Derrida writes a good deal about an "Eighteenth Century" he typically puts in scare-quotes, and he puts difficult questions to such a notion of a century and indeed to all historicizing and periodizing concepts. Beginning with explicit remarks about the Eighteenth Century in Of Grammatologie, we show that this is done not with a view to denying or ignoring history, but in the interests of understanding how history is possible at all, and notably how texts in their historicity still remain open for reading today.