“Cultural Graphology” could be the name of a new human science: this was Derrida’s speculation when, in the late 1960s, he imagined a discipline that combined psychoanalysis, deconstruction,
and a commitment to the topic of writing. He never undertook the project himself, but he did leave two brief sketches of how he thought cultural graphology might proceed. In this book, Juliet
Fleming picks up where Derrida left off. Using his early thought and the psychoanalytic texts to which it is addressed to examine the print culture of early modern England, she drastically
unsettles our knowledge of the key vehicle of modern writing: the book.
Fleming shows that the single most important lesson to survive from Derrida’s early work is that we do not know what writing is. Channeling Derrida’s thought into places it has not been seen
before, she takes on topics such as errors, spaces, and print ornaments that have hitherto been marginal to our accounts of print culture and excavates the long-forgotten reading practice of
cutting printed books. Proposing radical deformations to the meanings of fundamental and apparently simple terms such as “error,” “letter,” “surface,” and “cut,” Fleming opens up exciting new
pathways into our understanding of the book as a material and cultural object.
