MARJORIE GREN E
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stein's "forms of life" message , I think it's fair
to
say that what
Derrida chiefly wants to show us is the hand of death in speech as
against the life we seek but never find. He wants to protect us from
the ideal of life, which in fulfillment would be death, by showing us
the role of death in the only life we have. Thus the constant thesis , in
his view, from the
Phaedrus
to Saussure , of the unique superiority of
living
speech, can only be corrected by the counterthesis: the possibil–
ity of language depends upon the possibility of death. Hence his
insistence on writing, on the grammatic as essential to speech itself.
He does not mean , of course, that people wrote before they spoke.
His is not an historical thesis in that sense-though it is a thesis about
the
possibtlity
of history , of
Geschichtlichkeit,
to borrow Heidegger's
term. We do learn from the dead, after all. True , a wild child (if
there ever was one) on its own would never learn to speak and hence
would never become human . We need the mediation of living lan–
guage-users to initiate us into the language-borne, as well as lan–
guage-born, historical, human , social world . But
what
do our elders
teach us? What did little Augustine learn from the grown-ups? His
mother-tongue, an invisible , indeed inaudible, machine transmitted
at a countless sequence of maternal knees, long turned to clay. Speech
(parole)
is of the living, but language
(langue),
which precedes
speech , operates through death.
It
not only transcends death, it needs
death
to
work as it does, to be what it is . Each living moment is
unique ; but the very quintessence of words is repeatability , non–
uniqueness, and that is the nature of writing, of the text, which is
not lived , which in itself indeed is dead , yet survives the moment of
writing, can indeed even survive the writer. Even Shakespeare's death
didn 't kill the English tongue-though, admittedly , life with the
mass media may. That's by the way, or maybe it isn't . For the point
is: what matters most in language is not speaking speech (as Merleau–
Ponty called it), but the texts we leave: that is, the habits of speech ,
whether strictly' 'written down" or not, that will have become estab–
lished ways of talking for those not yet living, who will-God help
them-have learned from us. And habits,
hexeis,
remember , are
second actualities, worked up possibilities of action-but still possi–
bilities, not acts themselves. Language is defined as texts to be read ,
not the very act of reading, let alone of speaking purely out of one's
heart . If language were really
verbum cordis ,
there would be none
