Reading Of Grammatology: Annotating REALLY Difficult Texts

So I find myself reading Of Grammatology cover-to-cover.  I've never done it - honestly, I sort of pooh-poohed Derrida for a long time and a bit of that skepticism remains.  It gives me a great opportunity to think a lot about annotating for comprehension on a really high reading level though.  I've always maintained to students that my annotation method mirrored what all competent readers actually do when confronted by a difficult text, but I didn't really have great examples.

But on the train the other day, I caught myself twisted around a particular passage, working out exactly what Derrida was saying.  The process I was going through was exactly what I ask students to do, which is annotate for what the text actually says, not what I connect it to or what I think of it.  The first thing that has to be done is figure out what the text says, and even at the highest levels of reading this is a process that has to happen first, even if only in a split-second before it can be influenced by whatever nuances my personalized reading adds.  It is, perhaps, in slowing down and just looking to translate Derrida's complex prose that I've come the closest to illustrating this step in the decoding process.

“The paradox to which attention must be paid is this:  natural and universal writing, intelligible and nontemporal writing, is thus named by metaphor.  A writing that is sensible, finite, and so on, is designated as writing in the literal sense; it is thus thought on the side of culture, technique, and artifice; a human procedure, the ruse of a being accidentally incarnated or of a finite creature.  Of course, this metaphor remains enigmatic and refers to a “literal” meaning of writing as the first metaphor.  This “literal” meaning is yet unthought by the adherent of this discourse.  It is not, therefore, a matter of inverting the literal meaning and the figurative meaning but of determining the “literal” meaning of writing as metaphoricity itself “ (15).

Contradiction/paradox – exposition of a universal truth comes in the form of metaphor – of representation.  Fixation on the sensible moment is (ostensibly) literal and non-representative.  It is what it is and, in its temporality, is human/accidental/imperfect/momentary, so debased.  However, understanding types of writing in this representational form is (contradictorily) making “literal” writing into a metaphor while descrying its poverty of representational texture.

Of course, there's a clear sense of irony here.  Looking to see what Derrida "actually says" is loaded to the top with implications - speech vs writing, a unified meaning in the text, etc.  However, those considerations come second to the moment of perception for me.  Filtered through my own biases as it may be, I think these annotations of Derrida illustrate the way that the process can be used to decode or translate or productively paraphrase the reading.  At very least, it helped me to understand what Derrida was writing, maybe through an accidental visual example of deferral.