It must of course be understood in the cybernetic sense, but cybernetics is itself intelligible only in terms of a history of the possibilities of the trace as the unity of a double movement of protention and retention. This movement goes far beyond the possibilities of “intentional consciousness.” It is an emergence that makes the grammē appear as such (that is to say according to a new structure of nonpresence) and undoubtedly makes possible the emergence of the systems of writing in the narrow sense. (Derrida 1974, 84) The grammē structures all levels of the living and beyond, the pursuit of life by means other than life, “since genetic inscription’ . . . up to the passage beyond alphabetic writing to the orders of the logos and of a certain Homo sapiens.” And it must be thought from out of the process of the “freeing of memory” described by Leroi-Gourhan: “an exteriorization always already begun but always larger than the trace which, beginning from the elementary programmēs of so-called ‘ instinctive’ behavior up to the constitution of electronic card indexes and reading machines, enlarges différance and the possibility of putting in reserve” (Derrida 1974, 84).

What is specific to the human is the movement of putting itself outside the range of its own hand, locking onto the animal process of “liberation”: “the brain was not the cause of developments in locomotor adaptation but their beneficiary” (26). The hand never has anything within its range. Prostheticity, here a consequence of the freedom of the hand, is a putting-outside-the-self that is also a putting-out- of-range-of-oneself. Pursuing the “process of liberation,” the installation of this techno-logical complex nevertheless brings on a rupture. The conquest of mobility, qua supernatural mobility, qua speed, is more significant than intelligence— or rather, intelligence is but a type of mobility, a singular relation of space and time, which must be thought from the standpoint of speed, as its decompositions, and not conversely (speed as the result of their conjunction). It would be necessary, moreover, to analyze the relation of différance to speed: différance is itself also a conjunction of space and time more originary than their separation. It is in this sense, then, that différance will, perhaps, have to be thought as speed.2

To oppose speech to writing is always also to oppose man to animal in opposing him in the same stroke to the technical. However, it must not be forgotten that if grammatology is not “one of the sciences of man, [this is] because it asks first, as its characteristic question, the question of the name of man” (Derrida 1974, 83). How does grammatology pose this question? By calling man (or his unity) into question, and by forging the concept of différance, which is nothing else than the history of life.

We are left with the question of determining what the conditions of such an emergence of the “grammē as such” are, and the consequences as to the general history of life and/or of the grammē. This will be our question. The history of the grammē is that of electronic files and reading machines as well— a history of technics— which is the invention of the human. As object as well as subject. The technical inventing the human, the human inventing the technical. Technics as inventive as well as invented. This hypothesis destroys the traditional thought of technics, from Plato to Heidegger and beyond.

Différance is the history of life in general, in which an articulation is produced, a stage of différance out of which emerges the possibility of making the grammē as such, that is, “consciousness,” appear. The task here will be to specify this stage. We shall refer to a double rupture in the history of life— of what comes to pass or what passes, between two blows, two coups received by différance in general from a specific différance: the Zinjanthropian and the Neanthropian are the names of these two coups. What takes place here, the place of this event, is the passage from the genetic to the nongenetic. Derrida here refers, without quoting them, to two texts of Leroi-Gourhan (1993, 221 and 228), from which other consequences will be drawn in the second volume of this work. The passage from the genetic to the nongenetic is the appearance of a new type of grammē and/or program. If the issue is no longer that of founding anthropos in the pure origin of itself, the origin of its type must still be found. This means that a typology of grammēs and programs must be constructed.