“a certain sort of question about the sense and origin of writing precedes, or at least is mixed up with, a certain type of question about the meaning and origin of technique.“ (8)
death of the book announces nothing but a death of speech (of a so-called full speech) and a new mutation in the history of writing, in history as writing. (8-9)
the paradox: natural and universal writing, intelligible and nontemporal writing, is named by metaphor. A writing that is finite and sensible is writing in the proper sense; it is then thought on the side of culture, of technique, and of artifice. It is not a matter of inverting the proper meaning and the figurative meaning but of determining the “proper” meaning of writing as metaphoricity itself. (16)
the determination of absolute presence is constituted as self-presence, as subjectivity. It is the moment of the great rationalisms of the seventeenth century. (17)
“The idea of the book is the idea of a totality, finite or infinite, of the signifier; this totality of the signifier cannot be a totality, unless a totality constituted by the signified preexists it, supervises its inscriptions and its signs, and is independent of it in its ideality.” (19)
The Western tradition: “the order of the signified is never contemporary, is at best the inverse of the subtly discrepant parallel—discrepant by the time of a breath—of the order of the signifier. And the sign must be the unity of a heterogeneity, since the signified (sense or thing, noeme or reality) is not in itself a signifier, a trace: in any case is not constituted in its sense by its relationship to the possible trace. The formal essence of the signified is presence, and the privilege of tits proximity to the logos as phonè is the privilege of presence.” (19)
Heidegger insists that being is produced as history only through the logos, and is nothing outside of it. The difference between being and the being [étant] indicates that fundamentally, nothing escapes the movement of the signifier and that, in the last instance, the difference between signified and signifier is nothing. (24)
(Criticizing Saussure:) one should say model rather than structure; it is not the case of a constructed system functioning perfectly, but of an ideal explicitly directing a functioning which in fact is never phonetic right through. (33)
(the limits of phenomenology:) Arche-writing as spacing cannot occur as such, within the phenomenological experience of a presence. It marks the dead time within the presence of the living present, within the general form of all presence. … As a phenomenology of the sign in general, a phenomenology of writing is impossible. (74)
relating trace to Levinas’s critique of ontology: “relationship to the illeity as to the alterity of a past that never was and can never be lived in the originary of modified form of presence.” (76)
the signified is originarily and essentially (and not only for a finite and created spirit) trace, that it is always already in the position of the signifier, is the proposition within which the metaphysics of the logos, of presence and consciousness, must reflect upon writing as its death and its resource. (79)
“The trace is nothing, it is not a being [étant], it exceeds the question what is and contingently makes it possible.” (81)
the Leibnizian project of a universal characteristic that isn’t essentially phonetic doesn’t interrupt logocentricism. On the contrary, universal logic confirms logocentrism, is produced within it and with its help. … There is a profound unity, within a certain historical epoch, among infinitist theology, logocentrism, and a certain technicism. (85)
The end of linear writing is the end of the book. … “If today the problem of reading occupies the forefront of science, it is because of this suspense between two ages of writing.” (94)
“Phonetic” and “nonphonetic” are therefore never pure qualities of certain systems of writing, they are the abstract characteristics of typical elements, more or less numerous and dominant within all systems of signification in general. (96)
“Descartes had driven out the sign—and singularly the written sign—from the cogito and from clear and distinct evidence; the latter being the very presence of the idea to the soul, the sign was an accessory abandoned in the region of the senses and of the imagination.” (107)
“In linguistics as well as in metaphysics, phonologism is undoubtedly the exclusion or abasement of writing. But it is also the granting of authority to a science which is held to be the model for all the so-called sciences of man. In both these senses Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism is a phonologism.” (110)
“Figurative language was the first to be born”, Roussau says, “proper meaning was found last” (<Essay>). It is to this eschatology of the proper (prope, proprius, self-proximity, self-presence, property, own-ness) that we ask the question of the graphein. (115)