The essence of being present

In this column, we further examine Jack Derrida’s Of Grammatology and the profound ideas which led to the birth of the theory of deconstruction. We concluded the previous week’s column with “What is noteworthy is that according to Potts the argument boils downs to a hierarchy of signification. Potts summarises this segment as “ There is thus a sort of hierarchy of signification. Signifier refers to signified, but since not all signifieds are created equal; a signified may refer in turn (as signifier) to another, higher signified as validation.

The stopping point of this process must be a “primum signatum: the transcendental signified”, supplied through the logos, a highest signified that needs no validation. Without a transcendental signified, the very notion of sign (as combination of signifier and signified) would collapse into a vicious regress of signifiers”.

Jacques Derrida

David plotts observes, “ Now the heart of self-validation is presence. That is, no fact needs to be validated if it is immediately present to us; its presence is its validation. For example, the basic reason we cannot doubt our own existence is that we are present to ourselves (which is what is going on in the cogito argument). Therefore what marks the higher signifieds in the chain of signification is their higher degree of presence. Indeed the essence of the signified is presence. Moreover, and by the same token, the essence of being is presence. To be valid and to be real are the epistemic and metaphysical sides of the same coin of presence.”

Derrida states that logocentrism is dependent on the fact of being presence. Derrida observes, “We already have a foreboding that phonocentrism merges with the historical determination of the meaning of being in general as presence, with all the subdeterminations which depend on this general form and which organise within it their system and their historical sequence (presence of the thing to the sight as eidos, presence as substance/essence/existence [ousia], temporal presence as point [stigmè] of the now or of the moment [nun], the self-presence of the cogito, consciousness, subjectivity, the co-presence of the other and of the self, intersubjectivity as the intentional phenomenon of the ego, and so forth). Logocentrism would thus support the determination of the being of the entity as presence.

To the extent that such a logocentrism is not totally absent from Heidegger’s thought, perhaps it still holds that thought within the epoch of onto-theology, within the philosophy of presence, that is to say within philosophy itself. This would perhaps mean that one does not leave the epoch whose closure one can outline. The movements of belonging or not belonging to the epoch are too subtle, the illusions in that regard are too easy, for us to make a definite judgment.

Mediation

The epoch of the logos thus debases writing considered as mediation of mediation and as a fall into the exteriority of meaning.

To this epoch belongs the difference between signified and signifier, or at least the strange separation of their “parallelism,” and the exteriority, however extenuated, of the one to the other. This appurtenance is organized and hierarchized in a history. The difference between signified and signifier belongs in a profound and implicit way to the totality of the great epoch covered by the history of metaphysics, and in a more explicit and more systematically articulated way to the narrower epoch of Christian creationism and infinitism when these appropriate the resources of Greek conceptuality. This appurtenance is essential and irreducible; one cannot retain the convenience or the “scientific truth” of the Stoic and later medieval opposition between signans and signatum without also bringing with it all its metaphysicotheological roots. To these roots adheres not only the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible—already a great deal—with all that it controls, namely, metaphysics in its totality. And this distinction is generally accepted as self-evident by the most careful linguists and semiologists, even by those who believe that the scientificity of their work begins where metaphysics ends. ”

According to Derrida, language is a system of signs. : “As modem structural thought has clearly realised, language is a system of signs and linguistics is part and parcel of the science of signs, or semiotics (Saussure’s sémiologie). The mediaeval definition of sign—aliquid stat pro aliquo —has been resurrected and put forward as still valid and productive.

Linguistic sign

Thus the constitutive mark of any sign in general and of any linguistic sign in particular is its twofold character: every linguistic unit is bipartite and involves both aspects —one sensible and the other intelligible, or in other words, both the signans “signifier” (Saussure’s signifiant) and the signatum “signified” (signifié) . These two constituents of a linguistic sign (and of sign in general) necessarily suppose and require each other. But to these metaphysico-theological roots many other hidden sediments cling. The semiological or, more specifically, linguistic “science” cannot therefore hold on to the difference between signifier and signified—the very idea of the sign—without the difference between sensible and intelligible; certainly, but also not without retaining, more profoundly and more implicitly, and by the same token the reference to a signified able to “take place” in its intelligibility, before its “fall,” before any expulsion into the exteriority of the sensible here below.

As the face of pure intelligibility, it refers to an absolute logos to which it is immediately united. This absolute logos was an infinite creative subjectivity in medieval theology: the intelligible face of the sign remains turned towards the word and the face of God. ” Potts observes that Derrida’s distinction between ‘intelligible/ sensible” provides a ‘natural elaboration of ‘metaphysico-theology’: “ Thus “the epoch of the logos” implies an entire “philosophy of presence” an epithet by which Derrida characterises the whole history of Western philosophy.

All of the distinctions and oppositions fought out in Western philosophy have been determined by the “logocentric” framework described above. The only such distinction of which Derrida gives more than a hint is Plato’s distinction between the intelligible and the sensible. The ideas are intelligible, i.e., immediately graspable by (present to) the mind through “an absolute logos.” Physical things are merely sensible traces of the intelligible ideas. Therefore, the former are fit only to be signifiers of the latter, and only the latter have real being. The intelligible/sensible distinction thus provides a natural and even elaboration of the logocentric “metaphysico-theology”.