Writing in a foreign language as a science of writing or grammatology

Abstract

The present paper explores the issue of writing in a foreign language as a pedagogic process that may produce a radical subjective transformation. Drawing on Bernstein’s notions of the pedagogic device and discursive gap, the paper explores the epistemic make-up of language and the way it has been normalised by academic and educational institutions as a reified notion that discourages an understanding of it as the very formation of subjects, social contexts and pedagogic identities. Based on a principle of complementarity, the study proposes the deployment of pedagogies that draw on both Derrida’s science of writing or grammatology, and the dialectical approach of Vygotsky, in which writing is viewed as a representation of oral speech, capable of objectivising semiosis. The author draws on his experience as a language instructor in Japan, carrying the baggage of his self-imposed exile, to contextualise those pedagogies in relation to the positions subjects take (resistance, avoidance, commitment) and opportunities for subjective emancipation. In the end, the author suggests that Derrida’s anti-epistemologic approach offers new ways of addressing the issue of subjective domination and emancipation.