Derrida's Paralogism of Writing: A Critique of Deconstructive Reasoning

Abstract

This article is a critique of the flawed logic Derrida employed in articulating his program of a Grammatology for deconstructing Western philosophy. I argue that Derrida in several instances built his arguments around what Kant called the paralogism. I look at an often cited case in order to substantiate my claim: Derrida's reading of Saussure, where his argument is based on a paralogism. Derrida misinterprets Saussure by seeing his alleged rejection of graphical writing as a rejection of his own idiosyncratic notion of writing (alias différance, trace, generalized writing, etc.), which only corresponds to Saussure's own notion of linguistic value, produced in a system of differences without positive terms. © 2015 International Society for the Study of European Ideas.