Of Grammatology , 1965–2026 — A History Lesson

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.