An interview with Jacques
Derrida
By Paul Brennan
P.B.:
How would you respond to the assertion that you are trying to set up a kind of
literary science?
J.D.:
It's not really a science in the traditional sense. It's strategy for
interpreting sciences, and philosophy also... to deconstruct them, to look at
them from many points of view (but of course also from a political point of
view) and to show the implicit limits of sciences. For instance, language
sciences are the dominant models of science on the French scene.
P.B.:
What can a grammatologist do that other philosophers and linguists can't do?
J.D.:
First I must say [laughs] that since grammatology is
not a positive science... nor a philosophy, there is no
"grammatologist". The book on grammatology is not a book for grammatology;
it's also a book which insists on the limits of grammatology.
P.B.:
You talk about living languages, where the written language closely reflects
the spoken language. And you talk also about dead languages, where the written
language has no connection with the spoken language. If you look around the
world at the hundreds of languages which exist at the moment, which ones would
you say are very much alive and which ones are approaching death?
J.D.:
Excuse me, but I never said exactly so. I never said that there are totally
living languages and that there are dead languages. I think that there is a
part of death in every language. And the opposition of life and death in
language is a false opposition. The traditional statement about language is that
it is in itself living, and that writing is the dead part of language. And this
is what I'm fighting against. So, I would not engage myself in saying that
there is a hierarchy of more or less living languages today. There are more or
less powerful languages - on for instance the technical level, on the economic,
or scientific or military level. There are some languages - for instance,
English, Russian, Chinese - which are spoken not only
by more and more people, but by people and nations which are, for the moment,
more powerful than others. But I wouldn't draw the consequence that they are
more "living" than the others.
P.B.:
You do make a contrast between spoken language and written language and the
relationship between them...
J.D.:
Ah... it's not an opposition. What I've been doing in the last few years is to
extend I mean to give an absolute extension to - the concept of writing so that
even the spoken language is written in some way. I mean, there is what I call
an "arche-writing" (arche-écriture)
which is implied within the spoken language, which implies that the concept of
writing is transformed, of course. So there is no opposition between them. For
instance, tape recordings are writings in some sense.
P.B.:
You've suggested we should stop thinking about various media - speech and writin - that we should stop thinking about them ethically
and that the two media of language are beyond good and evil. This obviously
puts you at variation with someone like Marshall McLuhan
who talks about the medium in very ethical terms - "the microphone created
Hitler" and so on.
J.D.:
Mm... I think that there is an ideology in McLuhan's
discourse that I don't agree with, because he's an optimist as to the
possibility of restoring an oral community which would get rid of the writing
machines and so on. I think that's a very traditional myth which goes back
to... let's say Plato, Rousseau... And instead of thinking that we are living
at the end of writing, I think that in another sense we are living in the
extension - the overwhelming extension - of writing. At least in the new
sense... I don't mean the alphabetic writing down, but in the new sense of
those writing machines that we're using now (e.g. the tape recorder). And this
is writing too.
P.B.:
You end your book with a quotation from Rousseau, who has written about writing
as a kind of dreaming. He says:
The dreams of bad nights are given to us as philosophy. Younwill say that I too am a dreamer. I admit this. But I do what others fail to do. I give my dreams as dreams and leave the reader to discover whether there is anything in them which may prove useful to those who are awake.
My question to you is: are you allowing me to interview in much the same spirit - as a dream to be taken as the listener or reader wishes?
J.D.:
Yes, but if I were to indulge in saying so, I would imply that I am totally
awakened while dreaming, and I have no illusion about that.
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www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/so.html
Other
interesting interviews: [1] [2] [3] [4]