In the 1960s, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida wrote a book entitled ‘Of Grammatology’. It is the only book I have read in its entirety in three different languages—English, French and Portuguese. In this book and in his other works, Derrida proposes something that he calls ‘the end of the book and the beginning of writing’.

Since I like writing—far more than speaking—yet prefer freedom of expression to bookish authoritarianism, that idea has always appealed to me.

Derrida, like his philosophical antecedent Spinoza, hailed from a complex Jewish background, well acquainted with racist and religious persecution.

Spinoza had been expelled from the synagogue for espousing rationalist non-Biblical views, but was still persecuted by Christian authorities. Derrida grew up as a French Jew in occupied Algeria, where his thinking was assailed from an early age from three sides: by conservative Jewish tradition, by the radical secularism imposed by the French education system, and increasingly by the radical Marxist, anti-colonialist and nascent Islamist views espoused by the Algerian insurgency.

All of these ‘bullying’ movements involve ‘bookish’ notions (Torah, Bible, the declarations of the French Revolution, the Qu’ran, Das Kapital, little red or green books) that Derrida would later go on to question, often (it should be said) with more showmanship and populism than befits a serious academic.

For this reason, Derrida is still a bête noire in many intellectual circles and I still worry that the misapprehension of some his ideas and the way they were expressed may have been the ultimate progenitors of the vicious discourse of the likes of Steve Bannon, Bolsonaro, Boris and Trump.

Derrida, however, achieved something fundamental that no-one has ever done before or since. He systematically set about undermining claims not only to the absolute authority of individual books and bodies of belief but also, perhaps more controversially, to the immediacy and validity of spoken discourse and rhetoric.

‘Of Grammatology’ ends with a plea for a more networked kind of interactive writing that does not depend on the authority either of set texts or the enticement of person and voice. Fifty years later, we all now have the kind of communications technology that Derrida and his contemporary Ivan Illich imagined, readily available at our fingertips. And, for good or ill, we are all now still dealing with the inevitably unforeseen and unintended consequences of this silent revolution.

It was interesting that, during the Brazilian election last Sunday, left-wing PT supporters opted to take books to the polling station rather than guns or flak-jackets. Books are obviously more benign than firearms or body armor. This was obviously a nice gesture, but no more meaningful than taking flowers to a funeral.

However, from a Derridean point of view, there was something rather backward-looking and self-defeating about this tacit protest.

No-one I know who participated in this protest had actually read the contents of the book they took to the polling booth, still less pondered on it, commentated on it or shared these comments with others. The book was therefore in a sense no more than a weapon: a way of saying, I know more than you do because I have a book under my arm.

Years ago I wrote a stage-play in Portuguese in which a drug dealer converts to evangelical Christianity and starts using the Bible to threaten people in the same way that he used to employ a gun.

Bolsonaro used exactly the same tactic in his poorly recorded home-made YouTube victory speech, placing the Bible, a copy of the Brazilian Constitution and a biography of Churchill on the table before him.

I used to work as a librarian and I can tell just by glancing at it whether a book has been opened or not. None of these had been.

But weren’t the PT activists doing exactly the same thing, when they marched to the polling stations bearing un-thumbed volumes of Foucault or Marx?—whose theories contradict one another, by the way.

The whole parade was a nationwide display of fake bookishness, fake authority, and education by osmosis on both sides. A contest between two equally mendacious teams: one of whom has never read a book and another that only pretends to have done so.

Recently I went through a phase of calling ‘Of Grammatology’ ‘that bloody book’: a book that had warped and corrupted my political sensibilities from over-early age.

Increasingly, however, I am coming to see it as an ‘anti-book’, a non-partisan, non-ideological plea for a more open fair-minded way of doing thinking and discourse, policy and politics, in a way that eschews dogma and embraces debate, without descending into subterfuge and prestidigitation.

This requires a new kind of reading and writing, a new kind of participatory communication. After all, if no-one actually reads a book or engages with it or criticizes it (and, let’s face facts, none nowadays do), no book is more than a brick with a bumper sticker slapped on the cover.

Let’s start writing and truly communicating—not just smooth-talking or pointing guns at one another or bashing each other over the head with bricks of books.