Derrida, Jaques [1997 (1967)]: Of Grammatology
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- 1935), p. 193. ****
obscure words of God’s language, as a sleeper perceives the conversation of the people around him.” **** Jaspers: “The world is the manuscript of an other, inaccessible to a universal reading, which only existence deciphers.” ***** Above all, the profound differences distinguishing all these treatments of the same metaphor must not be ignored. In the history of this treatment, the most decisive separation appears at the moment when, at the same time as the science of nature, the determination of absolute presence is constituted as self-presence, as subjectivity. It is the moment of the great rationalisms of the seventeenth century. From then on, the condemnation of fallen and finite writing will take another form, within which we still • Quoted in Curtius, op. cit. (German), p. 326, (English), p. 324; Galileo’s word is “philosophy” rather than “nature.” ** Ibid. (German) p. 324, (English) p. 322. *** David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Norman Kemp Smith (Oxford,
xxx fotnoter slutt xxx ((17)) live: it is non-self-presence that will be denounced. Thus _the exemplariness of the “Rousseauist” moment, which we shall deal with later, begins to be explained. Rousseau repeats the Platonic gesture by referring to another model of presence: self-presence in the senses, in the sensible cogito, which simultaneously carries in itself the inscription of divine law. On the one hand, representative, fallen, secondary, instituted writing, writing in the literal and strict sense, is condemned in The Essay on the Origin of Languages (it “enervates” speech; to “judge genius” from books is like “paint-ing a man’s portrait from his corpse,” etc.). 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. The Bible is the most sublime of all books, . . . but it is after all a book... . It is not at all in a few sparse pages that one should look for God’s law, but in the human heart where His hand deigned to write (Lettre à Vernes) . * If the natural law had been written only in the human reason, it would be little capable of directing most of our actions. But it is also engraved in the heart of man in ineffacable characters. . . . There it cries to him (L’état de guerre.) ** Natural writing is immediately united to the voice and to breath. Its nature is not grammatological but pneumatological. It is hieratic, very close to the interior holy voice of the Profession of Faith, to the voice one hears upon retreating into oneself: full and truthful presence of the divine voice to our inner sense: “The more I retreat into myself, the more I consult myself, the more plainly do I read these words written in my soul: be just and you will be happy. . . . I do not derive these rules from the principles äf the higher philosophy, I find them in the depths of my heart writ-ten by nature in characters which nothing can efface.” *** There is much to say about the fact that the native unity of the voice and writing is prescriptive. Arche-speech is writing because it is a law. A natural law. The beginning word is understood, in the intimacy of self-presence, as the voice of the other and as commandment. 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. A modification well within xxx fotnote start xxx • Correspondance corn plate de Jean Jacques Rousseau, ed. R. A. Leigh (Geneva, 1967), vol. V, pp. 65-66. The original reads “l’évangile” rather than “la Bible.” ** Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, Pléiade edition, vol. III, p. 602. *** Derrida’s reference is Emile, Pléiade edition, vol. 4, pp. 589, 594. My reference is Emile, tr. Barbara Foxley (London, 1911), pp. 245, 249. Subsequent references to this translation are placed within brackets. ((18))
the Platonic diagram: writing of the soul and of the body, writing of the interior and of the exterior, writing of conscience and of the passions, as there is a voice of the soul and a voice of the body. “Conscience is the voice of the soul, the passions are the voice of the body” [p. 249]. One must constantly go back toward the “voice of nature,” the “holy voice of nature,” that merges with the divine inscription and prescription; one must encounter oneself within it, enter into a dialogue within its signs, speak and respond to oneself in its pages. It was as if nature had spread out all her magnificence in front of our eyes to offer its text for our consideration. . . . I have therefore closed all the books. Only one is open to all eyes. It is the book of Nature. In this great and sublime book I learn to serve and adore its author. The good writing has therefore always been comprehended. Comprehended as that which had to be comprehended: within a nature or a natural law, created or not, but first thought within an eternal presence. Comprehended, therefore, within a totality, and enveloped in a volume or a book. The idea of the book is the idea of a totality, finite or infinite, of the signifier; this totality of the signifier cannot be a totality, unless a totality constituted by the signified preexists it, supervises its inscriptions and its signs, and is independent of it in its ideality. The idea of the book, which always refers to a natural totality, is profoundly alien to the sense of writing. It is the encyclopedic protection of theology and of logocentrism against the
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