Chinese writing difference in modernity: The discourse of Chinese linguistic modernity and cultural translation (Jacques Derrida)

This dissertation investigates the discursive formation of Chinese linguistic modernity in which the construction of modernity relied heavily on the multi-dimensional written linguistic reform, including Romanization and grammatical Europeanization. Despite its enormous impact on the Chinese imagination of modernity, the discourse of Chinese writing reform has often taken for granted. This study can be divided into four parts.; Firstly, in tracing the discursive formation, this study rethinks the notorious motif "Chinese learning as substance; Western learning as function" and the related Dao/Qi distinction that were employed to negotiate the scale of westernization in the late Qing period. It points to the formation of the crucial notion of writing as technology of artificial creative evolution that aimed to worlding a modern China to the stage of "World History."; Secondly, under the titles of the "alphabetic prejudice" and the "grammatical fallacies", this study critically examines the ideology that European inflexive type of alphabetic writing is more "scientific". Both western philosophers and Chinese linguistic reformers often adhered to this ideology.; Thirdly, it investigates the actual molecular discursive practices involved in the dynamic formation of Chinese cosmopolitanisms, as well as in the creative-transformation of modern Chinese written language. It especially examines the belief that the "literal rendering of European syntax" was a way to "improve" Chinese syntax and the "Chinese slapdash brain" [Lu Xun's term].; Last but not least, it elaborates the molecular operation of the specific form of epistemic violence. By putting Derrida's deconstruction of western metaphysics in the postcolonial context, we can begin to clarify the discursive and historical relationship between the episteme we know as "western metaphysics" and the epistemic violence we find in various postcolonial projects of modernity. In the postcolonial situation, what we now call "Western Culture" is a translational effect. It is a field that is constituted through the becoming western of non-western cultures through translational practices that negotiate the cultural and linguistic boundaries.