The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing

October 9th, 2010

Derrida, Jacques, and Barry Stocker. Jacques Derrida: Basic Writings. London ; New York: Routledge, 2007.

In this chapter, “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing” from Of Grammatology, Derrida looks at what he considers to be the problem of language. This problem has to do with how we now (Note: this was published in 1967) use the term too loosely. “This crisis is also a symptom. It indicates, as if in spite of itself, that a historic-metaphysical epoch must finally determine as language the totality of its problematic horizon” (6).

As the chapter title suggests, Derrida is looking at the end of writing in reference to the book, since the book is a finite, limited, set collection of words and pages. Conversely, language has no boundaries, nor does the larger idea of writing. Writing itself can be altered, redirected, repurposed, resent, etc. To put it in context of the idea of the signified, spoken language (langue) signifies the thought and writing signifies the spoken language. Therefore, writing is the signifier of the signifier.

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Derrida – On the Demise of Language Through Writing (Part 2)

February 3rd, 2008

Last week, I had three questions posed on recent readings of Derrida. Here are the questions and my responses.

While Birkerts lays out a clear demarcation between electronic and print writing, Derrida writes in the pre-Internet era. If you were to hypothesize how Derrida would treat the relationship between print and electronic “text,” what would you say his treatment would be and why? Read the rest of this entry »

Derrida – On the Demise of Language Through Writing

January 31st, 2008

Birkerts, Sven. 1994. “Into the Electronic Millennium.” & “Hypertext of Mouse and Man.” The Gutenberg Elegies. New York: Ballentine Books. URL: http://archives.obs-us.com/obs/english/books/nn/bdbirk.htm

Derrida, Jacques. 1976. “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing.” Of Grammatology. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP.

While the Derrida peice was mighty dense, it was manageable; and both works provided some decent insight on how some scholars look at where writing has taken us (even from pre-/non-literate cultures) to where we are now, and on to where we are going, particularly in regard to electronic and hypertext writing. Read the rest of this entry »