Sean Burke The Death and Return of the Author : Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida.

the determinations which name difference always come from the metaphysical order. This holds
not only for the determination of difference as the difference between presence and the present
(Anwesen/Anwesend), but also for the determination of difference as the difference between
Being and beings . . . There may be a difference still more unthought than the difference
between Being and beings. We certainly can go further toward naming it in our language. Beyond
Being and beings, this difference, ceaselessly differing from and deferring (itself), would trace
(itself) (by itself) é this différance would be the first or last trace if one could still speak, here, of
origin and end.
Such a différance would at once, again, give us to think a writing without presence and without
absence, without history, without cause, without archia, without telos, a writing that absolutely
upsets all dialectics, all theology, all teleology, all ontology.8 So very much indeed would seem to
be at stake in the forgetting and remembering of writing. In the Grammatology, Derrida proposes
a 'theoretical matrix'—a 'structural figure as much as a historical totality' (lxxxix)—of this
repression. And Derrida does not use the word 'totality' lightly here. Logocentrism, we are to
believe, has controlled 'in one and the same order':
1. the concept of writing in a world where the phoneticisation of writing must dissimulate its own
history as it is produced;
2. the history of (the only) metaphysics, which has, in spite of all differences, not only from Plato
to Hegel (even including Leibniz) but also, beyond these apparent limits, from the pre-Socratics to
Heidegger, always assigned the origin of truth in general to the logos: the history of truth, of the
truth of truth, has always been . . . the debasement of writing, and its repression outside 'full'
speech.
3. the concept of science or the scientificity of science—what has always been determined as
logic . . . (3)
And, over the page, Derrida says that the subordination of speech to writing is 'the historical origin
and structural possibility of philosophy as of science, the condition of the episteme'. (4)
Within such a vast, unified, and all-inclusive episteme, the work of individual authors will serve
merely as indices, as regional instances of the infrastructural network of logocentric
determinations. Thus, though half of the text is given over to a massively detailed reading of
Rousseau, no especial significance is accorded to Rousseau's text as such; the reading is, as
Derrida says, 'the moment, as it were, of the example' (lxxxix); what we are reading is not a text
by a particular author, but one meeting point amongst so many others of the logocentric
metaphysics which has governed Western thought from its beginnings down to the present day:
before asking the necessary questions about the historical situation of Rousseau's text, we must
locate all the signs of its appurtenance to the metaphysics of presence, from Plato to Hegel,
rhythmed by the articulation of presence upon self-presence. The unity of this metaphysical
tradition should be respected in its general permanence through all the marks of appurtenance,
the genealogical sequences, the stricter routes of causality that organise Rousseau's text. We
must recognise, prudently and as a preliminary, what this historicity amounts to; without this, what
one would inscribe within a narrower structure would not be a text and above all not Rousseau's
text . . . There is not, strictly speaking, a text whose author or subject is Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. (246) The proper name is an improper variation on the common name. That the text
has even to make provisional recourse to the names of authors is a regrettable expedience. For
entirely preliminary purposes of concision and clarity, we locate a body of texts arbitrarily
assembled under the signature 'Rousseau', but we do so on the understanding that the name
'Rousseau' is under erasure throughout, that, strictly speaking, it has no meaning, signifies
absence.
Yet, from the very first, the Grammatology cannot be entirely secure on this issue. For is there not
(even with the necessary precautions) a contradiction involved in continuing over hundreds of
pages to talk about a Rousseauian text when no such thing properly exists? How can we, in all
consistency, utilise that whose existence we contest 'at root'? As we know, Derrida has inherited
from Heidegger numerous strategies with which to negotiate the saying of the strictly unsayable.
Most notably the practice of writing under erasure (in tandem with the vigilant use of parentheses,
quotation-marks) whereby words such as 'is', 'presence', continue to be deployed, not because
we wish to reconfirm the metaphysic always inherent in their enunciation, but in despair of any
other language with which to speak. And it would seem entirely de règle to allow this concession,