Grammatology: A Vital Science

Abstract

This essay argues that Jacques Derrida's early work on grammatology and the science of writing continues to have interventionary relevance for how we understand the scientific enterprise today. Catherine Malabou has argued that the importance of Derrida's contribution has waned because the metaphors and tropes that he deploys have been eclipsed with time, becoming less applicable in explanations of how things work. Offering her own replacement term, ‘plastology’, Malabou argues that insights into the operations of brain plasticity, for example, have superseded graphic metaphors. I suggest that Malabou's remedial is misguided because Derrida's ‘graphematic structure’ was never intended to answer the problem of representational accuracy. Indeed, Derrida advises that his non-concepts ‘trace’, ‘gramme’ or ‘writing’ are no more graphic than phonological, no more temporal than spatial. I argue, with Derrida, that a model, or representation, is not a third term in-between the biologist and biology or the writer and the world. In grammatology's onto-epistemological confounding of subject with/in object, we find that ‘writing's’ riddles also appear in/as the entanglements of quantum physics, where the one who knows, the measuring apparatus and the object to be interpreted are strangely involved.