ABSTRACT
The human genus, at some indeterminable stage of evolution, became grammatological: We learned to make symbolic signs upon surfaces. When Theophylaktos, at the beginning of this book, commanded us to pay attention to “the mind of the inscriptions” , he used a Greek noun that means “something drawn” and hence “letter” and hence “text”; our words graph and graphic and telegram and grammar all derive from that ancient verb and noun. Geometry, mathematics, art, and writing put mind into marks; all kinds of signs branch from this grammatological root, this marking of surfaces.
