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

Rousseau scholars have been divided as to whether the Essay was written before or after the
second Discourse (Discourse on Inequality). 15 Speculation ranges over a period of fifteen or so
years, the mid-1740s being the earliest possible time, 1761 the latest. The second Discourse
(1754) occupies such prominence in this debate because it is considered the first of the great
Rousseauian works, and thus forms the opening of the primary canon. Scholars have largely
consented in the view that the Essay is not the equal of these great discourses, that a certain
want of structure and immaturity of philosophical reasoning are incompatible with the later work.
Correspondingly, the themes of the later works have been discovered in inchoate and fledgling
form in the Essay. This position has also the added advantage of explaining why the text was
never published during Rousseau's lifetime. Publication was withheld, it is assumed, because the
author realised that this work would not do justice to the great philosophical project he was about
to undertake.16
Derrida contests this position vigorously, and in an argument that throughout respects all the
protocols of classical textual scholarship. With an attentiveness and rigour all his own, he argues
that in terms of external evidence, there is no progression in philosophic thematics between the
Essay and the second Discourse, if anything the reverse. There is thus no question of the Essay
predating the second Discourse on these counts. With regard to the external question, Derrida
claims that the debate was settled in favour of the posteriority of the Essay as long ago as 1913,
and quotes a Rousseau scholar at great length to this effect."17 The intricacies of Derrida's
argument are of no especial interest here. The more compelling question is why the
Grammatology should concern itself with this issue at all. What motivates Derrida to depart from
the theme of the supplement for a full and valuable twenty-five pages immediately after having
introduced it in the most spellbinding fashion? And to do so in the interest of pursuing the most
auteurist and positivistic of exercises? What could be more irrelevant to a broad-based
intertextuality than the question of whether the Essay was written six years before the second
Discourse or six years after?
Derrida's commentators are silent on this issue. As well they might be, for not only does this
section command precious little interest for anyone who is not a Rousseau scholar, but it would
appear, also, to be thoroughly counterintuitive. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is rare, perhaps alone,
in mentioning 'The Place of the Essay', and she does so only in the offices of a translator's
introduction. For her, it 'is engrossing to watch the bold argument operating in the service of a
conventional debate', an opportunity to savour the 'taste of a rather special early Derrida', and the
section is to be read as a piece of 'rather endearing conservatism'. 18
However, true as this may be, the implication is that we are to regard the relationship of 'The
Place of the Essay' to the rest of the Grammatology as purely contingent. Yet one thing we
quickly learn from reading Derrida is that nothing is a simple digression, undertaken for no
apparent reason. Rather such moments, like faultlines in the text, will appear marginal and
extrinsic, but to rigorous investigation in fact reveal an economy, or strategic wager, vital to the
entire system. It is upon such moments, a footnote, a harmless entr'acte, a casual metaphor, a
seemingly directionless chapter, that deconstructive reading will begin its work of unsettling the
structures and presuppositions of the text. Why then does Derrida want us to agree that the
Essay postdates the second Discourse? Spivak also says: 'I do not believe that Derrida ever
again devotes himself to this sort of textual scholarship.'19 However, when we consider that
Derrida undertakes a very similar mission in 'Plato's Pharmacy', the necessities which dictate
'The Place of the Essay' begin to emerge.20
By a coincidence, perhaps uncanny, Plato's Phaedrus has also been relegated by tradition to a
place among the works of its author's immaturity.21 The use of myth to illustrate the problem of
writing (an explanatory tactic generally censured by Plato), and ill-construction in the exchanges
between Phaedrus and Socrates, have led scholars to suppose that it was Plato's first dialogue.
In the early twentieth century this view persisted but took a curious turn as scholars now began to
assert that it was Plato's last work, the same defects now explicable in terms of declining rather
than nascent critical powers. Here again Derrida plays the dutiful advocate: 'We are speaking of
the Phaedrus that was obliged to wait almost twenty-five centuries before anyone gave up the
idea that it was a badly composed dialogue . . . We are no longer at that point.'22 To sufficiently
sensitive expiscation, Derrida argues, the Phaedrus will surrender all the logical rigour of the
great Platonic dialogues. It is only really necessary to read this text to see that, in its denunciation