This article takes its cue from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s ‘Afterword’ to the fortieth anniversary edition of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967), which advances two interconnected points essential to the Derridean legacy: first, learn how to translate; second, defend not just the rational, but the reasonable. This article first revisits Derrida’s two-step critique of Western logocentric rationality through the two parts of Of Grammatology, identifying the modern Chinese script revolution as a case of the globally other’s subjection to and negotiation with this logocentrism. It then focuses on the Chinese palaeographer Tang Lan and his call for a ‘reasonable’ science of writing. By zooming in on Tang Lan’s advocacy of a new ideo-phonography, this article considers Chinese grammatology — the science of both ancient and modern Chinese writing — as an integral part of a global grammatological project that practices anti-ethnocentric deconstruction and humanist intellectual activism.
This article brings into play questions of translation, untranslatability and mistranslating operative in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s ‘Translator’s Preface’ as well as the project of Of Grammatology it ushers. It does so in order to explore the concept of ‘global criticality’ such as it is developed out of Spivak’s work. The piece gives an informative account of the series of plenary panels at the Modern Language Association which, starting in 2018, scrutinized problems arising from the work of cultural translation and which carried forward and further developed this concept of ‘global criticality’.
Marking the fiftieth anniversary of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s English translation of Of Grammatology, and almost 60 years since its first publication, we can ask how deconstruction addresses the weight of the past, the dating of a text and the work that is not timeless but slipping away as we reread it. How did Derrida himself touch on the problem of history in Of Grammatology, especially with the ‘history lesson’ of his reading of Rousseau? It is a history lesson that rejects both ‘genesis’ and ‘structure’ as a method for interpreting the past. And Spivak’s translation and ‘Preface’, a much-revised work now dated 1976–1997–2016–2026, at once anticipates, enacts and registers the unavoidable time lags of a receding text that exceeds its anniversaries.
This article turns to the ‘Afterword’ of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's fiftieth anniversary translation of Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology (1967), focusing on Spivak's call to include artificial intelligence in Derrida's argument. The article asks how we might meet the challenge today of reading large language models as repeating, as well as refuting, what Derrida had identified in 1967 as the logic underpinning cybernetics and informatics. In this way, cybernetics and informatics join hands with philosophy, undoing its ethnocentrism and Eurocentrism.
