ABSTRACT
It could be said that the question of technology is one of the determining questions of our so-called ‘modernity’, but if one were faithful to the spirit of Derrida’s thought, then one would immediately qualify this kind of declaration by saying that technology has always been in different ways the determining question of humanity, of the human, of becoming-human or ‘hominization’. What Derrida has given to us are critical and conceptual tools, or perhaps more accurately, ways of thinking, which can help us to think about technology. In the very first chapter of Grammatology, for example, we are warned that writing in the everyday sense of the term cannot be viewed as simply a kind of technical auxiliary to spoken language – ‘technics in the service of language’ – and that ‘A certain sort of question about the meaning and origin of writing precedes, or at least merges with, a certain type of question about the meaning and origin of technics’.2 In Of Grammatology, Derrida is therefore questioning the reflex of thinking that would place the technological after the human, writing after speech – for a whole tradition of philosophical thought, speech is the defining and distinguishing feature of the human, the human being is by essence the speaking animal. The question concerning technology would, according to Derrida’s way of thinking, always have to exceed the ‘human’ in the narrow sense of the term, to include the animal, the animate, or, to anticipate, the articulated.
