ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the way American legal theory has failed to adequately address the challenges and insights of grammatology, the philological critique of the language of law initiated with Jacques Derrida's work Of Grammatology. It outlines the form that a grammatological approach to studying "law in the videosphere" might take. The resistance of anglophone legal culture to the theory of grammatology was in part a resistance to a foreign style—a "continental" European mode of thought. The United States, the land of plain English and straight talking—Europe without brakes—did not take well to grammatology or the study of the politics of writing systems. As with any translation, any transmission between traditions and cultures, the question posed was most immediately whether the new form of theory belonged, whether it was best included or excluded from the extant forms of faith and law. Deconstruction arrived as a hieroglyph in the form of the English translation of Derrida's treatise on writing systems, Of Grammatology.
