China and the West

Chow, Rey. How (the) inscrutable Chinese led to globalized theory. In : PMLA ; vol. 116, no 2 (2001). Staten, Henry. Letter to editor. In : PMLA ; vol. 116, no 3 (2001).
Rey Chow : "My point in using this familiar example of Derrida is not to call him to task, as others have done, for ignoring the actuality of the Chinese language. Insofar as he appeals to an ahistorical notion of Chinese writing for his philosophizing, Derrida does not depart from the habit of hallucinating China that has been characteristic of European thinking since the sixteenth century. This much is a foregone conclusion . . . What interests me, rather, is how a kind of work that is radical, liberatory, antitraditional— an epochal intellectual intervention in every respect—is founded not only on a lack of information about and indifference to the workings of a language that provides the pivot of its critical turn but also on a continual stigmatization of that language, through the mechanical reproduction of it as mere graphicity, as "ideographic" writing."
Henry Staten : "[Derrida's] suggestion that Chinese civilization developed "outside logocentrism" does not mean, as Chow bizarrely claims it does, that Chinese writing is free of différance ("an unmediated correspondence between sign and referent" [as Chow puts it]): to be outside logocentrism is precisely not to believe in freedom from différance . . . Since writing is, in [Derrida's] view, not external to speech, it follows . . . that no writing, Chinese included, can be either what Chow calls "mere graphicity" (a writing from which speech is absent) or a purely phonetic writing (a writing absolutely subordinated to speech)."

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak : In his letter to the editor, Staten responds to Chow's accusation that Derrida relies on the stereotype of Chinese writing as an essentially ideographic system. Certainly, he offers a most constructive criticism of Chow's argument in his response, namely that Derrida's assertion that Chinese civilization has developed outside of all logocentrism means only that Chinese writing incorporates both phonetic and nonphonetic elements into a system in which neither is privileged over the other.
It is worth noting, however, that Staten offers this criticism by modifying Derrida's rather categorical description of Chinese society in the phrase "outside of all logocentrism" to the more ambiguous "outside logocentrism." Staten also demonstrates quite convincingly in his response that the scholarship on Chinese writing on which Chow appears to rely in her paper suffers precisely from the "logo- or phonocentric teleologism" that Derrida critiques in Grammatology. Yet Staten dismisses Chow herself from the ongoing scholarly debate on Chinese writing. " This debate over what Chinese writing 'largely' or 'basically' might be is, contrary to Chow's simplistic conclusiveness, extremely complex and a matter for continued disagreement among scholars". And much like Bohm, Staten implies that Chow has never read Derrida's text or that she has misread it. "As the most casual reader of the Grammatology ought to know, there is for Derrida no sign of any kind that can be 'shorn of grammar, syntax, sound, history' [as Chow puts it] because all signs are loci in a system of différance; that is practically Derrida's only point in the first half of the Grammatology". I, for one, am not so sure that either half of Derrida's text is such an easy read. In any case, again like Bohm, Staten further questions Chow's scholarship. He strongly objects to her accusation that Derrida remains both ignorant of and indifferent to Chinese writing, as well as to the editors' "sensationalist" exploitation of her claim. "Rey Chow charges Derrida with racial stereotyping . . . This sensational accusation has already been reiterated without qualification by the credulous coordinator of the special issue of PMLA in which Chow's essay appears . . . and thus threatens to become academic doxa. Yet all the ignorance of and indifference to scholarly detail are on Chow's side". Staten concludes his response by demanding that both Chow and the editors apologize to Derrida himself:
"[F]or purveying such a badly reasoned, transparently false accusation against Derrida, made worse by the smug, gratuitous slurs she has mixed in—such as the claim that it is "a foregone conclusion" that Derrida would of course repeat ahistorical stereotypes—Chow owes him an apology. As, indeed, do the editors of the PMLA, who should consider the gravity of publishing accusations of racial stereotyping and review such accusations more carefully than they have done in the present case."