Abstract

Derrida's treatment of Chinese script as essentially non-phonetic in Of Grammatology has been a recurrent leitmotif among several sinologists and scholars of Chinese origin, particularly in Rey Chow's famous 2001 essay ‘How Inscrutable Chinese Led to Globalized Theory’. Despite forceful refutations of this misconception, the accusation of a fantasizing ‘ethnocentrism thinking itself as anti-ethnocentrism’ has endured and could still be found in a recent 2015 article suggestively titled ‘A Sort of European Hallucination: On Derrida's “Chinese Prejudice”’. This essay will probe into the recurrent accusation of a Derridean hallucination of the other as the other's own hallucination in order to analyse the sustained misreading of Derrida's phrase ‘outside of all logocentrism’ used about the Chinese ideogram.