Meaning-Making after Grammatology: Writing as a Breach of Subjectivity

This article expands upon the ongoing rereading of grammatology towards worldly and embodied problems, in the direction of existentialism, a tradition long thought to be worlds apart from deconstruction. Through a closer look at the two studies in existential analysis Jean-Paul Sartre dedicated to Jean Genet and Gustave Flaubert, we will reveal a sensibility to the radical potential of writing in transforming classical conceptions of meaning, authorship and subjectivity that echoes and in fact precedes Jacques Derrida’s. The notion of the transfinite, explored by Jean Cavaillès, is proposed as a possible conceptual connector between the two, even if spectrally. This shared cultural and conceptual milieu may explain their recognition of the fertile tension between unstable meaning and the universal scope of any event of meaning-making. But the later Sartre is more explicit than Derrida in thematizing the objective of contamination of other consciousnesses that would be inherent to all acts of meaning-making. This bolder approach will confirm certain avenues for the moral challenges classically addressed to grammatology, on questions of agency, ideology and pragmatics.