Of Grammatology

One of three books Derrida published in 1967, and the one most closely tied to the method later called deconstruction. Part One argues that Western philosophy has been logocentric: it has treated speech as the living presence of meaning and writing as a secondary, dangerous copy of speech. Derrida finds this hierarchy in Plato, Rousseau, Hegel and even in Saussure's linguistics, which banished writing to the margins. Yet Saussure's own insight that signs work only through differences undermines the priority of speech. Derrida proposes a general writing, or arche-writing, and the notion of the trace: every sign carries the marks of others that are absent, so meaning is never fully present. Part Two reads Lévi-Strauss on writing among the Nambikwara and then Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Languages, following the logic of the supplement, something added that turns out to be necessary. Here appears the phrase that there is nothing outside the text. Critics have charged Derrida with obscurity and relativism.

It is the main source of deconstruction, and reading it shows how a text can quietly depend on the very things it pushes to the margins.