Abstract
Cuneiform writing has a small but privileged position in Derrida’s Of Grammatology – providing the text with its first two epigraphs. By elucidating the source and import of these inscriptions and evaluating Derrida’s understanding of the cuneiform writing system in reference to more recent grammatological studies, this paper explains the significance of these references to the ancient Near East for Derrida’s arguments regarding the origins of Western metaphysics and logocentrism. In the first part, I analyze Derrida’s brief paragraph on cuneiform writing in Of Grammatology as evincing a “fundamental synaesthesia” of phonetic and non-phonetic elements that problematizes the phonocentric definition of writing as a transcription of speech. I then expand the comparative mythology that Derrida briefly notes in “Plato’s Pharmacy” to show how writing was thought of in cuneiform cultures in contrast to Plato’s Egyptian myth of Theuth. In parts three and four, I show how the first cuneiform epigraph hails an early science of writing – a grammatology, in other words – and how the second epigraph hails a written science.
Recommended Citation
Greenshields, Will.
"Derrida in Mesopotamia: On the Import of the Cuneiform Inscriptions in Of Grammatology."
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
26.2
(2024):
<https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.4644>
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