Table of Contents
Why Did Jacques Derrida Believe Writing Came Before Speech?
Unlock the complex philosophy of Jacques Derrida in this beginner-friendly review of Of Grammatology. Discover why writing is more than just recorded speech, how “traces” create meaning, and why deconstructing binaries changes the way we understand reality.
Ready to challenge everything you know about language? Read the full breakdown below to learn how deconstruction can help you see the hidden systems that shape your world.
Genres
Communication Skills, Philosophy, Education
Introducion: Discover why everything you know about writing, speech, and meaning is backwards.
Of Grammatology (1967) overturns basic assumptions about writing and speech, uncovering that writing isn’t just a tool for recording words but a fundamental system that makes all meaning possible. This revolutionary work became one of the cornerstones of poststructuralist thought, changing how we understand language, knowledge, and meaning-making across philosophy, literature, and cultural studies.
Since the dawn of history, humans have assumed that spoken language was developed first, and writing was a much later invention. Writing was just a way to record speech, and capture spoken words on clay, paper, or stone. But what if this assumption is completely wrong? What if writing, in its deepest sense, actually shapes how we think, speak, and understand our world in ways we never imagined?
In 1967, French philosopher Jacques Derrida turned this ancient belief upside down. He showed that writing isn’t just making marks on paper. It’s a vast system of differences and relationships that makes all meaning possible. When you understand this insight, you start seeing traces of it everywhere – in how we communicate, how we think, even in how our brains work. You realize that writing isn’t just a tool we use. In a very real way, it uses us.
This summary dives deep into how we understand language, meaning, and ourselves. Exploring just a few key insights from this revolutionary idea can help you see our everyday world in a completely new light.
Flipping the hierarchy
Think about how you learned language as a child. First you listened, then you spoke, and finally you wrote. This order seems natural and obvious.
For thousands of years, philosophers and linguists saw writing as just a tool for recording speech – a kind of technical backup system for our words. Speech felt pure and natural, while writing seemed artificial and secondary.
But Derrida noticed something strange. When you say a word like tree, its meaning comes from how it differs from other words like bush or flower. In other words, you understand what a tree is partly by understanding what it isn’t.
This system of differences exists before you ever speak the word. In fact, it has to exist first, or the word wouldn’t mean anything at all.
Here’s an example to make this clearer: Imagine you’re in a foreign country where you don’t speak the language. You see two locals having a conversation. Even though you can hear their speech perfectly, it means nothing to you.
That’s because you don’t have access to the system of differences that gives their words meaning. This system – this network of relationships between sounds and concepts – is what Derrida calls “writing” in its deepest sense.
Think about how you’re reading these words right now. Each letter and word only works because it’s different from other letters and words. The letter ‘A’ is only ‘A’ because it’s not ‘B’ or ‘C’. This system of differences comes before any actual speaking or writing. It’s like the rules of a game that have to exist before you can play.
This insight turns everything upside down. What we usually call writing, or making marks on paper, is just one visible form of a much bigger system. This larger system of differences and relationships makes all meaning possible. It comes before speech, before writing, before everything. It’s not just about language — it’s about how our minds make sense of the world.
When you understand this, you start seeing it everywhere. Every thought you have, every word you speak, every meaning you understand depends on this hidden system of differences. Speech isn’t more natural or immediate than writing — both are part of this larger system that makes meaning itself possible.
The trace and absence
The implications of Derrida’s insight don’t stop at the idea of meaning itself, either. He noticed another strange aspect of meaning, and his observation shaped much of his later work. The observation was this: meaning itself always depends on what isn’t there. He called this absent presence a trace, and once you understand it, you’ll see it working in every word and concept you use.
Try this experiment: Close your eyes and think of a cat. What makes that mental image mean cat to you? You might picture a specific cat, but the meaning comes from all the cats you’ve ever seen, and even from things that aren’t cats at all – dogs, rabbits, and every other animal that helps define what a cat is by being not a cat.
For Derrida, that’s a clear indication that the meaning of cat carries traces of all these absent things. And not just animals, either, but the meaning of cat is integrally linked to your fuzzy friend not being a tree, or a brick, or sofa, too.
This strange quirk of meaning gets even stranger with time-based concepts. When you think about breakfast, that word only makes sense because it carries traces of not-breakfast, like lunch and dinner. But it also carries traces of all the breakfasts you’ve eaten before, and all the breakfasts you expect to eat in the future.
None of these traces are actually present when you say or think the word, but without them, breakfast would be meaningless.
The same pattern is true with emotions, too. Your feeling of happiness right now carries traces of past happiness and past sadness. Each experience leaves a mark – a trace – that shapes how you understand the present moment.
In other words, nothing exists in pure, isolated presence. Everything carries traces of what came before and what might come after.
This isn’t just word games or abstract philosophy. Think about your own identity. Who you are right now carries traces of who you’ve been and who you might become. Your personality, your memories, your hopes – they’re all made up of these invisible traces of what isn’t physically present.
This insight changes how we think about presence and absence. We usually think of presence as the norm, and absence is just the lack of presence. But Derrida showed that absence – these traces of what isn’t there – actually makes presence possible. Every meaning we create, every thought we think, every word we speak depends on this play of presence and absence.
Understanding traces helps explain why meanings keep shifting and why no interpretation is ever final. Each person, each moment, brings different traces to the surface, creating new patterns of meaning in an endless dance of presence and absence.
The end of the book and dawn of writing
When you open a traditional book, you expect to find a complete story or argument. It will have a clear beginning, middle, and end. This idea of completeness is deeply embedded in Western thinking, which imagines knowledge as something that can be wrapped up neatly, bound in leather, and placed on a shelf.
But Derrida noticed that this model was breaking down. Think about how you gather information today. You might start with a news article in your feed, which links to a video, which leads you to a social media discussion, which references a scientific paper. There’s no clear beginning or end — just an endless web of connections.
Like your smartphone. At any moment, you’re connected to countless streams of text, images, and data. You’re not reading in a straight line anymore. Instead, you’re navigating through layers of meaning that overlap and interact. This isn’t just a new way of reading, it’s a fundamental shift in how meaning works.
Here’s an example: When you send an emoji to a friend, you’re using a form of writing that isn’t tied to speech at all. The meaning comes from visual patterns, cultural references, and shared understanding. It’s writing that has broken free from a traditional book’s linear structure.
And this new kind of writing is everywhere, too. Think about how you navigate a city. Street signs, advertisements, traffic signals, and architectural designs all form a complex system of meaning. You read the city without ever opening a traditional book. Even your social media feed is a kind of writing — one that combines images, text, reactions, and connections in ways that were impossible before.
But this isn’t really new. It’s just making visible something that was always true. Every text, even the most traditional, was always connected to other texts. Every meaning was always linked to other meanings. The digital age hasn’t created this interconnection, it’s just made it impossible to ignore.
This shift challenges us to think differently about knowledge and meaning. Instead of looking for final answers or complete systems, we need to learn to navigate these endless networks of connection. The future belongs not to the book, but to the open network. Not to the finished text, but to the endless possibilities of writing.
Deconstructing binaries
Humans love to divide the world into clear opposites. Like nature versus culture, mind versus body, inside versus outside. On the surface, these divisions seem to make the world easier to understand. But Derrida noticed how these simple oppositions break down when you look at them closely, revealing a truth that ancient wisdom traditions like Taoism had long embraced.
Think about the boundary between nature and technology, for instance. Is a bird’s nest natural or artificial? What about a beaver’s dam? If these count as natural, then so must human houses. Under this kind of scrutiny, the line between nature and human creation starts to blur.
Even your own body challenges this division. The bacteria in your gut aren’t you, they don’t share your DNA or come from your cells, yet you couldn’t survive without them. Just like your thoughts are shaped by language, which comes from culture, yet feels completely natural to you.
And consider the difference between inside and outside through the simple example of your skin. Is it inside or outside your body? The truth is that it’s both, and neither. It’s a living boundary that’s constantly exchanging substances with the world around it. Like the Taoist symbol of yin and yang, each side contains elements of its opposite.
This pattern appears everywhere once you start looking. Like the border between two countries. Is it part of one country or the other? The border itself can’t be neatly sorted into either category. The same is true of your memories – are they inside your mind or out in the world where you experienced them? They’re somehow both, existing in a space that challenges our usual categories.
Even the opposition between truth and fiction isn’t as clear as we think. Every true story requires imagination to be told. Every fictional story contains elements of truth. They’re not opposites but different patterns in the same fabric of meaning.
But this isn’t just philosophical wordplay. Understanding how these oppositions break down helps everyone think more clearly about real problems. Take the debate about genetic influences versus environmental factors in human development. The reality isn’t an either-or situation after all, it’s always both, interacting in complex ways that can’t be separated.
By moving beyond simple oppositions, we can understand problems in more nuanced ways. Like the ancient wisdom traditions taught, truth often lies not in choosing between opposites, but in understanding how they dance together.
The violence of writing
Every time you write something down, you’re doing a kind of violence to meaning.
This might sound strange, but Derrida argued that writing forces the endless possibilities of thought into rigid, simplified forms. Think about how many shades of emotion you can feel in the same moment. Then think about how few words you have to identify and express these feelings. Writing squeezes this vast range of experience into a limited set of symbols.
Consider what happens when you fill out a form. Maybe you’re applying for a job, opening a bank account, or filling out your medical history at a new doctor’s office. The form gives you boxes to check: male or female, single or married, employed or unemployed, hypertensive or not. Each checkbox forces your complex reality into simple categories. This is the violence of writing — it reduces the richness of human experience into manageable pieces.
This violence shapes how we think and live in ways we rarely notice. Your native language determines which sounds you can easily hear and produce. If you grew up speaking English, you might struggle with sounds that are obvious to speakers of other languages. The writing system you learned as a child influences how you break up the world into categories.
And the effect gets stronger as systems become more rigid. Computer programming languages are perhaps the most violent form of writing — they force every instruction into perfect, logical patterns. Even something as simple as your phone number splits your identity into digits that can be sorted and tracked.
But this violence isn’t always negative. Sometimes we need to simplify things to understand them. Scientists create models that deliberately ignore certain aspects of reality to reveal underlying patterns. Legal systems reduce complex human situations into clear rights and wrongs. These are useful forms of violence – they let us build shared understanding and create social order.
The key is recognizing this violence when it happens. When you see a news headline that reduces a complex event to a simple story, you’re watching the violence of writing at work. When you struggle to express a feeling because no word quite fits, you’re bumping up against the limits of written language.
Understanding this helps you use writing more consciously. You can look for ways to let complexity shine through even as you simplify. You can remember that every written word is just one possible version of truth, not truth itself.
Conclusion
In this summary to On Grammatology by Jacques Derrida, you’ve learned that…
Writing, in its broadest sense, isn’t just a tool for recording speech but a fundamental system of differences that makes all meaning possible. This system works through traces – in which every concept carries the shadow of what it isn’t, showing that meaning always depends on absence as much as presence. Traditional oppositions like nature / culture or inside / outside break down under careful examination, revealing a more complex reality where categories blur and interact. When we write or categorize things, we necessarily simplify complex realities – a kind of violence that can be both limiting and useful. Understanding these insights helps us think more clearly about language, meaning, and how we make sense of our world.