OF  GRAMMATOLOGY

  In Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida equates the culture of The Book with logocentrism, the belief in a signifier which is both outside of structure, and hence beyond scrutiny or challenge, and at the very centre, providing it with a central point of reference that anchors meaning. God, Man, the Imagination--these are only some of the names which the west has ascribed to its need for a transcendental signified which would fix truth to some point outside of language. Logocentrism has "always assigned the origin of truth in general to the logos; history of truth, of the truth of truth, has always been [...] the debasement of writing, and its repression outside full speech" .
    However, for Derrida, the epoch of The Book and its logocentric suppression of the free-play of signification, that is of writing itself, "seems to be approaching what is really its own exhaustion”:

    The idea of the book, which always refers to a natural totality, is profoundly alien to the sense of writing.
        It is the encyclopedic protection of theology and of logocentrism against the disruption of writing, against difference in general.

The arguments in Of Grammatology (1967; English translation 1976), perhaps his major book to date and also one of his more 'analytic' works to generalize deconstruction's principles, are brought into a more productive frame in a later more 'synthetic' work such as Glas (1974, English translation 1986); which by knitting together commentary and citation from Hegel's and Genet's writings not only blurs the boundaries between philosophy and literature, but also creates a new kind of textuality. As if anticipating hypertext, Glas's typography undoes the linearity of writing, transgresses the borders of text and puts into question the very form of the book.
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© Mark Lilla, The New York Review of Books, June 1998
© Elvira Gabaldón García, 2000