Ten Weeks of Derrida, Week 2: The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing
Of Grammatology is divided into two parts: Writing before the Letter and Nature, Culture, Writing. Here we begin the first part of the first part, The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing, a 24 page section subdivided into three parts: The Program (5 pages), The Signifier and Truth (9 pages), and The Written Being/The being Written (9 pages).
Before the program, a paragraph considering the problem of language.
“This crisis is also a symptom. It indicates, as if in spite of itself, that a historic-metaphysical epoch must finally determine as language the totality of its problematic horizon” (OG 6).
Consider the title of the chapter: The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing. A book is a discrete physical object, with a finite set of words arranged on a finite number of pages. The experience of reading a book, however, is infinite and unique for each individual. And what do all of those words mean with regards to “reality?” For Derrida, this is the final question of our historic-metaphysical epoch. The words in a book extend infinitely inward into the mind of the reader, and infinitely outward as the book is cited, written about, and smeared across the rest of human existence. Language (and the idea of writing), unlike a book, have no boundaries. Continue reading
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