2.
the history of (the only)
metaphysics, which has, in spite of all differences, not only from
Plato to Hegel (even including Leibniz) but also, beyond these apparent limits, from the pre-
Socratics to Heidegger, always assigned the origin of truth in general to the logos: the history
of truth, of the truth of truth, has always been—except for a metaphysical diversion that we
shall have to explain—the debasement of writing, and its repression outside “full” speech.
3.the concept of science or the scientificity of science—what has always been determined as
logic—a concept that has always been a philosophical concept, even if the practice of science
has constantly challenged its imperialism of the logos, by invoking, for example, from the
beginning and ever increasingly, nonphonetic writing. No doubt this subversion has always
been contained within a system of direct address [système allocutoire] which gave birth to the
project of science and to the conventions of all nonphonetic characteristics. 1 It could not
have been otherwise. None-
((4))
theless, it is a peculiarity of our epoch that, at the moment when the phoneticization of writing
—the historical origin and structural possibility of philosophy as of science, the condition of
the epistémè—begins to lay hold on world culture, 2 science, in its advancements, can no
longer be satisfied with it. This inadequation had always already begun to make its presence
felt. But today something lets it appear as such, allows it a kind of takeover without our being
able to translate this novelty into clear cut notions of mutation, explicitation, accumulation,
revolution, or tradition. These values belong no doubt to the system whose dislocation is
today presented as such, they describe the styles of an historical movement which was
meaningful—like the concept of history itself—only within a logocentric epoch.
By alluding to a science of writing reined in by metaphor, metaphysics, and theology, 3 this
exergue must not only announce that the science of writing—grammatology 4—shows signs
of liberation all over the world, as a result of decisive efforts. These efforts are necessarily
discreet, dispersed, almost imperceptible; that is a quality of their meaning and of the milieu
within which they produce their operation. I would like to suggest above all that, however
fecund and necessary the undertaking might be, and even if, given the most favorable
hypothesis, it did overcome all technical and epistemological obstacles as well as all the
theological and meta-physical impediments that have limited it hitherto, such a science of
writing runs the risk of never being established as such and with that name. Of never being
able to define the unity of its project or its object. Of not being able either to write its
discourse on method or to describe the limits of its field. For essential reasons: the unity of all
that allows itself to be attempted today through the most diverse concepts of science and of
writing, is, in principle, more or less covertly yet always, determined by an historico-
metaphysical epoch of which we merely glimpse the closure. I do not say the end. The idea of
science and the idea of writing—therefore also of the science of writing—is meaningful for us
only in terms of an origin and within a world to which a certain concept of the sign (later I
shall call it the concept of sign) and a certain concept of the relationships between speech and
writing, have already been assigned. A most determined relationship, in spite of its privilege,
its necessity, and the field of vision that it has controlled for a few millennia, especially in the
West, to the point of being now able to produce its own dislocation and itself proclaim its
limits.
Perhaps patient meditation and painstaking investigation on and around what is still
provisionally called writing, far from falling short of a science of writing or of hastily
dismissing it by some obscurantist reaction, letting it rather develop its positivity as far as
possible, are the wanderings of a way of thinking that is faithful and attentive to the
ineluctable world of the future which proclaims itself at present, beyond the closure of
knowledge.
((5))
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.
((6))
1. The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing
Socrates, he who does not write*—Nietzsche
However the topic is considered, the problem of language has never been simply one problem
among others. But never as much as at present has it invaded, as such, the global horizon of
the most diverse researches and the most heterogeneous discourses, diverse and
heterogeneous in their intention, method, and ideology. The devaluation of the word
“language” itself, and how, in the very hold it has upon us, it betrays a loose vocabulary, the
temptation of a cheap seduction, the passive yielding to fashion, the consciousness of the
avant-garde, in other words—ignorance—are evidences of this effect. This inflation of the
sign “language” is the inflation of the sign itself, absolute inflation, inflation itself. Yet, by one
of its aspects or shadows, it is itself still a sign: this crisis is also a symptom. It indicates, as if
in spite of itself, that a historico-metaphvsical epoch must finally de-termine as language the
totality of its problematic horizon. It must do so not only because all that desire had wished to
wrest from the play of language finds itself recaptured within that play but also because, for
the same reason, language itself is menaced in its very life, helpless, adrift in the threat of
limitlessness, brought back to its own finitude at the very moment when its limits seem to
disappear, when it ceases to be self-assured, contained, and guaranteed by the infinite
signified which seemed to exceed it.
The Program
By a slow movement whose necessity is hardly perceptible, everything that for at least some
twenty centuries tended toward and finally succeeded in being gathered under the name of
language is beginning to let itself be transferred to, or at least summarized under, the name of
writing. By a hardly perceptible necessity, it seems as though the concept of writing
xxx fotnote start xxx
•
”Aus dem Gedankenkreise der Geburt der Tragödie,” I. 3. Nietzsche Werke (Leipzig,
1903), vol. 9, part 2, i, p. 66.
xxx fotnote slutt xxx