Writing, speech-which is parasitic? A new slant on an old debate

Which is the real, original – speaking or writing? Jacques Derrida and others argued that speech is parasitic on writing rather than the other way round (for example Plato condemned writing as a bastardised form of communication, according to Derrida and Jonathan Culler. When we come to evaluating the trustworthiness (whatever we mean by that) of religious systems we often come up against the ‘problem’ that its founding texts were only set down in writing many years after the death of its founder. So it was quite revealing to come across the following in  Bhikku’s Blog from a month or so ago: “Pali was originally a spoken language only, and was not committed to writing until several hundred years after the Buddha’s time. During the Buddha’s own lifetime writing was, in India, a fairly recent technological innovation and was used only for practical purposes such as commercial and diplomatic messages. It was still considered improper to use such a vulgar medium for religious texts.” Even Ferdinand de Saussure (early 20th century founder of structural linguistics) saw writing as dangerous and open to ambiguity and other weaknesses that are not, accoring to him, features of spoken language. So that puts this problem of the authority of religious texts (and by extension, teaching) into a new light.