And all said and done, that is the sort of reader I would hope for. A reader who would fasten
upon my mistranslations, and with that leyerage deconstruct Derrida’s text beyond what
Derrida as controlling subject has directed in it.
VI
“The first part of this book, ‘Writing before the Letter,’ sketches in broad outlines Now I
insert my text within his and move you on, situating here a theoretical matrix. It indicates
certain significant historical moments, and proposes My name: certain critical concepts.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. These critical concepts are put to the test
the places of this
work: Iowa City, (New Delhi–Dacca–Calcutta), Boston, Nice, Providence, Iowa City, in the
second part, ‘Nature, Culture, Writing.’ Its time: July, 1970-October, 1975. This part may be
called illustrative .. .
((lxxxvii))
((lxxxvix))
Preface
The first part of this book, “Writing before the Letter,” 1 sketches in broad outlines a
theoretical matrix. It indicates certain significant historical moments, and proposes certain
critical concepts.
These critical concepts are put to the test in the second part, “Nature, Culture, Writing.” This
is the moment, as it were, of the example, although strictly speaking, that notion is not
acceptable within my argument. I have tried, to defend, patiently and at length, the choice of
these examples (as I have called them for the sake of convenience) and the necessity for their
presentation. It is a question of a reading of what may perhaps be called the “age” of
Rousseau. A reading merely outlined; considering the need for such an analysis, the,difficulty
of the problems, and the nature of my project, I have felt justified in selecting a short and
little-known text, the Essay on the Origin of Languages.* I shall have to explain the
privileged place I give to that work. There is yet another reason why my reading might be
incomplete: although I have no ambition to illustrate a new method, I have attempted to
produce, often embarrassing myself in the process, the problems of critical reading. These
problems are at all times related to the guiding intention of this book. My interpretation of
Rousseau’s text follows implicitly the propositions ventured in Part I; propositions that
demand that reading should free itself, at least in its axis, from the classical categories of
history—not only from the categories of the history of ideas and the history of literature but
also, and perhaps above all, from the categories of the history of philosophy.
It goes without saying that around that axis I have had to respect classical norms, or at least I
have attempted to respect them. Although the word “age” or “epoch” can be given more than
these determinations, I should mention that I have concerned myself with a structural figure
as much as a historical totality. I have attempted to relate these two seemingly necessary
approaches, thus repeating the question of the text, its historical status, its proper time and
space. The age already in the past is in fact constituted in every respect as a text, in a sense of
these words that I
xxx
fotnote start xxx
•
Derrida uses the 1817 Bélin edition of the Essai. My references, placed within
brackets, as are all my interpolations, are to On
the Origin of Languages, Jean Jacques
Rousseau; Essay on the Origin of Language, Johann Gottfried Herder, tr. John H. Moran and
Alexander Gode (New York, 1966).
Notes at the foot of the pages in this volume are translator’s notes. Author’s notes appear at
the back of the book.
xxx fotnote slutt xxx
((xc))
shall have to establish. As such the age conserves the values of legibility and the efficacy of a
model and thus disturbs the time (tense) of the line or the line of time. I have tried to suggest
this by calling upon and questioning the declared Rousseauism of a modern anthropologist.
((1))
I. Writing before the Letter
((2))
((3))
Exergue
1.The one who will shine in the science of writing will shine like the sun. A scribe (EP, p. 87)
O Samas (sun-god), by your light you scan the totality of lands as if they were cuneiform
signs (ibid.) .
2.These three ways of writing correspond almost exactly to three different stages according to
which one can consider men gathered into a nation. The depicting of objects is appropriate to
a savage people; signs of words and of propositions, to a barbaric people; and the alphabet to
civilized people. J.-J. Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues.
3.Alphabetic script is in itself and for itself the most intelligent. Hegel, Enzyklopädie.
This triple exergue is intended not only to focus attention on the ethnocentrism which,
everywhere and always, had controlled the concept of writ-ing. Nor merely to focus attention
on what I shall call logocentrism: the metaphysics of phonetic writing (for example, of the
alphabet) which was fundamentally—for enigmatic yet essential reasons that are inaccessible
to a simple historical relativism—nothing but the most original and powerful ethnocentrism,
in the process of imposing itself upon the world, controlling in one and the same order:
1.the concept of writing in a world where the phoneticization of writing must dissimulate its
own history as it is produced;