“Derrida's Chinese prejudice” (Publication, 2008)
Year
2008
Text
Meighoo, Sean. Derrida's Chinese prejudice. In : Cultural critique ; 68 (2008). (Derr20)
Type
Publication
Mentioned People (1)
Derrida, Jacques
(El-Biar, Algerien 1930-2004 Paris) : Philosoph, Professor für Philosophie, Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris ; Professor of the Humanities, University of California, Irvine.
Subjects
Linguistics
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Philosophy : Europe : France
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References / Sources
Chronology Entries (3)
| # | Year | Text | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1967.2 |
Derrida, Jacques. De la grammatologie [ID D24730]. Sekundärliteratur 1998 Mao, Yihong. Derridas Grammatologie und die chinesische Schriftsprache [ID D24737]. Während die westliche Philosophie mit dem Motto 'Zu der Sache selbst' und dem Begriff 'Dekonstruktion' versucht, über die traditionelle szientifische Rationalität hinauszugehen und zur eigentlichen, vorrangigen, vor der Logik liegenden Lebenswelt zurückzukehren, wird in China seit der Vierter-Mai-Bewegung ständig gefordert, die eigenen 'nicht logischen' Denkweisen aufzugeben, um nach wissenschaftlichen Regeln, nach den strengen Formen der Vernunft die chinesische Kultur umzubauen und ein neues Weltbild zu formen. Der Ausgangspunkt der Derridaschen Grammatologie ist die Kritik an der vom abendländischen Logozentrismus festgelegten Vorstellung des Verhältnisses von Denken, Sprache und Schrift. Nach dieser Vorstellung ist die Sprache der Ausdruck des Denkens, und die Schrift ist das Zeichen der Stimme. Logik hat Vorrang vor der Rhetorik, Schrift ist im wesentlichen Zeichen des Zeichens. Derridas Absicht liegt darin, durch ein neues Verständnis der Schrift, die als 'Bewegung der Differenz' betrachtet wird, die unerhörte Spur zwischen dem Erscheinenden und dem Erscheinen, zwischen Welt und dem Erlebten zu suchen. Um die klassische Hierarchie von Logos, Wort und Zeichen zu dekonstruieren, betrachtet Derrida die Schrift in gewisser Weise nicht nur als die Spur des Unbewussten, des nicht mit dem logischen Wort Ausdrückbaren, sondern sieht im Charakter der nichtphonetischen, piktographischen, ideographischen Schrift zugleich ihre Urform. Dabei erwähnt er die chinesische Schrift in seinen Werken. Derrida sagt, dass das nichtphonetische Moment der chinesischen Schriftsprache das Geistesleben als Selbstpräsenz bedroht. Denn der Begriff und das Wort verschwinden in der reinen Schrift. Hier beschreibt man Relationen, differente Spuren des Dings, nicht klare Benennungen. Deswegen werden von Derrida die beim Schreiben (der chinesischen Schrift) bewahrte Einzigartigkeit und die Besonderheit der Wirklichkeit (der Dinge, die durch das Zeichen ausgedrückt werden) sehr beachtet : « Dès que le signe apparaît, c'est-à-dire depuis toujours, il n'y a aucune chance de rencontrer quelque part la pureté de la 'réalité', de '1'unicité', de la 'singularité' ». Im Unterschied zu anderen westlichen Sprachwissenschaftlern richtet sich Derridas Interesse an der chinesischen Sprache auf die Bewegung ihrer Schrift. Die chinesischen Schriftzeichen bestehen aus verschiedenen Strichen und Linien, die in der Ausdrucksweise Derridas als 'Urschrift' betrachtet werden können. Aus ihnen bilden sich 'yin' und 'yang' heraus, die sowohl die natürlichen Jahreszeiten bedeuten, mathematischen Sinn beinhalten, das Schicksal der Menschen anzeigen, Ehe und Tugend bezeichnen, und gleichzeitig zur Grundlage der Philosophie werden, das heisst, die Dinge zeigen sich in einer Kette von Differenzen im Raum. Die chinesische Schrift ist eine Quadratschrift. Das Verfahren des Schreibens ist eine Art 'Aufpfropfen', wie Derrida es dargestellt hat... Derrida meint, dass es, wenn die Sache sich schreibt (und nicht geschrieben wird) und schreiben 'aufpfropfen' heisst, keine ursprüngliche Sache mehr gibt, sowie es auch keinen ursprünglichen Text gibt. Denn Urschrift heisst nicht, der Viel-Fältigkeit der Ursprünge einen Namen zu geben. Im Gegenteil, der Mythos, der von der Ein-Faltigkeit des Ursprungs erzählt, ist immer an den Begriff des Ursprungs selbst, an das Wort gebunden, welches den Ursprung der Letztbegründung schildert. Trotz interessanter Vergleichsmöglichkeiten zwischen der chinesischen Sprache und der Grammatologie Derridas sind wesentliche prinzipielle Unterschiede nicht zu bestreiten. Derridas Schrifttheorie, oder die ganze seit Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer bis hin zur Postmoderne durchgeführte Sprachkritik richtet sich auf die Befreiung des Denkens und der Sprache von Zwängen einer logischen Struktur, von Letztbegründung sowie absoluter Identität. 2008 Meighoo, Sean. Derrida’s Chinese prejudice [ID D24732]. It is not the Near East, through which, it is well known, many of the original texts of Plato and Aristotle were transmitted from ancient Greece to medieval Europe. Nor is it that Far East, which, after all, possesses phonetic writing in the form of Sanskrit, as does the Near East in the form of Arabic. The Arabic or Sanskrit East is still too near the West. It is that Far East, which is dispossessed of phonetic writing, the Farthest East condensed in the name of China that escapes Derrida's indictment, that remains innocent of the charge of logocentrism, of metaphysics, and therefore of history and knowledge. Derrida goes on to explain in his chapter on the project of grammatology that the next set of conditions for grammatology were established only after the Chinese and hieroglyphist prejudices were eradicated, as had been the theological prejudice before them. This entailed a revaluation of the very distinction between phonetic and nonphonetic scripts, on which were based both the theological prejudice on one hand and the Chinese and hieroglyphist prejudices on the other. Yet within the project of grammatology itself there persisted a theoretical distinction between phonetic and nonphonetic scripts, even as the ongoing project of deciphering non-European scripts challenged any such categorical distinction. As Derrida puts it, " The greatest difficulty was . . . to conceive, in a manner at once historical and systematic, the organized cohabitation, within the same graphic code, of figurative, symbolic, abstract, and phonetic elements". The difficulty, of course, was that the distinction between the phonetic and the nonphonetic concerned the conceptual basis of logocentric metaphysics itself. "[T]he issue was nothing less than the distinctions between phonetic and ideographic, syllabic and alphabetic, scripts, between image and symbol, etc. The same may be said of the instrumentalist and technicist concepts of writing, inspired by the phonetic model which it does not conform to except through a teleological illusion, and which the first contact with nonoccidental scripts ought to have demolished". Derrida argues that this is the position in which the project of grammatology presently finds itself. If grammatology has finally succeeded in demonstrating the "organized cohabitation" of phonetic and nonphonetic elements within any single script, then it has yet to confront the logocentric determination of the concepts of symbol and image, signified and signifier, speech and writing themselves. Derrida should suggest that Chinese society in particular is distinguished by the absence of logocentrism. If the distinction between the phonetic and the nonphonetic pertains to all writing as Derrida argues, then certainly the problem of phoneticization would similarly pertain to all languages, cultures, or societies. And yet, in a passage that is quite prominently placed toward the end of the chapter, just before the conclusion in which Derrida reiterates the ambiguity of the task of establishing a positive science of grammatology, he plainly states, "[W]e have known for a long time that largely nonphonetic scripts like Chinese or Japanese included phonetic elements very early. They remained structurally dominated by the ideogram or algebra and we thus have the testimony of a powerful movement of civilization developing outside of all logocentrism. Writing did not reduce the voice to itself, it incorporated it into a system" (90). Derrida thus suggests that there is some categorical distinction to be made between phonetic and nonphonetic writing, calling Chinese writing a "largely nonphonetic script" that is "structurally dominated by the ideogram or algebra" and implying that there are indeed other systems of writing that have not "remained" predominantly nonphonetic but have instead become predominantly phonetic. Accordingly, he conflates Chinese and Japanese writing by designating "Chinese or Japanese" nonphonetic, blithely inserting his own reference to Japanese writing into the discussion of Chinese writing that occupies so much of his chapter. Furthermore, Derrida claims that Chinese society as such is entirely removed from the problems of Western metaphysics, asserting that the "civilization" in which this predominantly nonphonetic writing is practiced is located "outside of all logocentrism." Immediately following this rather sensational statement, Derrida cites a substantial passage from one of the papers presented at the colloquium on writing, in which a number of claims are made: that despite the presence of phonetic elements within the Chinese script, it does not constitute a phonetic system; that Chinese writing is not considered a representation of speech; that the characters of the Chinese script have "retained" their "primitive prestige"; and that the valuation of speech that marks "all great ancient civilizations from the Mediterranean basin to India" is not operative in China (cited in Grammatology). Derrida then makes the reserved comment, "It is difficult not to subscribe to this analysis globally" . However, his reservations concern the teleological and logocentric rhetoric in which these claims are couched, rather than any of these specific claims themselves, let alone the general claim that China stands outside of all logocentrism. Moreover, Derrida seems to hold the opinion that Chinese writing itself provides a ready way to circumvent the Western metaphysics of logocentrism, albeit not for those within Chinese society who are already located "outside of all logocentrism," as much as for those within Western society who have only recently discovered Chinese writing, namely, Western artists and intellectuals. "[T]he necessary decentering [of logocentrism] cannot be a philosophic or scientific act as such, since it is a question of dislocating, through access to another system linking speech and writing, the founding categories of language and the grammar of the epistémè" . This "other system," of course, is Chinese writing. And the "access" to this other system refers to the European discovery of non-European scripts. Derrida goes on to suggest that it is within "literature and poetic writing" that this decentering of logocentrism has been accomplished most decisively. "[Pound's] irreducibly graphic poetics was, with that of Mallarmé, the first break in the most entrenched Western tradition. The fascination that the Chinese ideogram exercised on Pound's writing may thus be given all its historical significance". Similarly, in his notes to the chapter, Derrida cites in approval, or at least without censure, the summary analyses of Chinese writing made by the psychoanalyst Klein and the philosopher and curator Fenollosa, the former of whom stated that "the earlier picture-script [exemplified by Chinese writing], which underlies our script too, is still active in the phantasies of every individual child" (cited in Grammatology), and the latter of whom stated that in the translation of Chinese poetry, "[w]e should avoid the 'is' and bring in a wealth of neglected English verbs" (cited in Grammatology). For Derrida, then, the very concept of being that dominates the Western tradition of metaphysics, as well as the concept of the voice that determines the logocentrism of this tradition, is altogether absent from Chinese society or "civilization." There is no philosophical or scientific method that can break with the Western tradition, since any such method is ensconced within the same metaphysics of logocentrism that determines this tradition. Logocentrism can only be circumvented by a strategic deployment of Chinese writing itself, a system of writing that is essentially nonlinear, if not nonphonetic. Derrida thus suffers from his own Chinese prejudice, according to which Chinese society is marked not by the lack of phonetic writing as such but rather by the lack of logocentric metaphysics, a lack that is itself highly prized within the project of grammatology. To paraphrase Derrida's argument on Leibniz's Chinese prejudice as well as Kircher's "hieroglyphist" prejudice, Derrida's own concept of Chinese writing functions as a sort of Euro-American "hallucination," a hallucination that he shares with Pound, Klein, and Fenollosa alike, and surely with Leibniz himself. This concept of Chinese writing remains a "domestic representation," harboring a profound "misunderstanding" of Chinese language, culture, and society. And the "hyperbolical admiration" with which Chinese writing is presented only conceals the effort to consolidate the "inside" of Western metaphysics and to draw from this representation some "domestic benefit," even if this benefit entails the destruction of Western metaphysics itself. Perhaps this reinscription of logocentrism and ethnocentrism is inevitable in the attempt to establish a positive science of writing, given the ambiguity of this task with which Derrida introduces and concludes his chapter on the project of grammatology. But then again, perhaps this recurring Chinese prejudice affects the very program of deconstruction that Derrida mounts over the course of the entire text, a text that, after all, bears the name of Grammatology itself. Derrida's placement of China "outside of all logocentrism" is symptomatic of the Chinese prejudice from which French intellectuals in general suffered throughout the twentieth century, structuralists and poststructuralists, Marxists and existentialists alike. This widespread Chinese prejudice is also exhibited in the Maoist enthusiasm that was displayed by the structuralists and poststructuralists, and particularly by those who were associated with the journal Tel Quel, including, to varying degrees of commitment, Barthes, Kristeva, Foucault, and Derrida himself, an enthusiasm that sprang up to replace the Bolshevist enthusiasm, which had been doused so unceremoniously by the reluctant critique of Stalinism, and that would itself soon enough be doused in the same manner, an enthusiasm that conjoined the economic, political, and ideological critiques of the West and that oriented the gaze of the early poststructuralists toward the East, though now well beyond the Soviet Union, an enthusiasm from which Derrida's own Chinese prejudice cannot be entirely dissociated. Of course, this fascination with the East, a fascination that was more often than not dispelled on making any acquaintance with the East, is itself premised on the essential difference of the West from the East, all accidental meetings between them notwithstanding. The ethnocentrism that informs Derrida's Grammatology, then, is not limited to the passage in which Derrida proposes the absence of logocentrism within Chinese society but appears throughout the text at every point at which the concept of the West is invoked, at every point at which Western metaphysics or Western society in general is given to us as the operating system on which the program of deconstruction has been mounted. But Grammatology also offers us a critique of this ethnocentrism by which the poststructuralist strategy of anti-ethnocentrism is typically deployed, a critique that I have only slightly redirected in this paper toward Derrida's own Chinese prejudice. The problem of Derrida's Chinese prejudice concerns precisely the region of deconstruction, in both senses of its geographical and theoretical region. To accept Derrida's proposition on the absence of logocentrism in Chinese writing is to accept the proposition that logocentrism is a regional problem, that there is a system of writing unencumbered by logocentrism, which is, moreover, still in common usage in many parts of the world, that writing without logocentrism is possible. Even if we accept the very dubious claim that Chinese writing incorporates its phonetic and nonphonetic elements into a system in which neither is privileged over the other, we would not necessarily be compelled to accept that Chinese writing remains free of any determination by meaning, truth, or being. As Derrida makes it quite clear in Grammatology, logocentrism implicates not the phonè as such, but its link to the logos. To accept that Chinese writing is not dominated by its phonetic elements is not necessarily to accept that it does not thus carry the burden of representation, signification, or referentiality. Moreover, even if we accept the claim that Japanese writing privileges neither its phonetic nor its nonphonetic elements, we would certainly not be able to account for Derrida's conflation of Japanese with Chinese writing. By all accounts, the actual distribution of phonetic and nonphonetic elements in Japanese writing is significantly different from their distribution in Chinese writing. To accept that both Chinese and Japanese writing are nonphonetic is certainly not to accept that they are thus categorically related. |
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| 2 | 1997 |
Derrida, Jacques. Of grammatology [ID D24730]. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak schreibt im Vorwort : "Even though Derrida points out in Of Grammatology that Chinese writing "functioned as a sort of European hallucination,"his own project does not go beyond the ethnocentrism of a repeated reference to the other culture as a bearer—a sign—of the limits of the West . . . By insisting that logocentrism is "Western," Derrida forecloses the possibility that similar problems of the "proper" exist in as deep-rooted ways in the non-West and require a deconstruction that is at least as thorough and sophisticated as the one he performs for "his" tradition.” |
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| 3 | 2001 |
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." |
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Cited by (1)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2000- | Asien-Orient-Institut Universität Zürich | Organisation / AOI |
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