, could be called writing only within the historical closure, that is to say within the limits of science and philosophy” (Derrida 93).

“God is the name and the element of that which makes possible an absolutely pure and absolutely self-present self-knowledge” (Derrida 98).

“God’s infinite understanding is the other name for the logos as self-presence. The logos can be infinite and self-present, it can be produced as auto-affection, only through the voice” (Derrida 98).

“What links writing to violence? What must violence be in order for something in it to be equivalent to the operation of the trace?” (Derrida 101).

“that digression about the violence that does not supervene from without upon an innocent language in order to surprise it, a language that suffers the aggression of writing as the accident of its disease, its defeat and its fall; but is the originary violence of a language which is always already a writing. Rousseau and Levi-Strauss are not for a moment to be challenged when they relate the power of writing to the exercise of violence. But radicalizing this theme, no longer considering this violence as derivative with respect to a naturally innocent speech, one reverses the entire sense of a proposition—the unit of violence and writing—which one must therefore be careful not to abstract and isolate” (Derrida 106).

“If writing is no longer understood in the narrow sense of linear and phonetic notation, it should be possible to say that al societies capable of producing, that is to say of obliterating, their proper names, and of bringing classificatory difference into play, practice writing in general. No reality or concept would therefore correspond to the expression ‘society without writing.’ This expression is dependent on ethnocentric oneirism ,upon the vulgar, that is to say ethnocentric, misconception of writing” (Derrida 109).

“The death of absolutely proper naming, recognizing in a language the other as pure other, in invoking it as what it is, is the death of the pure idiom reserved for the unique. Anterior to the possibility of violence in the current and derivative sense, the sense used in ‘A Writing Lesson,’ there is, as the space of its possibility, the violence of the arche-writing, the violence of difference, of classification, and of the system of appellations” (Derrida 110).

“There was in fact a first violence to be named. To name, to give names that it will on occation be forbidden to pronounce, such is the originary violence of language which consists in inscribing within a difference, in classifying, in suspending the vocative absolute” (Derrida 112).

“Here a strict separation of the anthropological confession and the theoretical discussion of the anthropologist must be observed. The difference between empirical and essential must continue to assert its rights” (Derrida 117).

“By radically separating language from writing, by placing the latter below the outside, believing at least that it is possible to do so, by giving oneself the illusion of liberating linguistics from all involvement with written evidence, one thinks in fact to restore the status of authentic language, human and fully signifying language, to all languages practiced by peoples whom one nevertheless continues to describe as ‘without writing.’ It is not fortuitous that the same ambiguity affects Levi-Strauss’s intentions” (Derrida 120).

“On the one hand, the colloquial difference between language and writing, the rigorous exteriorty of the one with respect to the other, is admitted. This permits the distinction between peoples using writing and peoples without writing. Levi-Strauss is never suspicious of the value of such a distinction. The above all allows him to consider the passage from speech to writing as a leap, as the instantaneous crossing of a line of discontinuity: passage from a fully oral language, pure of all writing—pure, innocent—to a language appending to itself its graphic ‘representation’ as an accessory signifier of a new type, opening a technique of oppression” (Derrida 120).

“The traditional and fundamental ethnocentricism which, inspired by the model of phonetic writing, separates writing from speech with an ax, is thus handled and thought of as anti-enthnocentrism. It supports an ethico-political accusation: man’s exploitation by man is the fact of writing cultures of the Western type. Communities of innocent and unoppressive speech are free from this accusation” (Derrida 121).

“If it is true, as I in fact believe, that writing cannot be thought outside of the horizon of intersubjective violence, is there anything even science, that radically escapes it? Is there a knowledge, and, above all, a langauage, scientific or not, that one can call alien at once to writing and to violence? If one answers in the negative, as I do, the use of these concepts to discern the specific character of writing is not pertinent” (Derrida 127).

“In other words, if writing is to be related to violence, writing appears well before writing in the narrow sense; already in the difference or the arche-writing that opens speech itself” (Derrida 128).

“To recognize writing in speech, that is to say differance and the absence of speech, is to begin to think the lure. There is no ethics without the presence of the other but also, and consequently, without absence, dissimulation, detour, differance, writing” (Derrida 139-140).
“‘Languages are made to be spoken, writing serves only as a supplement to speech. . . . Speech represents thought by conventional signs, and writing represents the same with regard to speech. Thus the art of writing is nothing but a mediated representation of thought’” (Derrida quoting Rousseau 144).

“The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plentitude enriching another plentitude, the fullest measure of presence” (Derrida 144).

“the supplement is an adjunct, a subaltern instance which takes-(the)-place” (Derrida 145).

“The sign is always the supplement of the thing itself. This second signification of the supplement cannot be separated from the first” (Derrida 145).

“According to Rousseau, the negativity of evil will always have the form of supplementarity. Evil is exterior to nature, to what is by nature innocent and good. It supervenes upon nature. But always by way of compensation for [sous l’espece de la suppleance] what ought to lack nothing at all in itself” (Derrida 145).

“Finally it means that Nature does not supplement itself at all; Nature’s supplement does not proceed from Nature, it is only inferior to but other than Nature” (Derrida 145).

“The supplement is the image and the representation of Nature. The image is neither in nor out of Nature. The supplement is therefore equally dangerous for Reason, the natural health of Reason” (Derrida 149).

“The supplement is maddening because it is neither presence nor absence and because it consequently breaches both our pleasure and our virginity. “. . . abstinence and enjoyment, pleasure and wisdom, escaped me in equal measure” (Confessions, p. 12)” (Derrida 154).

“It is from a certain determined representation of ‘cohabitation with women’ that Rousseau had to have recourse throughout his life to hat type of dangerous supplement that is called masturbation and that cannot be separated from his activity as a writer” (Derrida 155).

“the writer writes in a language and in a logic whose proper system, laws, and life his discourse by definition cannot dominate absolutely. He uses them only by letting himself, after a fashion and up to a point, be governed by the system. And the reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between the what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses” (Derrida 158).

“But this indispensable guardrail has always only protected, it has never opened, a reading” (Derrida 158).
“There is nothing outside of the text” (Derrida 158).
“Although it is not commentary, our reading must be instrinsic and remain within the text. That is why, in spite of certain appearances, the locating of the word supplement is here not at all psychoanalytical, if by that we understand an interpretstion that takes us ouside of the writing toward a psychobiographical signified, or even toward a genderal psychological structure that could rightly be separated from the signifier” (Derrida 159).

“If it seems to us in principle impossible to separate, through interpretation or commentary, the signified from the signfier, and thus to destroy writing by the writing that is yet reading, we nevertheless believe that this impossibility is historically articulate” (Derrida 159).

“And what Rousseau has said, as philosopher or as psychologist, of writing in general, cannot be separated from the system of his own writing. We should be aware of this” (Derrida 160).

“In a certain way, I am within the history of psychoanalysis as I am within Rousseau’s text. Just as Rousseau drew upon a language that was already there—and which is found to be somewhat our own, thus assuring us a certain minimal readability of French literature” (Derrida 160).

“The opening of the question, the departure from the closure of a self-evidence, the putting into doubt of a system of oppositions, all these movements necessarily have the form of empiricism and of errancy. At any rate, t hey cannot be described, as to past norms, except in this form” (Derrida 162).

“We must begin wherever we are and the thought of the trace, which cannot take the scent into account, has already taught us that is was impossible to just ify a point of departure absolutely. Wherever we are: in a text where we already believe ourselves to be” (Derrida 162).

“It tells us in a text what a text is, it tells us in writing what writing it, in Rousseau’s writing it tells us Jean-Jacque’s desire, etc. If we consider, according to the axial proposition of this essay that there is nothing outside the text, our ultimate justification would be the following: the concept of the supplement and the theory of writing designate textuality itself in Rousseau’s text in an indefinitely multiplied structure—en abyme [in an abyss]—to employ the current phrase” (Derrida 163).
“Thus Rousseau inscribes textuality in the text” (Derrida 163).

“I do not simply duplicate what Rousseau thought of this relationship. The concept of the supplement is a sort of blind spot in Rousseau’s text, the not-seen that opens and limits visibility. But the production, if it attempts to make the not-seen accessible to sight, does not leave the text. It has moreover only believed it was doing so by illusion. It is contained in the transformation of language it designates” (Derrida 163-164).

“That which is not subjected to the process of differance is present” (Derrida 166).

“From then on, metaphsycis consists of excluding non-presence by determining the supplement as simple exteriority, pure addition or pure absence. The work of exclusion operates within the structure of supplementarity. The paradox is that one annuls addition by considering it a pure addition. What is added is nothing because it is added to a full presence to which it is exterior. Speech comes to beaded to intuitive presence (of the entity, of essence, of the eidos, of ousia, and so forth); writing comes to be added to living self-present speech; masturbation comes to be added to so-called normal sexual experience; culture to nature, evil to innocence, history to origin, and so on” (Derrida 167).

“It is the myth of the effacement of the trace, that is to say of an originary differance that is neither absence nor presence, neither negative nor positive” (Derrida 167).

“Writing is one of the representatives of the trace in general, it is not the trace itself. The trace itself does not exist. (To exist is to be, to be an entity, a being-present, to on.)

“And speech always presents itself as the best expression of liberty” (Derrida 168).

“The Essay on the Origin of Languages opposes speech to writing as presence to absence and liberty to servitude” (Derrida 168).

“If one moves along the course of the supplementary series, he sees that imagination belongs to the same chain of significations as the anticipation of death. Imagiantion is at bottom the relationship with death. The image is death. A proposition that one may define or make indefinite thus: the image is a death or (the) death is an image” (Derrida 184).

“The presence of the represented is constituted with the help of the addition to itself of that nothing which is the image, announcement of its dispossession within its own representer and within its death” (Derrida 184).

“In that sense imagination, like death, is representative and supplementary. Let us not forget that these are the qualities Rousseau expressively recognizes in writing” (Derrida 184).

“If now it is remembered that Rousseau gives the name terror to the fear of death (Discourse, p. 143) [p. 171], one perceives together the entire system which organizes the concepts of terror and pity on the one hand, and the tragic scene, representation, the imagination, and death on the other” (Derrida 185).

“According to a tradition that remains imperturbable here, Rousseau is sure that the essence of art is mimesis. Imitation redoubles presence, adds itself to it by supplementing it” (Derrida 203).

“The metaphor which makes the song a painting is possible, it can wrest from itself and drag outside into space the intimacy of its virtue, only under the common authority of the concept of imitation” (Derrida 203).

“Rousseau has need of imitation, he advances it as the possibility of song and the emergence out of animality, but he exalts it only as a reproduction adding itself to the represented through it adds nothing, simply supplements it. In that sense he praises art or mimesis as a supplement. But by the same token praise may instantly turn to criticism. Since the supplementary mimesis adds nothing, is it not useless? And if nevertheless, adding itself to the represented, it is not nothing, is that imitative supplement not dangerous to the integrity of what is represented and to the original purity of nature?” (Derrida 203)

“Rousseau must at once denounce mimesis and art as supplements (supplements that are dangerous when they are not useless, superfluous when they are not disastrous, in truth both at the same time)” (Derrida 204).

“It is the status of the sign that is marked by the same ambiguity. Signifier imitates signified. Art is woven with signs” (Derrida 204).

“According to Rousseau, the child is the name of that which should not relate in any way to a separated signifier, loved in some way for itself, like a fetish” (Derrida 204).
“If art is imitation, it is essential to remember that everything in it signifies. In the aesthetic experience, we are affected not by things but by signs” (Derrida 206).

“It would be wrong to conclude that, in Rousseau’s critique of sensationalism, it is the sign itself that exhausts the operation of art. We are moved, ‘excited,’ by the represented and not by the repsented, by the expressed and not by the expression, by the inside which is exposed and not by the outside of the exposition” (Derrida 208).

“If the beautiful loses nothing by being reproduced, if one recognizes it in its sign, in the sign of the sign of the sign which a copy must be, then in the ‘first time’ of its production there was already a reproductive essence” (Derrida 208).

“If the origin of art is the possibility of the engraving, the death of art and art as death are prescribed from the very birth of the work” (Derrida 208).

“Imitation is therefore at the same time the life and the death of art. Art and death, art and its death are comprised in the space of the alteration of the originary iteration (iterum, anew, does it not come from Sanskit itara, other?); of repetition, reproduction, representation; or also in space as the possibility of iteration and the exit from life placed outside of itself” (Derrida 209).

“What does Rousseau say without saying, see without seeing? That substitution has always already begun; that imitation, principle of art, has always already interrupted natural plentitude; that, having to be a discourse, it has always already broached presence in differance; that in Nature it is always that which supplies Nature’s lack, a voice that is substituted for the voice of Nature. But he says it without drawing any conclusions:” (Derrida 215).

“Speech never gives the thing itself, but a simulacrum that touches us more profoundly than the truth, ‘strikes’ us more effectively. Another ambiguity in the appreciation of speech. It is not the presence of the object which moves us but its phonic sign: ‘The successive impressions of discourse, which strike a redoubled blow, produce a different feeling from that of the continuous presence of the same object. . . . I have said elsewhere why feigned misfortunes touch us more than real ones’ (Derrida 240).

“Rousseau would like to separate orginarity from supplementarity. All the rights constituted by our logos are on his side: it is unthinkable and intolerable that what has the name origin should be no more than a point situated within the system of supplementarity” (Derrida 243).

“Writing will appear to us more and more as another name for this structure of supplementarity” (Derrida 245).

“It does not suffice to say that Rousseau thinks the supplement without thinking it, that he does not match his saying and his meaning, his descriptions and his declarations. One must still organize this separation and this contradiction. Rousseau uses the word and describes the thing. But now we know that what concerns us here belongs neither to word nor to thing. Word and thing are referential limits that only the supplementary structure can produce and mark” (Derrida 245).

“What are the two contradictory possibilities that Rousseau wishes to retain simultaneously? And how does he do it? He wishes on the one hand to affirm, by giving it a positive value, everything of which articulation is the principle or everything with which it constructs a system (passion, language, society, man, etc). But he intends to affirm simultaneously all that is cancelled by articulation (accent, life, energy, passion yet again, and so on)” (Derrida 245-246).

“It is the strange essence of the supplement not to have essentiality: it may always not have taken place. Moreover, literally, it has never taken place: it is never present, here and now. If it were, it would not be what it is, a supplement, taking and keeping the place of the other” (Derrida 314).

“The supplement is neither a presence nor an absence. No ontology can think its operation” (Derrida 314).

“As Saussure will do, so does Rousseau wish at once to maintain the exteriority of the system of writing and the maleficent efficiency with which one singles out its symptoms on the body of the language. But am I saying anything else? Yes, in as much as I show the interiority of exteriority, which amounts to annulling the ethical qualification and to thinking of writing beyond good and evil; yes above all, in as much as we designate the impossibility of formulating the movement of supplementarity within the classical logos, within the logic of identity, within ontology, within the opposition of presence and absence, positive and negative, and even within dialectics, if at least one determines it, as spiritualistic or materialistic metaphysics has always done, within the horizon of presence and reappropriation” (Derrida 314).

“One can no longer see disease in substitution when one sees that the substitute is substituted for a substitute” (Derrida 314).

“But if Rousseau could say that ‘word [voix], not sounds [sons] are written,’ it is because words are distinguished from sounds exactly by what permits writing—consonants and articulation. The latter replace only themselves. Articulation, which replaces accent, is the origin of languages” (Derrida 315).

“A speech without consonantic principle, what for Rousseau would be speech sheltered from all writing, would not be speech; it would hold itself at the fictive limit of the inarticulate and purely natural cry. Conversely, a speech of pure consonants and pure articulation would become pure writing, algebra, or dead language. The death of speech is therefore the horizon and origin of language. But an origin and a horizon which do not hold themselves at its exterior borders. As always, death, which is neither a present to come nor a present past, shapes the interior of speech, as its trace, its reserve, its interior and exterior differance: as its supplement” (Derrida 315).

“But Rousseau could not think this writing, that takes place before and within speech. To the extent that he belonged to the metaphysics of presence, he dreamed of the simple exteriority of death to life, evil to good, representation to presence, signfier to signified, representer to represented, mask to face, writing to speech . . . The supplement is none of these terms. It is especially not more a signifier than a signified, a representer than a presence, a writing than a speech. None of the terms of this series can, being comprehended within it, dominate the economy of differance or supplementarity” (Derrida 315).