Page 38 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Language, Metaphysics, and Ontology
leges the first term of each of these pairs. Sprat also privileges 'a natural way of speaking' as against the 'swellings of style.' Here style appears as unnaturally evident; and, through the Latin stilus (a pointed instrument for use with a wax tablet), it recalls the artificeofinscription,awritingasopposedtoaspeech.
2. SpeechandWriting
To examine the implications of this ranking of'speech' over 'writing' has been a recurrent task for Derrida. He traces it in Saussure, in Levi-Strauss, in Rousseau, and in the locus classicus: Plato's Phaedrus. Socrates, in this dialogue, tells of the Egyptian god Thoth, who invented writing and offered it to the king with 'a paternal love,' but found his gift refused; the parent is not always the best judge of children. The figure of parenthood is developed as Socrates describes the fate of speeches when transferred to writing: tumbled about anywhere with no parent to protect them, and unable to reply for themselves. As opposed to these abandoned children, however, there is 'a son of the same family, but lawfully begotten... the intelligent word graven in the soul of the learner, which can defend itself, and knows when to speak and when to be silent.' This is 'the living word of knowledge... of which the written word is properly no more than an image.' Plato's idealism is evident; the written word, depreciated as it is, functions in the same way as the image of the bed in the Republic. Yet the intelligent word is 'graven,' inscribed, in the soul: the rejected image of writing somehow taints the site from which it is excluded.
The written word, for Plato, suffers an absence; there is no parent to speak up for it; it lacks the principle of reason which, by contrast, is present to the lawful son, the intelligent word graven in the soul. The intelligent word and the soul are both principles of reason; that is, reason is here present to itself and confirms itself. This self-presence is for Derrida characteristic of western metaphysics, whose various systems are organized around self-present, self- confirming centers which control and legitimate their surrounding structures.
3. Logocentrism
Building on the Greek logos, which can mean both 'word' and 'rational principle,' Derrida calls this Western tradition 'logocentrism.' It is apparent in Western religions, most obviously in the Fourth Gospel, which appropriates the pagan logos for Chris- tian divinity:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
(John 1:1)
And, even earlier, the 'I am that I am' of Exodus 3:14 is an example of presence confirmed by reflexive self- definition. But the practice is not exclusively religious;
on the contrary, logocentrism can be entirely secular, as in Husserl's phenomenology, where the self- presence of consciousness, purified by a process of bracketing or reduction, attains what he calls a 'realm of essential structures of transcendental subjectivity immediately transparent to the mind.'
These logocentrisms go beyond the world of physi- cal fact. In their organizing mastery, they transcend the physical: they are metaphysical. Deconstruction engages in a questioning of metaphysics, insofar as metaphysics provides a repertoire of logocentric mas- ter terms: foundation, origin, end, essence. And the counterclaim is: "There will be no unique name, even if it were the name of Being.' So deconstruction, in dealing with binary pairs, does not simply reverse the direction of dominance and privilege the under- privileged. This would be to exchange the rule of cen- trism for another, the principle of mastery remaining intact. It has been shown how Derrida's attempt to discover the 'other' of philosophy entailed not an opposing recourse to literature, but rather 'an allusion to certain movements which have worked around the limits of our logical concepts.' These disruptive move- ments are what forestall a symmetrical reversal, and naming them is doubly problematic. In the first place is the risk of producing yet another master term, another 'unique name.' Second, to name and codify the deconstructive operation is to make it available for appropriation and vulgarization, particularly at a time when theories are fashionably marketable. As Adorno wrote, 'No theory today escapes the marketplace. Each one is offered as a possibility among competing opinions; they are all put up for choice; all are swal- lowed.' Once packaged for consumption, decon- struction is easily domesticated, its disruptive potential dissipated. It is for this reason that Derrida denies that deconstruction is a method or even a
critique. But appropriations of one sort or another are unavoidable. American deconstructors, in particular, have been driven to definitions, which include Paul de Man's equation of the deconstructive potential of language with literature itself—a privileged role not envisaged by Derrida. Again, as de Man says:
Ihaveatendencytoputupontextsaninherent authority, which is stronger, I think than Derrida is willing to put upon them. I assume, as a working hypothesis (as a working hypothesis, because I know better than that), that the text knows in an absolute way what it's doing.
(de Man 1986:118)
In fact the hypothetical nature of de Man's assump- tion is not always evident in his more apodictic state- ments. But, flirtations with literariness aside, deconstruction's influence on literary theory and criti- cism has been marked, not least because of its atten- tion to the preconditions of discourse; to what goes into (and what is kept out of) the constitution of an identity, be it a discipline, a genre, a system, an
16