ABSTRACT
Post-structuralism and deconstruction have been thinking from the outset about China and the cultures influenced by China. It is uncertain to me, as I
look over the record, whether the intersection is really that of a method coming to affect an area, or whether the area was somehow part of the method already, so that deconstruction is unable, for historical reasons, to think about anything without to some extent thinking or dreaming about 'China,.2 This thinking or dreaming occurs under the two broad headings of grammatology and the end of humanism. (If, that is, these are two: as we shall see, the one tends to shade into the other.) I will begin with some representations of Chinese writing that invoke the arguments about writing, speech, time and presence - about the 'Iogocentrism' of classical Western philosophy - familiar to us all through the early writings of Jacques Derrida:
Is not China, in our dreams, the privileged home of space? For our imaginary system, Chinese culture is the most meticulous culture, the most hierarchical, the most impervious to occurrences in time, the one most attached to the pure unfolding of distance. We imagine China as a civilization of dikes and dams under the eternal face of Heaven, spread and immobilized across the whole extent of a wallencircled continent. Even Chinese writing does not reproduce in horizontal lines the fleeting passage of the voice, but arranges in columns the motionless and still recognizable image of things themselves.3
