Of Grammatology

"Well, I chose this because you can’t really get around it when it comes to deconstruction. It is the urtext and it is also one of the books which either draws you into deconstruction and leaves you stuck there for years and years, or that pushes you away from deconstruction. It’s also one of those books that probably more people have claimed to have read—and not to have read—than virtually any other book other than Ulysses . When I was doing philosophy at university, I certainly pretended to read Of Grammatology . And for me, part of the problem here is the reception of Of Grammatology. It is classed as a book of philosophy, which it is. But with books of philosophy, we tend to have a set of expectations. One of the expectations we have is that we’ll find a fairly logical argument. We start with one proposition, there are building blocks, there are contradictions and so forth. And the argument progresses cogently, even in someone like Nietzsche or Heidegger . We expect that from a philosophy book. Of Grammatology doesn’t really work like that. I describe it in my biography of Derrida as ‘bonkers’. I think in the first draft I actually called it ‘batshit crazy’, but that didn’t get past the publishers, so we went with ‘bonkers’. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In a sense it is exactly that. This is Derrida, who was 37 when he wrote it, who had these ideas that he hadn’t really found an outlet for yet. It’s one of those books where he just throws in everything he knows at that point, almost unashamedly. It’s about writing; it’s about deconstruction; it’s about language. There’s a vast section on Rousseau and masturbation, and sections on supplementarity and pictographic language, all these things are thrown together. It’s also a mash up of two different essays that he’d written separately, but put together clumsily—he always felt he had put them together clumsily. It’s all of these things. And, because it’s so forbidding, it does turn a lot of people off deconstruction altogether. I think that the thing to do is to read it, in a sense, as you would read a piece of fiction. You can dip into it, you can understand a few paragraphs, and then not understand a couple of paragraphs. We are used to doing that with some fiction, particularly with something like Ulysses , to use an obvious comparison. We are comfortable with the idea that meaning will gradually emerge as we read along. And if we don’t understand something, we can dump it and come back to it. But for me—and I’m sure for many, many people—you sit down with the first paragraph and think, ‘I don’t understand this’ and stop. I say, don’t panic, and don’t stop. Yes, which is a risk. But you know, all reading is a risk – which is a very Derridean thing to say. We take that risk any time we open a book – we risk wasting time. Now, obviously, with a book of this level of influence, I would hope people would think it has something to say, and so you would take that risk. And I think what gradually happens, and it took me a long time—and again, like Ulysses —it’s one of those books where every time you go back to it, you understand a little bit more. It’s one of those books where gradually the meaning grows on you. For Derrida, one of the central things is that meaning is not fixed, that any declarative statement has to be questioned. So Of Grammatology avoids declarative statements in a way that other philosophy books don’t. It puts things in quotation marks; it uses lots of the tactics of novels; it uses bits of dialogue; it uses epigrams; it uses hyperbole – all of these things. It uses all of those as its tactics, not gratuitously, but because it’s performing deconstruction as it goes along. The footnotes are vast, the endnotes are vast. You really have to allow yourself to get lost in the thick of it."