Text/Textuality

Of Grammatology draws out the relation between this text and a critique of the philosophical ethnocentrism expressed in the subordination of writing to speech. Although Derrida frames the issue in terms of a critique of Ferdinand de Saussure's account of the linguistic sign, it is clear that the problems raised regarding Husserl's figure of interweaving are not far away. Indeed, Saussure's subordination of writing to speech is read as an expression of his tacit agreement with Husserl's phenomenological construal of language. To challenge this subordination and the ethnocentrism sustaining it, Derrida uses the logic of the text, that is, the argument that the interweaving that confounds the distinction between different levels of consciousness and dimensions of reality also confounds not just the distinction between speech and writing but the distinction between thought and signs. Here, the semiological text comes to designate the unstable process whereby experience and representation (whether linguistic or not) engage one another in a radically undecidable manner. The oft-cited formulation "there is nothing outside the text," which appears in the discussion of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, thus asks, at one level, to be taken this way: there is no experience that can be absolutely separated from the systems of representations developed for its expression. The text then is less a thing than a philosophical paradigm, that is, a way of representing—within the protocols and procedures of a certain discourse—the undecidable limits of representation. It is not that there is nothing but representation. Rather, if there is nothing outside the text, it is because there is nothing but the enduring missed encounter between experience and representation.

Because of the intimacy that defines the relation between Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference (from the same year), it is important here to acknowledge the way Derrida mobilizes Sigmund Freud to extend his critique of experience, a critique that might otherwise appear to leave both the personal and the ineffable unthematized. In "Freud and the Scene of Writing" Derrida, by tracing Freud's ambivalent relation to the metaphors of writing as they appear in various discourses, shows how a textual logic is at work both in Freud's account of neurophysiology (the thematics of Bahnung, "pathmaking") and in his account of the psychical interaction of memory and perception, whether in waking life or in the dream. Thus, the semiological text, by representing the undecidable interweaving at work in the different operations of the psychical apparatus, is shown to have yet another relation to the systemic mediation of experience. If, as Derrida argues, the signifier and the signified are interwoven—in effect, structured by the differing deferral of différance (Derrida's well-known neologism)—then, strictly speaking, there are no ideas. Idealism is then thrown into crisis, and while Derrida's materialism has consistently defied philosophical categorization, it is clear that the text paradigm, in foregrounding the interminable labor of differentiation, exhibits an unmistakable materiality.