from Derrida’s On Grammatology, translated by Spivak.
“It is this longing for a center, an authorizing pressure, that spawns hierarchized [hierarchical] oppositions” (xix).
“The superior term belongs to presence and the logos; the inferior serves to define its status and mark a fall. The oppositions between intelligible and sensible, soul and body seem to have lasted out the history of Western philosophy, bequeathing their burden to modern linguistics: the opposition between meaning and word; The opposition between writing and speech takes its place within this pattern”(xix).
“There is therefore a good and a bad writing: the good and natural is the divine inscription in the heart and the soul; the perverse and artful [writing] is technique, exiled in the exteriority of the body” (17).
“A modification well within the Platonic diagram: writing of the soul and of the body, writing of the interior and of the exterior, writing of conscience and of the passions, as there is a voice of the soul and a voice of the body”(17-18).