Derrida's Chinese Prejudice

Abstract

The program of that is mounted in Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology?and already problem of reading is raised, for as Spivak tells us in preface to her English translation, term deconstruction did not appear in earliest published version of first part of Grammatology, Heideggerian term destruction marking its appearance in advance?this program of includes a critique of ethnocentrism. I might have even said that critique of is not merely accidental but absolutely essential to program of deconstruction, were it not for sus picion that casts on all such philosophemes. The very first sentences of Grammatology?and again problem of reading is raised, for I am provisionally excluding text of Grammatology itself author's preface and triple exergue, as well as sup plementary materials provided by translator and press?its very first sentences call attention to the which, every where and always, ha[s] controlled concept of writing, and to what [Derrida calls] logocentrism: metaphysics of phonetic writ ing ... which [is] fundamentally ... nothing but most original and powerful ethnocentrism (3; emphasis in original). On this twofold charge of and logocentrism, Der rida indicts the history of (the only) metaphysics, which has, in spite of all differences, not only Plato to Hegel... but also, beyond these apparent limits, pre-Socratics to Heidegger, always assigned origin of truth in general to logos (3; emphasis in original), or to trace this history by a somewhat more apocryphal genealogy, from Plato to Saussure (70), from Phaedrus to Course in General Linguistics (103). This metaphysical tradition is characterized in its