Transcription
Of Grammatology;,
ofGranunatologyBYJacquesDerridaCorrected EditionTranslated byGayatri Chakravorty SpivakThe Johns Hopkins[/niversity PressBaltimore and London
Copyright 1974, 1976, 1997 by The Johns Hopkins University PressAll rights reservedPrinted in the United States of America on acid-free paperFirst American edition, 1976Originally published in Franceunder the title De la GrammatologieCopyright 1967 by Les Editions de MinuitJohns Hopkins Paperbacks edition, 1976Corrected edition, 19979 87 6 5 4 3The Johns Hopkins University Press2715 North Charles StreetBaltimore, Maryland 21218-4363www.press.jhu.eduLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataDerrida, Jacques.Of grammatology.Translation of De la grammatologie.Includes bibliographical references.1. Languages-Philosophy. I. TitleP1OS·DS313-1976- 410 76-17226ISBN 0-8018-1841--9 (hardcover)ISBN 0-8018-1879-6 (paperback)ISBN 0-8018-S83 -S (corrected edition)A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
ContentsAcknowledgmen tsTranslator's PrefacePrefaceVllixlxxxixPart IWriting before the Letter1Exergue31 . The End of the Book and the Beginning of WritingThe ProgramThe Signifier and TruthThe vVritten Being/The Being Written662. Linguistics and GrammatologyThe Outside and the InsideThe Outside the InsideThe Hinge [La Brisure]3-Of Grammatology as a Positive ScienceAlgebra : Arcanum and TransparenceScience and the Name of ManThe Rebus and the Complicity of OriginsPart IINature, Culture , Writing95Introduction to the HAge of Rousseau"971.The Violence of the Letter: From Levi-Strauss to RousseauThe Battle of Proper NamesWriting and Man's Exploitation by Man" . . . That Dangerous Supplement . . . "From/Of Blindness to the SupplementThe Chain of SupplementsThe Exorbitant. Question of Method3. Genesis and Structure of the Essay on the Origin of LanguagesI . The Place o f the " Essay"Writing, Political Evil, and Linguistic EvilThe Present Debate : The Economy of PityThe Initial Debate and the Composition of the Essay2.1011071 181411 441 521 571651651 671711 92v
ContentsVIII. ImitationThe Interval and the SupplementThe Engraving and the Ambiguities of FormalismThe Turn of WritingIII. Articulation"That Movement of the Wand . "The Inscription of the OriginThe NeumeThat "Simple Movement of the Finger." Writing and theProhibition of Incest.1951952002162292292422472554. From/Of the Supplement to the Source: The Theory of Writing 269270The Originary Metaphor280The History and System of ScriptsThe Alphabet and Absolute Representation295302The Theorem and the TheaterThe Supplement of ( at) the Origin313NotesIndex317355
AcknowledgmentsI thank Angelo B ertocci for having given me the idea for this transla tion. I thank Paul de 1an for his patient and penetrating criticism of theTranslator's Preface and the text, at a time when his own schedule was sothoroughly besieged. I thank J. Hillis Miller for his advice, his active en couragement, and his acute comments on the Translator's Preface. lowehim particular thanks for having introduced me to Derrida himself after Ihad been working on this book for a year. I am grateful to John Brenkmen,Leone Stein, and Paul M. \Vright for their support during the early stagesof the work. In the preparation of the translation, I have been particularlyhelped by four painstaking and indefatigable bilingual readers : Jessie L.Hornsby, Dori Katz, Richard Laden, Talbot Spivak. Pierre de Saint-Victor,the late Alexander Aspel, Jacques Bourgeacq and Donald Jackson untiedoccasional knots. To all of them, a considerable debt of gratitude is due.(The whole book is a gift for Talbot Spivak. ) I thank also the CarverFoundation at the University of Iowa for making it possible for me to goto France in the summer of 1973 to discuss this book with Jacques Derrida.To Robert Scholes I am grateful for having made it possible for me toteach a seminar on Derrida at Brown University in the fall of 1974-75. Atthat seminar, especially through active exchange with Bella Brodzky andTom Claire, I staked out the ground for my Preface.I am grateful to Peter Bacon for typing the first half of the manuscriptand the Preface from sometimes indecipherable copy. Pauline Crimson notonly typed the rest, but always delivered material at very short notice with out complaint, and conscientiously copy-edited my pages. I believe shecame to feel a personal responsibility for the making of this book, and forthat I am most grateful. I thank Timothy Shipe for his able assistance.Without Dominick Franco, my research assistant, the manuscript wouldnot have gone to press. Michael Ryan criticized each version of the Trans lator's Preface with a sharp and inspired eye and helped untiringly withlibrary materials . I cannot thank him enough for his incredibly meticulousand informed reading of the final proofs. And Catty, indifferent yet devotedcompanion through a season of solitary labor.I am grateful to Grammatology for having brought me the friendship of 1arguerite and Jacques Derrida.Gayatri Chakravorty SpivakVll
Translator'sPrefaceIf you have been reading Derrida, you will know that a plausible gesturewould be to begin with a consideration of "the question of the preface."But I write in the hope that for at least some of the readers of this volumeDerrida is new; and therefore take it for granted that, for the moment, anintroduction can be made.Jacques Derrida is maitre-assistant in philosophy at the Ecole NormaleSuperieure in Paris . He was born forty-five years ago of Sephardic Jewishparents in Algiers.! At nineteen, he came to France as a student. He was atHarvard on a scholarship in 1 9 56-57. In the sixties he was among theyoung intellectuals writing for the avant-garde journal Tel Quel.2 He isnow associated with GREPH ( Groupe de Recherche de l'EnseignementPhilosophique ) -a student movement that engages itself with the prob lems of the institutional teaching of philosophy. He was for a time a visit ing professor on a regular basis at the Johns Hopkins University, and nowoccupies a similar position at Yale. He has an affection for some of theintellectual centers of the Eastern seaboard-Cambridge, New York, Balti more-in his vocabulary, "America." And it seems that at first these placesand now more and more of the intellectual centers all over the UnitedStates are returning his affection .Derrida's first book was a translation of Edmund Husserl's "Origin ofGeometry," with a long critical introduction . This was followed by La voixet Ie phenomene, a critique of Husserl's theory of meaning. In betweenappeared a collection of essays entitled L' ecriture et la difference. De lagrammatologie came next, followed by two more collections-La dissemina tion and Marges de la philosophie. There was a little noticed introductionto the Essai sur l' origine des connaissances humaines by Condillac, en titled "L'archeologie du frivole," and Positions, a collection of interviews.This year his monumental Glas has appeared.3J acq ues Derrida is also this collection of texts.In an essay on the Preface" to Hegel's Phenomenology of the Mind,Jean Hyppolite writes :ix
xTranslator's PrefaceWhen Hegel had finished the Phenomenology . . . he refle cted retrospe ctivelyon his philosophic enterprise and wrote the "Preface." . . It is a strange demon stration, for he says above all, "Don't take me seriously in a preface. The realphilosophical work is what I have j ust written, the Phenomenology of the Mind.And if I speak to you outside of what I have written, these marginal commentscannot have the value of the work itself . . . . Don't take a preface seriously. Thepreface announces a project and a project is nothing until it is realized ."4It is clear that, as it is commonly understood, the preface harbors a lie."Prae-fatio" is "a saying before-hand" ( Oxford English Dictionary-OED ) .Yet it is accepted as natural by Hyppolite, as indeed by all of us, that"Hegel reflected retrospectively on his philosophic enterprise and wrote his'Preface'." We may see this as no more than the tacit acceptance of afiction. vVe think of the Preface, however, not as a literary, but as anexpository exercise. It "involves a norm of truth," although it might well bethe insertion of an obvious fiction into an ostensibly "true" discourse. ( Ofcourse, when the preface is being written by someone other than theauthor, the situation is yet further complicated . A pretense at writingbefore a text that one must have read before the preface can be written.Writing a postface would not really be different-but that argument canonly be grasped at the end of this preface. )Hegel's own obj ection to the Preface seems grave. The contrast be tween abstract generality and the self-moving activity of cognition appearsto be structured like the contrast between preface and text. The method ofphilosophy is the structure of knowing, an activity of consciousness thatmoves of itself; this activity, the method of philosophical discourse, struc tures the philosophical text. The reader of the philosophical text will recog nize this self-movement in his consciousness as he surrenders himself to andmasters the text. Any prefatory gesture, abstracting so-called themes, robsphilosophy of its self-moving structure. "In modern times," Hegel writes,"an individual finds the abstract form ready made."5 Further,let [modern man] read reviews of philosophical works, and even go to the lengthof reading the prefaces and first paragraphs of the works themselves; for thelatter give the general principles on which everything turns, while the reviewsalong with the historical notice provide over and above the critical j udgment andappreciation, which, being a judgment passed on the work, goes farther than thework that is judged . This common way a man can take in his dressing-gown .But spiritual elation in the eternal, the sacred, the infinite, moves along the highway of truth in the robes of the high priest.6Yet, as Hyppolite points out, Hegel damns the preface in general even ashe writes his own "Preface." And Derrida suggests that a very significantpart of Hegel's work was but a play of prefaces ( Dis 1 5f) . Whereas Hegel's
Translator's PrefaceXlimpatience with prefaces is based on philosophical grounds, his excuse forcontinuing to write them seems commonsensical : "Having in mind that thegeneral idea of what is to be done, if it precedes the attempt to carry it out,facilitates the comprehension of this process, it is worth while to indicatehere some rough idea of it, with the intention of eliminating at the sametime certain forms whose habitual presence is a hindrance to philosophicalknowledge [in der Absicht zugleich, bei dieser Gelegenheit einige Formenzu entfernen, deren Gewohnheit ein Hindernis fur das philosophischeErkennen ist]. " 7 Hegel's objection to prefaces reflects the following struc ture: preface/text abstract generality/self-moving activity. His accept ance of prefaces reflects another structure : preface/text signifier/sig nified . And the name of the " " in this formula is the Hegelian Auf hebung.Aufhebung is a relationship between two terms where the secondat once annuls the first and lifts it up into a higher sphere of existence; itis a hierarchial concept generally translated "sublation" and now sometimestranslated "sublimation." A successful preface is aufgehoben into the text itprecedes, just as a word is aufgehoben into its meaning. It is as if, to useone of Derrida's structural metaphors, the son or seed ( preface or word ) ,ca used or engendered by the father ( text or meaning ) is recovered by thefather and thus justified.But, within this structural metaphor, Derrida's cry is "dissemination,"the seed that neither inseminates nor is recovered by the father, but isscattered abroad.8 And he makes room for the prefatory gesture in quiteanother way :The preface is a necessary gesture of homage and parricide, for the book( the father ) makes a claim of authority or origin which is both true andfalse. (As regards parricide, I speak theoretically. The preface need makeno overt claim-as this one does not-of destroying its pre-text. As a preface,it is already surrendered to that gesture . . . . ) Humankind's common desireis for a stable center, and for the assurance of mastery-through knowingor possessing. And a book, with its ponderable shape and its beginning,middle, and end, stands to satisfy that desire. But what sovereign subjectis the origin of the book? "I was not one man only," says Proust's narrator,"but the steadv advance hour after hour of an armv in close formation, inwhich there appeared, according to the moment, i passioned men, indif ferent men, jealous men . . . . In a composite mass, these elements may, oneby one, without our noticing it, be replaced by others, which others againeliminate or reinforce, until in the end a change has been brought aboutwhich it would be impossible to conceive if we were a single person. " 9\\That, then, i s the book's identity? Ferdinand d e Saussure had remarkedthat the "same" phoneme pronounced twice or by two different people is
Translator's Prefacexunot identical with itself. Its only identity is in its difference from all otherphonemes ( 77-78, 52-54* ) . So do the two readings of the "same" bookshow an identity that can only be defined as a difference. The book is notrepeatable in its "identity" : each reading of the book produces a simu lacrum of an "original" that is itself the mark of the shifting and unstablesubject that Proust describes, using and being used by a language that isalso shifting and unstable. Any preface commemorates that difference inidentity by inserting itself between two readings-in our case, my reading( given of course that my language and I are shifting and unstable ) , myrereading, my rearranging of the text-and your reading. As Hegel ( andother defenders of the authority of the text ) wrote preface on preface tomatch re-editions and revised versions, they unwittingly became a partyto this identity in difference :From the moment that the circle turns, that the book i s wound back upon itself,that the book repeats itself, its self-identity receives an imperceptible differencewhich allows us to step effectively, rigorously, and thus discreetly, out of theclosure. Redoubling the closure, one splits it. Then one escapes it furtively, be tween two passages through the same book, through the same line, following thesame bend . . . . This departure outside of the identical within the same remainsvery slight, it weighs nothing, it thinks and weighs the book as such. The returnto the book is also the abandoning of the book . ( ED 4 3 0 )The preface, b y daring to repeat the book and reconstitute it i n anotherregister, merely enacts what is already the case : the book's repetitions arealways other than the book. There is, in fact, no "book" other than theseever-different repetitions : the "book" in other words, is always already a"text," constituted by the play of identity and difference. A written prefaceprovisionally localizes the place where, between reading and reading, bookand book, the inter-inscribing of "reader ( s ) ," "writer ( s ) ," and languageis forever at work. Hegel had closed the circle between father and son, textand preface. He had in fact suggested, as Derrida makes clear, that thefulfilled concept-the end of the self-acting method of the philosophicaltext-was the pre-dicate-pre-saying-pre-face, to the preface. In Derrida'sreworking, the structure preface-text becomes open at both ends. The texthas no stable identity, no stable origin, no stable end . Each act of readingthe "text" is a preface to the next. The reading of a self-professed preface isno exception to this rule.It is inaccurate yet necessary to say that something called De la gram matologie is ( was ) the provisional origin of my preface. And, even as Iwrite, I project the moment, when you, reading, will find in my preface theprovisional origin of your reading of Of Grammatology. There can be anindefinite number of variations on that theme.*Hereafter all page numbers in bold-face type refer to pages in this volume.
Translator's PrefaceXlllWhy must we worry over so simple a thing as preface-making? There is,of course, no real answer to questions of this sort. The most that can besaid, and Derrida has reminded us to say it anew, is that a certain view ofthe world, of consciousness, and of language has been accepted as thecorrect one, and, if the minute particulars of that view are examined, arather different picture ( that is also a no-picture, as we shall see ) emerges.That examination involves an enquiry into the "operation" of our mostfamiliar gestures. To quote Hegel again :What is "familiarly known" is not properly known, just for the reason that it is"familiar. " When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest formof self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume somethingto be familiar, and to let it pass [gefallen zu lassen] on that very account. Knowl edge of that sort, with all its talking around it [Hin- und Herreden] never getsfrom the spot, but has no idea that this is the case . . . . To display [auseinander legen] an idea in its original [urspriinglich] elements means returning upon itsmoments, . . 10.When Derrida writes that, since Kant, philosophy has become aware oftaking the responsibility for its discourse, it is this reexamination of thefamiliar that he is hinting at. And this is one of the reasons why he is sodrawn to Mallarme, "that exemplary poet," who invested every gesture ofreading and writing-even the slitting of an uncut double page with a knife-with textual importYAnd if the assumption of responsibility for one's discourse leads to theconclusion that all conclusions are genuinely provisional and therefore in conclusive, that all origins are similarly unoriginal, that responsibility itselfmust cohabit with frivolity, this need not be cause for gloom. Derrida con trasts Rousseau's melancholy with Nietzsche's affirmative joy preciselyfrom this angle: "Turned toward the presence, lost or impossible, of theabsent origin, [the] structuralist thematic of broken immediateness is thusthe sad, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauist aspect of the thought ofplay of which the Nietzschean affirmation-the joyous affirmation of theplay of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of aworld of signs without fault, without truth, without origin, offered to anactive interpretation-would be the other side." (ED 42 7, SC 264)There is, then, always already a preface between two hands holding opena book. And the "prefacer," of the same or another proper name as the"author," need not apologize for "repeating" the text.I"It is inaccurate yet necessary to say," I have written above, "that some thing called De la grammatologie is ( was ) the provisional origin of my
XIVTranslator' s Prefacepreface." Inaccurate yet necessary. My predicament is an analogue for acertain philosophical exigency that drives Derrida to writing "sous rature,"which I translate as tlunder erasure." This is to write a word, cross it out,and then print both word and deletion . ( Since the word is -inaccurate, it iscrossed out. Since it is necessary, it remains legible.) To take an examplefrom Derrida that I shall cite again : ". the sign that ill-named . .which escapes the instituting question of philosophy . . " ( 3 1 , 19 ) .In examining familiar things we come to such unfamiliar conclusionsthat our very language is twisted and bent even as it guides us. Writing"under erasure" is the mark of this contortion .Derrida directs us to Martin Heidegger's Zur Seinsfrage as the "au thority" for this strategically important practice, 12 which we cannot under stand without a look at Heidegger's formulation of it.Zur Seinsfrage is ostensibly a letter to Ernst Junger which seeks to estab lish a speculative definition of nihilism. Just as Hegel, writing a preface,philosophically confronted the problem of prefaces, so Heidegger, establish ing a definition, philosophically confronts the problem of definitions : inorder for the nature of anything in particular to be defined as an entity, thequestion of Being is general must always already be broached and answeredin the affirmative. That something is, presupposes that anything can be.What is this question of Being that is necessarily precomprehended inorder that thinking itself occur? Since it is always anterior to thinking, itcan never be formulated as an answer to the question "what is . . : " "The'goodness' of the rightfully demanded 'good definition' finds its confirma tion in our giving up the wish to define in so far as this must be establishedon assertions in which thinking dies out. . No information can be givenabout nothingness and Being and nihilism, about their essence and aboutthe ( verbal ) essence [it i s] of the ( nominal) essence [it is] which can bepresented tangibly in the form of assertions [it is . . .]." ( QB 80-81 ) Thispossibility of Being must be granted ( or rather is already of itself granted )for the human being to say "I am," not to mention "you are," tlshe is."Even such negative concepts as "nothingness" or "nihilism" are held withinthis precomprehended question of Being which is asked and answered non verbally, nonnominally, and without agency. This question, therefore,cannot be constructed to match an assertive answer.And the human beingis the place or zone where this particular problem has its play; not thehuman being as an individual, but the human being as Dasein-simplybeing-there-as the principle that asks and posits : 'Man does not only standin the critical zone. .He himself, but not he for himself and particularlynot through himself alone, is this zone." ( QB 82-83 ) But, Heideggercautions us, this is not mysticism. It is the baffling result of an examinationof the obvious, the lifting of the most natural forgetfulness."What if even the [propositional] language of metaphysics and meta-
Translator's Prefacexvphysics itself, whether it be that of the living or of the dead God, asmetaphysics, formed that barrier which forbids a crossing over (Obergehen]the line [from the assertion, to the question, of Being] ?" (ElsewhereHeidegger suggests, as does, of course, Nietzsche before him, that the propo sitional language of the sciences is just as forgetful of the question of Being.)': f that were the case, would not then the crossing [out1 [diagonally Uberqueren] of the line necessarily become a transformation of languageand demand a transformed relationship to the essence of language?" ( QB70-71 )As a move toward this transformation, Heidegger crosses out the word'"Being," and lets both deletion and word stand. It is inaccurate to use theword "Being" here, for the differentiation of a "concept" of Being hasalready slipped away from that precomprehended question of Being. Yet itis necessary to use the word, since language cannot do more :A thoughtful glance ahead into this realm of "Being" can only write it as The drawing of these crossed lines at first only wards off (abwehrt] , especiallythe habit of conceiving "Being" as something standing by itself . . . . The signof crossing through (Zeichen der Durchkreuzung1 can, to be sure, . . . not be amerely negative sign of crossing out [Zeichen der Durchstreichung1Man inhis essence is the memory [or "memorial," Gediichtnis1 of Being, but of This means that the essence of man is a part of that which in the crossedintersected lines of puts thinking under the claim of a more originarycommand [anfanglichere Geheiss1. (QB 80-8 1 , 82-8 3).Language is indeed straining here. The sentence " 1an in his essence isthe memory ( memorial ) of Being" a voids ascribing an agent to the unask able question of Being. Heidegger is working with the resources of theold language, the language we already possess, and which possesses us. Tomake a new word is to run the risk of forgetting the problem or believing itsolved : "That the transformation of the language which contemplates theessence of Being is subject to other demands than the exchanging of anold terminology for a new one, seems to be clear." This transformationshould rather involve "crossing out" the relevant old terms and thusliberating them, exposing "the presumptuous demand that [thinking]know the solution of the riddles and bring salvation." ( QB 72-7 3 )Now there i s a certain difference between what Heidegger puts undererasure and what Derrida does . "Being" is the master-word that Heideggercrosses out. Derrida does not reject this. But his word is "trace" ( theFrench word carries strong implications of track, footprint, imprint) , aword that cannot be a master-word, that presents itself as the mark of ananterior presence, origin, master. For "trace" one can substitute "arche writing" ( "archi-ecriture" ) , or "differance," or in fact quite a few otherwords that Derrida uses in the same way . But I shall begin with "trace/
XVlTranslator's Prefacetrack," for it is a simple word; and there also seems, I must admit, some thing ritually satisfying about beginning with the "trace."To be sure, when Heidegger sets Being before all concepts, he is attempt ing to free language from the fallacy of a fixed origin, which is also a fixedend. But, in a certain way, he also sets up Being as what Derrida calls the"transcendental signified." For whatever a concept might "mean," anythingthat is conceived of in its being-present must lead us to the already answered question of Being. In that sense, the sense of the final reference,Being is indeed the final signified to which all signifiers refer. But Heideggermakes it clear that Being cannot be contained by, is always prior to, in deed transcends, signification. It is therefore a situation where the signifiedcommands, and is yet free of, all signifiers-a recognizably theologicalsituation. The end of philosophy, according to Heidegger, is to restore thememory of that free and commanding signified, to discover Urworter( originary words ) in the languages of the world by learning to waylay thelimiting logic of signification, a project that Derrida describes as "the otherside of nostalgia, which I will call Heideggerian hope . . I . . . shall relateit to what seems to me to be retained of metaphysics in [Heidegger's]'Spruch des Anaximander,' namely, the quest for the proper word and theunique name." ( MP 29, SP 1 59-60 )Derrida seems to show no nostalgia for a lost presence. He sees in thetraditional concept of the sign a hetereogeneity-"the other of the signifiedis never contemporary, is at best a subtly discrepant inverse or parallel discrepant by the time of a breath-of the order of the signifier" ( 31, 18 ) .It is indeed an ineluctable nostalgia for p-resenceheterogeneity a unity by declaring that a sign brings forth the presence ofthe signified. Otherwise it would seem clear that the sign is the place where"the completely other is announced as such-without any simplicity, anyidentity, any resemblance or continuity-in that which is not it" ( 69, 47 ) .Word and thing or thought never in fact become one. We are reminded of,referred to, what the convention of words sets up as thing or thought, by aparticular arrangement of words. The structure of reference works andcan go on working not because of the identity between these two so-calledcomponent parts of the sign, but because of their relationship of difference.The sign marks a place of difference.One way of satisfying the rage for unity is to say that, within the phonicsign ( speech rather than writing ) there is no structure of difference; andthat this nondifference is felt as self-presence in the silent and solitarythought of the self. This is so familiar an argument that we would acceptit readily if we did not stop to think about it. But if we did, we wouldnotice that there is no necessary reason why a particular sound should beidentical with a "thought or thing"; and that the argument applies evenwhen one "speaks" silently to oneself. Saussure was accordingly obliged to.I.
Translator's PrefaceXVllpoint out that the phonic signifier is as conventional as the graphic ( 7 51 ) .Armed with this simple yet powerful insight-powerful enough to "de construct the transcendental signified " -that the sign, phonic as well asgraphic, is a structure of difference, Derrida suggests that what opens thepossibility of thought is not merely the question of being, but also thenever-annulled difference from "the completely other." Such is the strange"being" of the sign : half of it always "not there" and the other half always"not that." The structure of the sign is determined by the trace or trackof that other which is forever absent. This other is of course never to befound in its full being. As even such empirical events as answering a child'squestion or consulting the dictionary proclaim, one sign leads to anotherand so on indefinitely. Derrida quotes Lambert and Peirce: " ' [philosophyshould] reduce the theory of things to the theory of signs.' . . 'The idea ofmanifestation is the idea of a sign' " ( 7 2, 49 ) , and contrasts them to Hus serl and H eidegger. On the way to the trace/track, the word "sign" has tobe put under erasure : "the sign that ill-named lhfHg; the only one, thatescapes the instituting question of philosophy : 'What is . . . 7' "Derrida, then, gives the name "trace" to the part played by the radicallyother within the structure of difference that is the sign . ( I stick to "trace"in my translation, because it "looks the same" as Derrida's word; the readermust remind himself of at least the track, even the spoor, contained withinthe French word . ) In spite of itself, Saussurean linguistics recognizes thestructure of the sign to be a trace-structure. And Freud's psychoanalysis,to some extent in spite of itself, recognizes the
philosophy is the structure of knowing, an activity of consciousness that moves of itself; this activity, the method of philosophical discourse, struc tures the philosophical text. The reader of the philosophical text will recog nize this self-movement in his consciousness
