Topoi (2007) 26:279286

DOI 10.1007/s11245-007-9025-9

Jacques Derridas Writing and Difference

Maurizio Ferraris

Published online: 15 August 2007

Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007

1 Our Own Time Grasped in Thought

Philosophy, Hegel used to say, is its own time grasped in
thought. And, indeed, the book Im going to review would
have been inconceivable without the technological explosion of writing (e-mail, SMS, the Internet) that has been the
distinctive mark of the last twenty years. If this book had
been published, let us say, in 1967 rather than in 2007, it
would have looked like the work of an insane person, a
visionary or an aesthete. Back in those years, there was the
predominance of what McLuhan defined as the hot
mediai.e. cinema, radio, television, letters were a
disappearing species, and people made use of telephones
only. The phenomenon of the return of illiteracy was quite
a concrete prospect for the inhabitants of an advanced
society. Moreover, it would have sounded absurd to say
that there is a constitutive link between writing and
thought, that we would have used our personal computers
as writing machines rather than as devices for thinking, or
that we were on the edge of an overflow of writing like the
Babel library into which we enter every time we switch on
our computers and phones. An illustration will suffice. In
the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odissey, in the spaceship
the computer Hal is designed to think, whereas writing
machineswhich nowadays are seen as modern artifacts
are utilized for writing.
Another aspect of this book that a reader of the past
decades would have perceived as utterly out of time is the
remarkable confidence in philosophy that comes out from

M. Ferraris (&)
University of Turin, Turin, Italy
e-mail: maurizio.ferraris@labont.it

its pages. It should be recalled, in fact, that for the large

part of the twentieth century, the widespread opinion was
that the end of philosophy would have come within years,
and that something like post-philosophy was on the
horizon. In this case, too, the expectations have been
sharply disproved, since philosophy today seems to be
quite in good health. It is worth considering that these
two aspectsthe explosion of writing and philosophys
survivalappear to have been closely intertwined with
each other, thus disproving one of the most established and
repeated philosophical dogmas from Plato to Gadamer, according to which philosophy has to do in its
essence with the spoken word, with dialogue, and that
writing is therefore a potential adversary (or at least a
degenerated form) both of the spoken word and of creative thinking. But we live, of course, in 2007 and not in
1967, and no one is surprised by the fact that philosophy
has not dissolved itself into the natural or human sciences,
or that it has not reduced itself to its own historyand
most importantly that it is not something that belongs to
the past.
After all, we no longer live in the twentieth-century.
However, it is precisely this negative circumstance that
gives rise to one of the most objectionable traits of the
bookalong with many other positive hintsnamely, the
fact that the author, with the benefit of a hindsight that is
available to any graduate student of our time, makes fun
of some of the great authors of the twentieth century,
whether their name is Foucault or Bataille, Levinas or
Levi-Strauss, and simply refuses to consider them in their
specific historical context; on the contrary, he insists on
treating them as contemporaries. Let us be frank: as a
thought experiment this is not funny at all inasmuch as its
only result is to bring grist to the mill of the authors
futile pride.

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2 Hindsight
Let us take the bull by the horns and deal with the first
aspect of the book, which is not entirely pleasant. On the
face of it, we are confronted with a survey of the mythical
figures of French literature and thought of the last century:
literary structuralism and the structuralism advocated by
authors such as Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Jabe`s, Levinas,
Artaud, Bataille The choice is undoubtedly appealing
and definitely fascinating. Who were the matres a` penser
that seduced and enchanted the French and American
cultures in the last century? What were their theories, their
mistakes, their exaggerations, their more or less innocent
obsessions and fixations? Every historian of culture could
be interested in such a book. But Derridas approach is
nonetheless morally deplorable, or at least is revealing of a
complete lack of good taste, for he treats such authors like
contemporaries, and criticizes them from the top of an
experience accumulated in the successive half of the century. But having arrived later is not a plus, it is just a fact,
just as having arrived before is not a fault in itself; to
overlook this fact is the sign of the narrow-mindedness of
ones historical sense, and amounts to treating disrespectfully the giants, or at least the teachers, who have carried us
on their shoulders.
Let me consider Derridas approach to structuralism in
the opening and in the penultimate essay, the one devoted
to Levi-Strauss. Its easy for Derrida to argue that the
dream of a structure completely detached from history is
not so different in and by itself from a critique of pure
reason. But, again, its easy to make such considerations
half a century later. This is even truer in the case of
Cogito and the History of Madness. From a contemporary standpoint, it is too easy a win to criticize Foucault, to
proclaim untenable the views advocated in a 1961 book
such as Histoire de la folie a` lage classiqueFolie et
deraison in the light of the successive, and well-known,
failures of anti-psychiatry. But the most objectionable
feature of Derridas critique lies in the fact that he doesnt
appeal to empirical evidence (e.g. anti-psychiatry has
failed) but rather simply offers captious arguments against
Foucaults theoretical assumptions. Foucault, as the reader
might recall, insisted on the socially constructed features of
madness, and, at the same time, wanted to see in madness a
radical alterity in relation to the rationality that left it out.
Its easy for Derrida to point out that, as long as we consider madness as socially constructed, it is difficult to
maintain that there is something in madness that is radically at variance with the dominant rationality.
Derrida analyzes the subject of an impossible alterity
in detail, and, indeed, such a theme plays a fundamental
role in his argument against Levinas, in what perhaps is the
most dense and longest essay in the collection. As

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historians of the philosophy of the last century know well,

Levinas philosophical activity was entirely devoted to the
search for radical alternatives to the tradition in which we
all grew up. Levinas saw metaphysics, as the thought of the
person, in sharp opposition to ontology, as the thought of
being; and, analogously, he saw Judaism in opposition
to Hellenism, the Greek philosophical tradition. Derrida
insists on the fact that this search is nothing other than a
mere illusion, just like the empiricist dreams of a pure
experience. The alternative to traditionDerrida writesis nullified in the precise moment in which it becomes
word; in the same way that in the essay on Foucault,
madness is neutralized in the precise instant in which it
becomes the subject of reason. Derrida sums up his own
view by quoting Joyce, at the end of the essay: Jewgreek
is greekjew: Extremes meet. In other words, alterity looks
more like a dream than a reality. Now, its easy to reach
such a conclusion today in the aftermath of the failure of
revolutionary movements, or even of the critiques
addressed by Western alternatives to the system at a
time when globalization has prevailed all over the world.
However, how can we blame someone like Levinas who
certainly didnt have a crystal ball and lived in another
century?
One may ask what is the fundamental core of Derridas
critique; as I said earlier, it is not founded on a number of
historical evidences, but rather originates from theoretical
considerations, not without an unforgivable vanity and a
deleterious passion for complexity. In a more general
sense, what we have here is a reiteration of Hegelian dialectics, made more spicy and existential by the use,
between the lines, of Koje`ves Hegelian comments. Considered in this light, Derridas passion for modern artifacts
never contradicts itself; however, in this respect too, Derrida does not stand out for his originality. Fifty years ago,
to talk about Hegel required some courage, all things
considered; but nowadays, when even analytic philosophers show a renewed interest in Hegels philosophy,
Derridas gesture is not original at all. In his essay on
Bataille, Derrida confines himself to a number of trivialities. For he strives to show us the intrinsic virtues of
dialectics, its being insurmountable as long as alterity can
always be absorbed into identity and the negative always
recovered by the positive.

3 The Materialism of the Incorporeal

I shall leave it to the reader to evaluate this proposal. The
argument Derrida offers in the essays devoted to Artaud is
somehow subtler. He praises Artauds combination of
metaphysics and corporeality. These, however, are not
viewed as incompatible ingredients, but rather are

Jacques Derridas Writing and Difference

construed as two faces of the same coin, in agreement with

Artauds project of a materialism of the incorporeal that
inspired his experimental theatre. (The younger readers
may know nothing about the experimental theatre, and this
is surely a deficiency; but Derrida feels no need to spend a
single word to explain this phenomenon of the last century
to the younger people.) In this case too, by underscoring
the metaphysical theatre and the materialism of the
incorporeal, Derrida runs the risk of explaining what is
obvious at a time when metaphysics has taken, once again,
its own place within the philosophical constellation, after
an ostracism that lasted for the entire twentieth century; in
fact, in the last twenty years, the debate over the mind
body problem has become a philosophical routine. However, there is a point that deserves attention, which
discloses Derridas sensibility for current philosophy, a
receptivity that I have already signaled at the outset of this
critical review. Derridas sensibility is so strong that even
the harshest criticas I think I amis somehow convinced to turn a blind eye to his pontificating about the
great authors of the past. Such a sensibility reveals itself in
Derridas construalwhich is nothing original, but is
perfectly in accord with our timesof writing (precisely
what is overflowing into our computers and cell phones) as
a good instantiation of Artauds idea of a materialism of
the incorporeal. Indeed, in this case, Derridas intuition
appears to be well grounded. The Materialism of the
incorporeal sounds more or less like an oxymoron;
however, as long as writingwhich is materialcan be a
vehicle of intelligible contents, we cannot dismiss Derridas view as simply untenable, since he points to a truth
that anyone can see. For once, let us acknowledge it,
Derrida does not put forth a mere triviality. In his sensibility for what is actual, in fact, there are no concessions to
the postmodern idea according to which information science has placed us in a dematerialized world. If it suffices
to pull out the plug of our computers to turn them off, then,
one can easily understand how important a form of
materialism is even in the realm of the incorporeal (recall
that here we are dealing with Derridas intuitions, which
today sound much less original than they could have
sounded twenty years ago when postmodernism was
flourishing).
I am quite aware that I have offered a rather critical
analysis of Derridas views, as they are put forward in these
essays. Nonetheless, it is difficult not to feel uncomfortable
when confronted with such a bizarre mixture of archaisms
and resolutely modern considerations with which virtually
anyone can agree. Incidentally: why has Derrida left this
book unfinished and why does he not revise his files in
order to finish it? Why did he only write a short introductory note in which he talks about sketches that must
be preserved? In the age of computers, to publish

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unfinished essays is really a form of laziness. Enough with

the cahier des doleances. It is time to explain the reason
why this book deserves to be published, and why there are
reasons to believe that, in spite of everything, it will be
quite a successful book.

4 A Psychoanalysis of Philosophy
The mixture of the old and the new, which is typical of
Derrida, becomes very visible in the essay on Freud, which
in this respect is exemplary. On the one hand, we face a
colossal archaism, namely, the philosophical concern with
psychoanalysis. Its been ages since this topic was dropped
from the philosophical agenda and now we perceive it
clearly as something belonging to the past. Derrida himself
must be aware of this, since, at the beginning of the essay,
he makes clear that appearances notwithstanding what
hes proposing is not a psychoanalysis of philosophy. But
then, for Gods sake, why should we deal with psychoanalysis? On the other hand, the caveat just mentioned has
to be reckoned as a denegation, a Verneinung, an
instance of that admitting by denying and denying by
admitting which was so popular in those days when
psychoanalysis was the latest craze in salons and
conferences.
But this is not the only archaism. Whos the patient to be
psychoanalyzed here? Nothing less than metaphysics, just
as if we were in Nietzsches time or, in the best case, in
Heideggers. This seems to lead to the following conclusion: Derrida has spent a lot of time mocking past thinkers,
treating them like junk store items, and then it turns out that
his own tools of the trade are outdated as well. Like
Nietzsches Twilight of the Idols (a 1888s work!) or Heideggers writings from the 1940s. Hence, the best Derrida
can do is the following: we have to psychoanalyze metaphysics, which suffers from so many tics and neuroses. He
claims then that metaphysics, a two-thousand-years-old
tradition which thinks of itself as being unselfishly in love
with the truth, needs a session with the psychoanalyst. And
the questions to be raised are: what are the grounds of such
a love? Is it really a feeling that has nothing to do with any
sensible motivation or technical implication? Is it true that
theres no hidden purpose behind it? With its back against
the wall, philosophy will try to defend herself, but Freudian
slips hidden between the lines of its texts will uncover the
resistances and truth will come to light.
We have the feeling of finding ourselves in the past
century in the middle of the 1960s, possibly in Paris, in an
apartment in Rue Saint-Andre` des Arts, where men of
letters, philosophers and psychoanalysts (slightly Maoist,
as was in fashion at that time) meet. Now the reply is
foregone: this psychoanalysis of philosophy, which Derrida

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(following Heidegger, once again) calls deconstruction,

is pursuing truth too, and in so doing it is not immune from
the flaws and hypocrisies of metaphysics. Nevertheless,
Derrida seems to be more interested in the right/wrong
dichotomy rather than in the true/false one (and here we
can perceive the lesson of Levinas, despite the distance
with which hes treated in the essay devoted to him): if we
are wrong and unfair, selfish, racist, sexist, etc., thats
because we tend to repress too many things, caught as we
are in a dream of presence, integrity, and identity at the
level of morality, sociality, and sexuality. Thus, the history
of metaphysics turns out to be dominated by a struggle
between Good and Evil, whose presuppositions have to be
unmasked. In this context, the philosopher will appear like
the scholarly kinsman of the revolutionary.
So it was no mirage, after all. We really are in Paris,
between the Odeon and the Rue dUlm! Dien Ben Phus
defeat happened just yesterday and the battle of Algiers
stands out on front pages of newspapers. Philosophers,
people who are sensitive to Marxism and who are the
psychoanalysts of their own society, think they have
something important to say about the process of decolonization: Western rationality is not the only one; on the
contrary, it is something historically determined and geographically localized. Whats important in this work of
disassembling is to question not only the purity of philosophys intentions, but also its identity, that is to say, the
alleged existence of something like a pure philosophy,
separated from history, sciences, myths and, of course,
human events. This purity must be taken for what it really
is: a myth. It has to be shown that the centre of philosophical discourse can never set its own margins (rhetoric,
technique) aside, and that in some cases it is intertwined
with its opposite (literature, fiction).
That was the Zeitgeist of those days. But, again, taking
(irritatingly) advantage of hindsight, Derrida seems to have
fun in playing the role of an older, wiser and more
responsible brother, when in actuality hes just a small
grandson who writes his verdict forty or fifty years later.
Philosophy, he explains (as if we didnt know that), is not
merely history or geography, although it has much to do
with (and in some respect it depends from) them. But the
exit from philosophy isnt really so smooth and easy as
those guys in Rue dUlm were supposing. Now that
libraries, websites and professors desks are overflowing
with post-colonial studies, it is worth wondering whether
dismantling a whole tradition is really such a simple
enterprise. Moreover, we know now that the revolution
didnt succeed, at least not the one which had been planned
between Rue dUlm and the Odeon. Here, again, Derrida
indulges in belated balances and retrospective looks. But
today its just too easy to see how things are going, whereas
we could accept lessons from him only if we knew that he

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had really declared his intuitions in 1968s Paris, similarly

to what Heidegger did in 1933s Germany.

5 The Scene of Writing

Nonetheless, in this crowd of confused and illogical claims,
there is a truly shining gem, an idea which provides us with
a useful insight not only into the spirit of 1968, but into the
challenges awaiting us today, almost half a century later.
Psychoanalysis is not only a way of uncovering complexes
and repressions. It can be examined with respect to the
concept of writing. This move may appear trifling, and
even obsessive, if we consider how compulsively Derrida
seems to find the theme of writingor, more precisely, of
its repressionin all his interpretations of philosophers
from Plato to Heidegger. Could we find in Freud, too, the
repression of writing? The question has to be answered
negatively. FreudDerrida points outneither represses
nor resists writing. Indeed, he represents the mind as a
writing apparatus, in agreement with the classical images
of the mind as a tabula rasa or as an empty room from
Plato and Aristotle to Locke; but in so doing, Freud, unlike
many philosophers, doesnt slide toward the spirit, the
voice, the incorporeal. On the contrary, the metaphor of
writing, constantly emphasized, turns out to be more than a
metaphor; it constitutes a realization of that materialism
of the incorporeal which Derrida finds also in Artaud.
Here we have to acknowledge an aspect of concreteness
that characterizes Derridas perspective, which allows him
to resist the temptations of postmodern immaterialism. And
this is why it is ultimately correct to think of Derrida as
belonging to the realist turn, which is typical of our
century.
But let me proceed in order. The main theme of the essay
devoted to Freud is the comparison between the 1895s
Project of a Psychology, written by a still positivist Freud,
and a much later text, the 1925s Note upon the Mystic
Writing-Pad. The two essays deal with the same theme. If
experience is traditionally construed in terms of an
inscription, how is it possible that the writing pad is not
saturated very quickly? And how can a single space account
for the recording as well as the forgetting and novelty of
experience? In 1895, the physician Freud answers with a
physiological hypothesis: there are two types of neurons;
the first ones, impermeable, serve to record perceived
events; the others, permeable, do not retain the impressions
and thus ensure the novelty of experience. In 1925, the
philosopher Freud introduces a metaphor that involves
straightforwardly the notion of writing. The mind is like a
mystic writing-pad, one of those old small boards where
writing was obtained by means of a contact between a
celluloid sheet and a base of resin.

Jacques Derridas Writing and Difference

Why all this emphasis on writing? And why should we

care about the magic pad? Here the answer is rather
obvious: because today, in 2007, we are in the age of
writing, and a magic pad, characterized by an infinite
possibility of inscription and deletion, can be found on
everybodys desk; there is surely one on the desk of the one
who is writing this review (i.e. my desk), and probably one
on the desk of the one who is reading it. Thus, what Derrida
seeks out in Freud is an insight on the present. And this
insight has nothing to do with obsolete notions like the
unconscious, but rather with actual and still relevant issues
like consciousness or the mindbody relation. Here the
main thread of Derridas discourse is, again, the materialism of the incorporeal, which, for him, is realized
precisely in writing. If we consider how usual it is to think
of the mind in analogy with computers, and how increasingly consciousness and knowledge turn out to be a library
(a powerful apparatus for writing and recording) we have
to admit that Derridas bet seems to be a winning one, and
that his approach to Freud, despite the very unpromising
premises, proves to be original and stimulating.

6 From Phenomenology to Grammatology

It should be acknowledged that the reference to writing is
neither a mere affectation nor a concession to the overwhelming topicality of the theme. On the contrary, it
reflects a rigour in approach and a solid academic background, which do honour to the author, who proves to be
well-grounded in his readings on phenomenology, as is
testified to by the central (robustly academic) essay of this
book on Genesis and Structure (a contribution to a
conference, which is probably the original motive of all the
essays collected here). Indeed, phenomenology is Derridas
academic specialty, and the theme of writing, far from
being a sociological whimsicality, is rooted in an interpretation of Husserl which tries to draw a correlation
between his thought and dialectical materialism. In this
context, once again, we find (but this is no longer a surprise) a pastiche of the old and the new. And the old here is
even decrepit: phenomenology and dialectical materialism!
We plunge right into the Fifties of the past century, face to
face with the Vietnamese philosopher Tran-Duc-Thao and
his book Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism
(1951). This is a very remote world, even older than the
one in which we tried the cocktail of Freud and philosophy,
since the barmen serving the cocktail of phenomenology
and dialectical materialism are not the older brothers, but
rather the academic fathers of those who liked to mix
Freudianism with Maoism.
This archaism leads Derrida to an entirely original
reworking of phenomenology, just as he did in the case of

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Freud. Actually, phenomenology is an old obsession, and

in this connection a digression on the overall production of
Derrida may be useful. Fifteen years before Writing and
Difference, in his dissertation entitled The Problem of
Genesis in the Philosophy of Husserl, Derrida used phenomenology as a tool to overcome the alternative between
structuralism (basically idealistic) and historicism (basically materialistic). This is very old stuff indeed, souvenirs
from the 1950s, things whose origin can be traced back to
the days when Claude Levi-Strauss and Raymond Aron
debated each other. Here, though, with a youthful and
lively impudence, Derrida pretends that the debate is even
older than that. Thus, by introducing in this context a reference to Husserl (who had to deal with similar problems at
the end of the XIX century), Derrida, not only cunningly
predates the debate, but is able to point to its upshot: history and structure are complementary rather than opposed.
The one involves the other; since the ideal structures didnt
fall from heaven, they have origins to which they cannot be
reduced (in the same sense in which logic cant be reduced
to psychology).
Ten years later, in his introduction to the French translation of Husserls The Origin of Geometry, Derrida faced
up to the alternative between history and structure, examining the special case of the history of a pure science. In
geometry idealism seems unavoidable: would we be willing to accept that Every equilateral triangle is equiangular
is a truth of the same type as Caesar crossed the Rubicon? Geometrical truth seems to be completely
independent from any empirical fact whatsoever: Pythagoras theorem would still be true even if Pythagoras had
never existed and nobody had discovered it. And yet, as
Derrida remarks, an idealist philosopher like Husserl has
deeply revised this conception. Of course, Pythagoras
theorem cant be identified with its discoverer. But the fact
that an ideal (and, thus, not contingent) entity like Pythagoras theorem exists depends on the existence of a real and
contingent entity like Pythagoras; and if Pythagoras had
immediately forgotten his own discovery, the whole thing,
so to say, would have fallen into oblivion; and if he had not
communicated to someone else his discovery, using language, it would have disappeared with him. Finally, if that
discovery did reach beyond the borders of his original
community, it was only because it was written down.
Thus, paradoxically (but not too much), the condition of
the ideal is to be found in something material like writing.
In Voice and Phenomenon, just published like Writing and
Difference, Derridas departure from phenomenology
becomes visible and the intuition just mentioned is generalized along these lines: without writing, traces, memories,
signs and marks in general, not only would there be no
history; there would be no structure and idea, either. And
this is so because what has been called structure, or, in a

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more Kantian vein, transcendental, the condition of the

possibility of knowledge is ultimately a form of writing.
This is the topic of Derridas third book, published in 2007,
whose title is Of Grammatology. Incidentally, is there
anyone who wants to deny that a Spirit of the Time exists?
Derrida is a true iPod philosopher, to the point that his
philosophy would be inconceivable without it; the annus
mirabilis of Derrida (which Gerard Granel mysteriously
links to mystical and Heideggerian notions like the
withdrawal of the origin, upon reviewing the three books
from the pages of Critique) is actually suspended between
Googles leap into cell phones and the release of the
iPhone. And we should notice that all this, far from challenging the validity of grammatological hypotheses, fully
confirms them.
Going back to pure philosophy: the categories, which
according to Kant mediate our relation to the world, are
transposed by Derrida into the notion of arche-writing,
which sums up the function of the inscription illustrated so
far. But Derrida doesnt show much concern for systematicity. Unlike the general semiotics developed by Umberto
Eco more than thirty years ago, grammatology is less
interested in describing the role of signs in the construction
of social reality, than it is in emphasizing how this role is
subject to a systematic repression both in the philosophical
tradition as well as in daily life. Logocentrism is the
name Derrida gives to this repression, which seems to
embody and to coincide with the fate of metaphysics from
Plato to Nietzsche: it is the fact that matter, signs, means
for transmitting and conserving disappear in the face of the
triad of Idea, Meaning and Spirit.

7 Deconstruction and Difference

Repression, logocentrism I can imagine what the reader is
going to ask: are we not talking once more about past fads,
like the philosopher that is a critic and physician of culture
(as Nietzsche has it), a figure that is two centuries old? Yes
and no. Or, better, this time we would rather not be driven by
an instinctive repulsion. Such an instinct was unavoidable
when we caught Derrida showing off with Levinas or LeviStrauss. Through his analysis, Derrida comes to what one
might call the Critique of Impure Reason: philosophers
and philosophy must awake from a dream of integrity and
purity, which turns out to be limited and totalitarian. In this
picture, it is not surprising that the fundamental notion of
Derridas philosophy is, as anticipated, deconstruction. The
termwhich is introduced in Of Grammatology, but
underlies Writing and Difference, and more generally the
whole work of Derridais borrowed from Heidegger (Destruktion or Abbau), who introduced the notion eighty years
ago. Heidegger was concerned with the history of

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metaphysics. His insight was that of de-sedimenting, or

reviving, inherited concepts, which have become inert, in
order to give a living meaning back to them. Derrida, however, wants to stress the constructive aspect of
deconstruction. In other words, deconstruction amounts to
the immediate construction of something different.
This is possible because Derrida is concerned with the
practical rather than with the theoretical sphere. One can
demonstrate that a theory is false without thereby proposing a true one, but it is impossible to criticize a form of life,
without thereby proposingat least implicitlyan alternative one. Still, the very idea of deconstruction is more
than a simple substitution of values. The underlying view is
that values are always relational: there is no white without
black, no center without outskirt, no figure without background, and thus no right without wrong (which is usually
identified with the different, the other, the stranger). Now,
deconstruction must first of all uncover this relationality,
the fact that the terms cannot exist apart from one another.
Just as in Hegels dialectic, the master does not exist
without the slave, identity does not exist without differenceeventually, the one depends on the other. Therefore,
difference is implication, hidden complicity. This is the
intuition that grounds Hegels Logic: we just need to
introduce time, and the oppositions (between life and
death, day and night, nature, culture, technique, etc.) turn
into complementarities.
This is why Derridain the text of a talk he kindly put
at my disposal, and which will be delivered at the Institut
Philosophique on January 2008re-christens difference as
differance, with an a. In French, differencethe fact
that two things differis spelled difference, with a e,
even if the two words are homophonic. The neologism,
which looks like a grammatical mistake (notice, for
instance, that Derrida has not entitled the book I am
reviewing Lecriture et la differance), transforms the
difference in a gerund, thereby stressing the reference to an
act of differing or postponing. The orthographical alteration expresses in an economic way Derridas thought: the
couples of opposites that are part of our life do not exist
autonomously; rather, one exists with respect to the other,
and time shows the complicity underlying their opposition.
Should we come to the conclusion that everything is relative? Not at all. The right conclusion is that nothing is
definitive, and thatdifferently from Hegelian dialectic
we will never come to an absolute knowledge, or to a last
word.

8 Archive-ache
However, the objection that I have put forth and propelled
myself still stands, I suppose. Talking about regret and

Jacques Derridas Writing and Difference

censorship, or aiming at deconstructions in the transparent society of the Internet is definitively vieux jeu: it
leads us, if not to Nietzsches world, to Adornos world (at
best). Such a world is dumb dead, and the Critique of
culture along with it. If it is not dead, it is at least decrepitand, again, this aspect shows us a peculiar mix of
archaism and actuality. However, the reviewer cannot
elude a question: what if Derridas archaism and naivete
were not a fiction? What if in the society of the Internet,
which is so transparent, the repressions were not a daily
business, and the deconstructions more urgent than ever?
Let me make a suggestion to illustrate how hot and
topical the theme of writing is to-day. Theut, the Egyptian
semi-god, the inventor of writing, takes note of the merits
and faults of each soul till her or his judgment. The
archivist, or the secretary, has never performed a futile
activity. The archivist is the tutor of documentality, the
keeper of crimes and punishments, and, more generally, of
social objects. What if the final solution were not recorded?
What if it, as the Nazis planned, there really were a historical decision nobody would ever know about?
Eventually, everybody came to know it, and there are still
the notes of the meeting of January 20th 1942 when the
decision was taken, readily available on the Internet
without the aid of papers. Here we see the point: sans
papier is not just the clandestine in a Manu Chaos song
(perdido en el corazon/de la grande babylon/me dicen el
clandestino/por no llevar papel), but the world of the
archive, too, which is increasingly devoid of papers.
The current world of the archivist is infinitely more
fragile than the world of the paper-archives. It is so because
of the obsolescence of the supports (after all, in forty years
our hard disks may share the same destiny of vinyl records,
which are unreadable without record-players), and it is
even more so because of its power, which leads to the
inflation of the archive (the infinite versions of the same file
on our PC, the abnormal redundancy of e-mail). Therefore,
we can legitimately speak, in a sense, and following Derridas suggestion, of a archive-achean ache that the
archive suffers in the transition from paper to sans papier.
But, indeed, the problem arising from the fragility of
supports is not as big as that arising from the excess of
means. The latter does not consist exclusively in the
inflation of data, but also and foremost in the impressive
transformation of the capacity and speed of the archive,
both omnipresent and polymorphic.
Let me take an example from the latest news. Once
more, in Iraq, images and words recorded by a cell phone
have embarrassed the American administration. I am
talking about Saddam Husseins execution. At the outset
Bush said that he was satisfied. Then he objected to the
manner of the execution. Besides, note that in the USA it is
forbidden to record executions, a very convenient provision

285

indeed, since it is doubtful that there can be flawless

executions.
The moral of the story, for me, is the following: Provided that even a cell phone can be an archive, anyone will
have (actually, we already have) an archive at hand: the
space of the archive is massively contracted, and the
consequences are easily foreseeable. Moreover, the time of
the archive is massively contracted too. At a glance, we can
come to know, thanks to Googlenow available on cell
phones tooa huge amount of information about the person standing right in front of us. A little space and a little
time, and the archive will be everywhere. This is the worst
of the archive-aches. We have invented systems and principles for the safeguard of privacy, for the treatment of
sensitive data in short, for making sure that nobody
can mind our own business, if we dont decide to disclose
it. But the data emerging from the Internet, on Google, are
completely open; they are the public data concerning our
work, our affiliations, the public documents we have
written or subscribed to. Once upon a time, those data were
difficult to retrieve, you needed time and commitment;
those inertial difficulties constituted a form of spontaneous
privacy. Now that everything is accessible just in few
seconds, everything changes.
This is a strange and perverse realization of absolute
knowledge, and it would not be surprising if Derrida,
prompted by the reality he is diagnosing, were to write a
book on Hegel out of his interests in the link between
writing and societywhy not? He could title or subtitle it
What is left of Absolute Knowledge. We imagine the text,
written on many columns, as it is on the web, with
windows, annotations, footnotes and comments of all sort,
a blog having Hegel as respondent. What a satisfaction,
so to speak. Maybe, he could title it Glas in honor of his
computers screen. We will see. Surely it is a long work,
and it will take time to write such a book whose grounds
though lie here in the essays collected in Writing and
Difference.

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