When Writing Comes Under Pressure: How Derrida’s Of Grammatology Became Necessary
— Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology
1. A Problem Before There Was a Book
Consider a geometrical truth. Once it has been discovered, how can it remain the same truth when the person who discovered it is gone? How can someone who never met the original geometer recognize the same theorem centuries later?
This is one of the problems that Jacques Derrida encountered long before Of Grammatology. In his 1962 introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, he follows Husserl’s question about how an ideal object such as a geometrical truth can acquire a history and remain available across generations. The problem is not simply how a truth is discovered, but how its meaning can survive the disappearance of the consciousness in which it first appeared.
Writing enters at precisely this point. An ideal meaning cannot remain the private possession of the person who first produced it. It has to become repeatable, transmissible, and available to others who were not present at its origin. Derrida therefore gives writing a role far more consequential than that of a passive record. In his reading of Husserl, graphic inscription is not merely added to an already constituted ideal object; it participates in the object’s becoming objective and historical. Derrida even calls it “the sine qua non condition of Objectivity’s internal completion” (Derrida, 1989, p. 89).
The problem of writing, then, begins to look different. Writing is no longer simply what happens to meaning after thought has been formed and speech has expressed it. It has something to do with how meaning survives, circulates, and becomes available beyond the presence of its origin.
By 1967, that problem had widened considerably.
2. When Writing Leaves the Page
Of Grammatology did not appear as an isolated meditation on a familiar philosophical topic. Its first part grew out of an earlier essay for Critique, and Derrida explicitly identifies three publications that had occasioned that work: Madeleine V. David’s history of writing and hieroglyphics, André Leroi-Gourhan’s Gesture and Speech, and the proceedings of a conference on writing and the psychology of peoples.
Writing was therefore being approached from several directions at once: historically, anthropologically, technologically, and philosophically. The question was no longer simply how writing represented speech. It was becoming a question of what writing was in the first place.
That shift is visible in the opening pages of Of Grammatology. Derrida observes that the word writing is already being used far beyond conventional inscription. It appears in discussions of cinematography, choreography, painting, music, sculpture, and other practices. He is not simply proposing, on his own authority, that these things should now be called writing. He is observing that the term is already moving beyond the limits assigned to it by the traditional concept.
He puts the matter strikingly: “we say ‘writing’ for all that gives rise to an inscription in general” (Derrida, 1976, p. 9).
Something has happened to the concept before Derrida has finished theorizing it.
3. When Science Starts Speaking of Writing
The pressure becomes much stronger when the vocabulary of writing enters the sciences.
Derrida points to biology, where the contemporary biologist speaks of “writing” and “program” in relation to the elementary processes of information within the living cell. He then turns to cybernetics, where information, transmission, storage, communication, and programming become central. The consequence is difficult to ignore: “the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing” (Derrida, 1976, p. 9).
This is the moment at which the inherited concept of writing begins to lose its obvious boundaries.
Writing had traditionally been understood as a graphic representation of spoken language. Yet the systems now being described in terms of writing do not begin with a speaker who produces a spoken meaning and then leaves a visible trace of it. They involve inscription, storage, transmission, repetition, and retrieval without requiring the immediate presence of a speaking subject.
The change therefore does not concern vocabulary alone. New scientific and technological practices are making visible relations that the traditional concept of writing had treated as secondary.
Derrida calls the encounter between cybernetics and the human sciences of writing a “nonfortuitous conjunction,” one that leads toward what he calls a “more profound reversal” (Derrida, 1976, p. 10).
But the reversal cannot simply mean putting writing where speech once stood. That would leave the old structure intact, merely changing which term occupies the privileged position.
The deeper question is why writing had been secondary at all.
4. Why Writing Had to Be Secondary
The traditional hierarchy makes sense only within a particular conception of meaning.
If thought is understood as something present to a conscious subject, speech appears to offer a privileged expression of that thought. The speaker is present; the meaning can be associated with that presence; and writing then appears as a representation of the spoken sign. Writing comes later in the sequence: thought → speech → writing
The hierarchy does not therefore depend merely on the physical difference between voice and inscription. It depends on the assumption that meaning can first exist in a relatively pure state and that writing subsequently records it.
This is why the developments Derrida is considering matter so much. Biology and cybernetics do not simply provide new examples to be added to an existing definition. They expose operations—programming, inscription, storage, repetition, transmission—that the old sequence has difficulty accommodating.
The same problem appears in another form in Derrida’s reading of Lévi-Strauss. There writing is treated as an addition to a supposedly more original state of speech, culture, or social presence. Yet what appears to be a supplement from outside begins to reveal a function that the supposedly pure origin already requires. Derrida's reading thus shifts the problem from “When does writing enter?” to “What if the origin was never as self-sufficient as it appeared?” His work on Lévi-Strauss in 1966 became the second part of Of Grammatology.
The various strands now converge. Writing is being reconsidered historically, scientifically, anthropologically, and philosophically because the inherited boundary between writing and non-writing is no longer holding its shape.
5. From the Definition of Writing to the Problem of Writing
At this point, Derrida's project becomes clearer.
He could respond to the new situation by enlarging the definition. He could simply declare that writing includes biological codes, cybernetic programs, images, choreography, and other systems of inscription.
But that would leave the underlying problem untouched. A new definition would merely establish another demarcation. It would tell us what belongs inside the concept and what remains outside it, without asking why the old demarcation had been constructed in the first place.
Derrida instead follows the pressure exerted on the concept.
This is why the notion of arche-writing should not be understood as the claim that human beings literally wrote before they spoke. It names a structure—trace, repeatability, inscription, difference, transmission—that cannot be derived simply from an original presence of meaning in speech. The term writing is retained precisely because the traditional opposition had assigned everything associated with such structures to the secondary side.
The result is not a reversal in which writing becomes the new privileged term. The opposition itself has become unstable.
That distinction is important because deconstruction does not begin with a method that can be mechanically applied to any concept. It begins when something in the history or use of a concept makes its inherited organization difficult to sustain.
In this case, Derrida does not first decide that writing should be generalized and then search for evidence. The evidence is already there: a philosophical problem about the transmission of ideality, an expanding field of writing practices, new scientific vocabularies of information and programming, and an inherited hierarchy that cannot comfortably contain them.
The concept has come under pressure before deconstruction names what is happening.
6. A Science of the Possibility of Science
This is also why Derrida's question about grammatology becomes more radical than the proposal for a new science of writing might initially suggest.
If writing were merely a particular kind of inscription, grammatology could study its forms, histories, and systems in much the same way other sciences study their objects. But what if inscription is involved in the possibility of history, transmission, objectivity, and scientific knowledge themselves?
Derrida puts the problem in deliberately provocative terms:
“The science of writing should therefore look for its object at the roots of scientificity” (1976, p. 27).
He immediately turns this into a series of questions: “A science of the possibility of science? A science of science” (Derrida, 1976, pp. 27–28).
The object of grammatology can no longer be treated as though it were simply waiting to be described. Writing has become entangled with the very processes by which objects become identifiable, knowledge becomes transmissible, and historical meaning survives beyond the moment of its production.
The problem that began with the survival of a geometrical truth has therefore widened into a question about the conditions under which meaning can survive at all.
That is what gives Of Grammatology its necessity. Derrida is not applying a ready-made procedure to the concept of writing. He is following what happens when the inherited concept meets developments it can no longer comfortably organize.
The question is consequently no longer just whether new forms of inscription should count as writing. It is whether writing was ever merely a secondary record of meaning produced elsewhere.
And that leads to the question on which the whole argument turns: What if writing does not begin where speech ends?
References
Aristotle. (1984). On interpretation. In J. Barnes (Ed.), The complete works of Aristotle: The revised Oxford translation (Vol. 1, pp. 25–38). Princeton University Press.
Derrida, J. (1962). Introduction à L’origine de la géométrie de Husserl. Presses Universitaires de France.
Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press. (Original work published 1967)
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