Of Grammatology

 “The devaluation even of the word ‘language,’ and everything, by way of the credit given to it, announces the looseness of its vocabulary, the temptation to seduce on the cheap, the fashionable passive abandon, the consciousness of the avant-garde, in other words its ignorance, all of this gives evidence.”

Derrida opens by challenging structuralism directly. He argues that language is slippery. Trying to discuss language through the medium of language itself further complicates the ability to understand and pin down the concept. Derrida rejects the idea that language is concrete or part of a grand narrative. These opening foundational claims contribute to the theme The Instability of Meaning. In short, Derrida suggests that meaning is difficult to pin down and can change over time or across different cultures and audiences.

“By a slow movement whose necessity is hardly perceptible, everything that for at least some twenty centuries tended toward and finally succeeded in being gathered under the name of language is beginning to let itself be transferred to, or at least summarized under, the name of writing.”

In this passage, Derrida suggests that speech has dominated the hierarchy of the binary opposites of speech and writing for centuries. Prevailing thought suggested that speech had greater value because it was closer to thought. Writing presented a unique problem to meaning. The word on the page signified a spoken word that signified a sign, creating more space between language and meaning. However, Derrida suggests that this perception is changing, and the written word is becoming more directly associated with meaning.

“The order of the signified is never contemporary, is at best the inverse or the subtly discrepant parallel—discrepant by the time of a breath.”

In his development of his argument for The Rejection of Logocentrism, Derrida explains that it is impossible for a signifier to have a meaning that is clearly defined by its relationship to the outside word.