In Honour of Reason: Working Towards a Chinese Grammatology

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.