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This conversation with Rodolphe Gasché-a keynote speaker at Mosaic's 2006 Following Derrida: Legacies conference-evolved over several months. Mosaic is pleased to publish this interview, which originally appeared in Mosaic 41.4 (December 2008).
DM Recently, I have been re-reading Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology. It is astonishing to think that Derrida published this in 1967, along with two other major books of that year, that, at so early a stage, he could anticipate what would prove to be his life-work, that he could analyze metaphysics in a way it had not been analyzed before. It is difficult to cut into the book and extract a statement from it, but I will try to do just that, citing from the section where Derrida reads texts on linguistics that were written by Ferdinand de Saussure. In these pages, Derrida attempts to detach his notion of the "trace" from the classical concept of the "sign" and from Saussure's privileging of the "natural bond" between sound and idea. To think the trace, Derrida says, to free such thinking of the metaphysical desire for a pure signified, "one must begin from the possibility of neutralizing the phonic substance."
Taking this proposed beginning as our point of departure here, I wonder if you might tell Mosaic readers at which stage you were in your own work when Of Grammatology reached you? In particular, how did you receive Derrida's major contention that metaphysics represents a powerful desire for a "living speech" that is unbreached by difference? It seems to me that while many readers of Derrida regularly acknowledge his challenge to the speech/writing hierarchy, not as many contend with the role of "sound" in his work, with the "acoustical plenitude" that he analyzes in the tradition of metaphysics. Do you agree? Has Derrida's deconstruction of the accord between sound, the voice, and sense changed your own work in a fundamental way?
RG On one occasion at least, and with some amusement, Derrida pointed out to me that the book, Of Grammatology, that made him famous was, unlike the Introduction to Husserl's Origin of Geometry and, in particular, Speech and Phenomena, a work patched together of two unrelated pieces: on the one hand, a reworked review article on several important books on writing that...