Thinking China Through “Ideography” – I

Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, first published in 1967—that is, approximately ten years after the Bandung Conference—may at first glance appear to be a complete book. Yet, as though it had developed within a “process,” it is impossible to evaluate Of Grammatology apart from the essay titled “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” included in the collection Writing and Difference published in the same year (under the translation used in the Turkish edition published as Yazı ve Fark). Presumably, Derrida did not include the essay “Freud and the Scene of Writing” in Of Grammatology itself—which was also translated into Turkish, albeit belatedly—because it contained an argument regarding Western metaphysics, namely its phonocentric and ethnocentric character, that would have required him to revise his position; that is, because he could not adapt that content to Of Grammatology, despite the fact that the essay addressed precisely the same subject.

One of Derrida’s early works—the work that first carried him into French intellectual circles, then into the Anglo-Saxon world, and from there into other geographies—was his work on grammatology. In this work, Derrida does not attempt, for various reasons, to posit a science that could straightforwardly be rendered as ilm al-huruf or a “science of letters” as a direct translation of grammatology, composed of gramma meaning “letter” and the suffix -logy, generally translated as “science.” On the contrary, he reconsiders a tendency already present especially in the aftermath of Heidegger from the perspective of a science of letters—or also from the perspective of “writing” [writing; écriture], which Derrida uses in a sense almost equivalent to “letter” (“writing” or écriture might perhaps more appropriately be translated as “scripturation”; however, here we will continue to use the generally accepted term “writing”). According to Heidegger, Western thought may have entered a metaphysical phase after the Pre-Socratics. In this metaphysical phase—which may also be called onto-theology—the relation between beings and Being ceased to be open to questioning; the presence-there of beings (that is, their presence or readiness within a given state) came to be confused with Being; consequently, Being itself began to be confused with beings. Heidegger attempts to cover over this confusion through a highly categorical and, in fact, hollow construction of Dasein. Derrida, by contrast, follows the “trace” of the relation between “speech” and “writing” within the same context and reconfigures Heideggerian phenomenology through the relations of sign, signifier, and signified in structuralist linguistics. Needless to say, in a manner that also bears traces of Nietzsche’s approach, Derrida, in Of Grammatology, seeks—through readings of Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, and above all Rousseau—to demonstrate why a Western metaphysics is at the same time an ethnocentric logocentrism.

Accordingly, Derrida, in his work (and indeed also in Voice and Phenomenon, which itself consists of the famous preface he wrote to the French translation of Husserl’s text The Origin of Geometry), does not attempt to provide any definition of either “voice” or “letter” (for instance, unless we take references in Voice and Phenomenon to “voice” in statements such as “Voice is the being that is close to itself in the form of co-knowing [con-science] as universality. Voice is consciousness” as constituting a definition of “voice”—whether in relation to an opposition generally structured through binary oppositions, or to elements that contaminate or permeate “voice” [those subjected to dissemination] [p. 111]. Such remarks are less definitions of “voice” than interpretations attempting, so to speak, to produce an archive of the relations into which “voice” enters).

Within this framework, speaking roughly, in Of Grammatology “voice” is transposed into logos, while “letter” is transposed into “writing”; and metaphysics—or onto-theology, which expresses the same thing—claims that “writing,” inscribed upon a surface under the dominion of logos, which at the same time means “word,” possesses in fact a metaphysical or onto-theological significance (not merely upon any surface extending from cave walls to papyrus, or from animal bone to paper, but upon the very surface of the history of metaphysics itself, and, as we shall see in the next essay, also upon the surface of psukhe). As a condition in which the onto-theological understanding of Being manifests itself otherwise, this meaning does not, on the one hand, seek to interrogate Being by displacing or multiplying the Heideggerian conception of Being; rather, it deprives the very place (surface) of the Being under interrogation of its privileged status vis-à-vis presence itself, while on the other hand, by claiming the existence of other privileged domains just like Being, it asserts that metaphysics constitutes a structure privileging logos, and consequently “word,” and within this framework “voice” as well.

To give merely one example among Derrida’s many theses on this matter: according to him, a metaphysics grounded in logos, on the one hand, drives the subject (or, if one prefers, Dasein) to read the signs within itself in order to find or attain logos, and consequently to hear its own “voice”; thus rendering the subject self-hearing (or the other within itself), or more generally transforms it into a state of self-presence. On the other hand, reading the logos—and therefore the “voice” and the “word”—in the “‘external’ world” separated from the subject in fact requires reading the inscription of God’s command as logos within nature. Thus, “word” as logos is treated as though it were everywhere present in its full self-presence. To put it colloquially, the book of the universe is read through logos.

This, in fact, renders necessary—whether willingly or not—that the Western metaphysical tradition which privileges logos, and consequently “word,” while in this respect relegating “writing” to a secondary position or reducing it to a supplement, must somehow presuppose the necessity of “writing,” or what Derrida calls an “arche-writing,” even prior to logos itself. For God’s command is “writing”/is written. That is to say, a metaphysical or onto-theological tradition that proclaims “in the beginning was the Word” inevitably carries within itself the necessity of the statement “in the beginning was writing.” Indeed, Derrida’s deconstruction itself, to put it in terms of the context concerning “writing,” attempts to seek the “trace” of the “writing” already present even within logos, and investigates why “writing” is repressed (in fact unsuccessfully, and therefore in a manner that cannot be subjected to psychoanalysis), and why it is regarded either as a supplement or as an element detrimental to the plenary presence of logos. He endeavors to dismantle the structure of understandings that lead to “writing”—which, because it is unsuccessfully repressed, is everywhere, yet is nevertheless deferred into a kind of derivativeness in relation to logos—being treated as though it were a breach opened within logos itself.

In this sense, through deconstruction, Derrida pursues the destabilization of “language” by a kind of transcendence acquired by “writing” (in the sense of writing; écriture) in the face of—or alongside—a transcendental concept such as Heidegger’s notion of Being (and if one were to substitute, say, the notion of “truth” for Being here, the result would remain unchanged). Accordingly, grammatology consists in the “writing systems” that, in all their forms, render “writing” present either explicitly or implicitly. Admittedly, Derrida states that what makes grammatology possible is logocentrism itself, which privileges “speech” by relegating “writing” to a secondary position, and thus conceives gramma within the same structure that must be dismantled together with logos; yet one of the problems in Derrida’s analysis lies in his thinking grammatology from within a genealogy of its relatively recent history in relation to “speech” and/or “language,” and—even if he posits an “arche-writing”—in thinking its “trace” within metaphysics through a “différance” (ayıram) that perpetually defers “voice,” logos, and even “writing” itself. A duality constituting différance, or one that always presupposes deferral instead of presence, exists from the outset; genesis is always bifurcated.Yet the emergence of this as grammatology within the context of “writing” coincides almost exactly with the beginning of critiques of ethnocentrism, in a manner corresponding to the closing phase of the history of metaphysics. That is, critiques of ethnocentrism give rise to grammatology.

In this context, the details of Derrida’s grammatological archaeology—how it is related to deconstruction, what stages it passed through, what ruptures it underwent, and most importantly why he left grammatology undefined despite its relation to “writing”—do not concern us much. What concerns us is what becomes of his assessment of grammatology as an (in fact, new) “positive science” when faced with “lands without an alphabet” such as China.

Interestingly, Derrida’s archaeological or archival reading of the history of grammatology is, in fact, a reading of a “process.” Although this “process” emerged only much later, for example through Derrida’s revision of the “history of writing,” which had first begun to be written in 1742, the striking point in this “process” is the recognition that certain “prejudices” are dominant. In this framework, the first prejudice that must be broken is the “theological” one. Derrida’s history of “prejudices” is, in a sense, a history that narrates otherwise the history Maurice Olender treats in The Languages of Paradise, though in a not entirely different context; it therefore overlooks the theo-logical conflicts and debates involved in the emergence of philology. Moreover, Derrida’s history is the history of a post-philological linguistics, perhaps of semiotics, or of a linguistics separated from philology in the general sense; it is precisely for this reason that Derrida equates the “theological prejudice” with Hebrew writing, as “the myth of a primitive and natural writing given by God.” For grounding Hebrew writing in the idea of a “writing” “traced by God’s own fingers” would constitute an obstacle to grammatology; and if a “history of writing” is to be written as grammatology, this “prejudice,” which pushes the emergence of “writing” beyond history, must be overcome. In this context, the decisive transformation comes with the acceptance of the plurality of alphabets: “The history of the alphabet is accepted only after the plurality of writing systems has been understood and a history has been attributed to them—whether or not they can be scientifically determined” (p. 117).

However, for grammatology to become possible at least as a history, the effect of the “theological prejudice” overcome through the adoption of the “plurality of writing systems” remains limited; for it encounters another obstacle of “prejudice”: the “Chinese prejudice,” upon which Derrida dwells even more extensively than upon the “theological prejudice.” Much like the “theological prejudice,” though from a different direction, the “Chinese prejudice” is a “prejudice” that, through the imagining of a transhistorical condition, leads to the dehistoricization of Chinese writing and thereby to its being evaluated philosophically. As examples of this “prejudice,” Derrida points to the ways in which a philosophical and universal writing system—and within this framework Chinese writing—were employed by figures such as the French philosopher Descartes; the German Jesuit Father Kircher, regarded as the first “Egyptologist,” even though his claim to have deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs proved false; the Anglican clergyman John Wilkins, one of the founders of Britain’s Royal Society, considered the founder of “natural theology” in the sense of a theology existing spontaneously apart from and parallel to revealed theology, likewise referred to as a “natural philosopher,” and whose most important characteristic in the context of our subject was his attempt to establish a “universal language,” known in his period as polygraphy or pasilaly; and the German philosopher Leibniz. Just like the “theological prejudice,” the “Chinese prejudice,” which dehistoricizes the “history of writing” as grammatology, consists of “all philosophical projects concerning a universal writing and a universal language that encourage seeing in the newly discovered Chinese writing … a model of philosophical language detached from history.” To summarize the “Chinese prejudice” in the sense attributed to it by Leibniz: proceeding from the assumption that “Chinese writing” is free from the “dominion of sound,” it is thought to possess an aspect that, “through arbitrariness and inventive artifices, renders it suitable and unique for philosophy by severing it from history as well” (p. 118). So much so that Leibniz even suggests that Chinese writing, which he claims was invented “arbitrarily,” may have been “invented by a deaf person” precisely because it lacks any connection with “sound” (p. 124).

In this sense, the greatest difference between Egyptian writing and Chinese writing lies in the fact that, whereas hieroglyphics are regarded as “popular, emotional, and allegorical,” Chinese writing is considered “intellectual.” Derrida likewise argues that the “Chinese prejudice,” developing together with a “hieroglyphic prejudice” is ultimately connected to logocentrism, which is “an ethnocentric metaphysics in an originary and ‘non-relative’ sense” and is “bound up with the history of the West.” Although Leibniz’s evaluations of Chinese writing appear to obstruct this metaphysics, Chinese writing, in the end, can only serve as a model for the projected “universal writing,” since its multitude of characters presents a difficulty requiring a lifetime to master.

It is precisely at this point that Derrida receives the greatest criticism in the context of Of Grammatology. Although he nowhere directly states that “Chinese writing” is not phonocentric and therefore not logocentric, merely speaking of a logocentrism—and consequently an ethnocentrism—that developed within a specifically Western metaphysics inevitably implies that Chinese writing is not phonocentric (for a summary of the debates on this issue, see Sean Meighoo’s article “Derrida’s Chinese Prejudice,” published in Cultural Critique in 2008, together with the sources discussed therein. Particularly noteworthy in this regard is John DeFrancis’s The Chinese Language, which examines Chinese writing within the tension between “fact” and “fantasy,” and argues that “Chinese characters constitute a phonetic writing system, not an ideographic system”; indeed, that “there never has been, and never can be, such a thing as an ideographic writing system. The notion of Chinese writing as a means of conveying ideas independently of speech became established as part of a fashionable admiration for China among Western intellectuals, stimulated by the generally highly laudatory works of Catholic missionaries from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries”).

Accordingly, the fundamental criticism directed at Derrida is that logocentric metaphysics is not peculiar to the West, and that Chinese writing, too, is phonocentric. As evidence for this claim, Eastern thought is said to be “filled with logocentric terminology” establishing “a conceptual connection between sound, breath, soul, life, and Being itself,” and thereby demonstrating that connections may be established with Western metaphysics in terms of “sound, word, meaning, truth, and Being.”

What is truly at issue for Derrida, however, is that while making the “Chinese prejudice” part of a grammatological history internal to the West, he shows no curiosity whatsoever toward the history of how Chinese writing, let us say, came close to “alphabetic universalism” and then strategically abandoned it (of course, Derrida visited China just as he visited many other parts of the world. He even recounts that he learned of September 11 while in China for a series of conferences devoted largely to themes that concerned him during that period, such as “hospitality,” “deconstruction,” and “the university.” Yet Derrida—who told the Chinese that although there was “thought” in China, there was no “philosophy”—behaved toward China very much like a Westerner, to such an extent that one may comfortably say he knew very little about the country). This lack of curiosity affects the way he evaluates China together with grammatology. (For an assessment of Derrida’s trip to China, Derrida being known also for directing criticisms at the “alphabet reform” during his visit to Türkiye through his famous “Letter to Istanbul,” see Ning Zhang’s article “Jacques Derrida’s First Visit to China: A Summary of His Lectures and Seminars.”)

Yet the real issue overlooked even by those criticizing Derrida in the context of Of Grammatology emerges not from the narrowness involved in ultimately failing to free Chinese writing, within a grammatological reading conceived as a “history of writing,” from a Western logocentrism and ethnocentrism, nor from his indifference—for example in never having encountered Lu Xun’s essay “China Without a Voice,” and therefore never noticing that Lu Xun in fact speaks of a “voice” inscribed in the “heart”—but rather from the grammatological assessments he develops in “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” where, in the context of psukhe, he treats “writing” as equivalent to it. Derrida attempts to inscribe Freud’s psukhe with “writing,” or to show that Freud’s psukhe contains an inscription effected by “writing”; yet although he connects Freud’s views concerning picture-writing (hieroglyphics) or concept-writing (ideography) to Western metaphysics, he does so without excessively ethnocentricizing them. It is as though psukhe, no matter how much it may be structured, remains closed off without recourse to an ethnocentric deconstruction, to “writing,” and consequently to logocentrism; and as though psychoanalysis, although carrying echoes of Western metaphysics, were the not-yet-completed “voice” of a new path that would bring that metaphysics to a close.

[A note for the curious: It is precisely for this reason that Gohar Homayounpour, who returned to Tehran twenty years after completing her psychoanalytic training and opened a clinic there, writes in her book Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran, in a manner that would be impossible in the West: “The other day in Iran … I found myself unable to refuse a box of sweets brought by an elderly woman. Talking about fees, asking patients to move onto the couch, telling them that our time is over—all this causes me greater discomfort here. But why? Is it because speaking Persian triggers different intentions within me? Is it because Iranian culture is, for me, literally a different audience, containing other ‘others’ to whom I speak and who respond to me? Because modern linguistics treats the ‘word’ as a unique symbolic capsule containing the entirety of developmental history. The word is the story of the self; the story of the desires of the self, and of the past and present objects of those desires”; in saying this, she in fact speaks of psukhe only indirectly, as something constituted as selfhood, whatever it may be. Indeed, doing psychoanalysis in Tehran is itself like making an Iranian film. For this reason, the director Abbas Kiarostami, who wrote a foreword to the book, while recommending Homayounpour’s work “to those who see human suffering as an existential phenomenon,” suddenly transforms the word “existential” into “film”: “Pain is undoubtedly pain everywhere; I have never heard of a Western or Eastern type of cancer, nor encountered an X-ray film revealing the patient’s nationality, religion, or culture. This book is an X-ray film revealing the human condition in Iran.” Here, “film” is in fact akin to Egyptian hieroglyphics or Chinese ideography in the face of an “alphabet” that turns the “word” into “the story of the self” (pp. 73 and 10–11; italics added)].

Since the question of how grammatology in the Freudian context displaces a grammatology in the context of the “history of writing” requires a somewhat more detailed treatment, it has been left to the next essay.