Age of the sign essentially theological

In the previous column on Of Grammatology, I concluded by citing Derrida’s remarks that ‘the age of the sign is essentially theological’. Although ‘its historical closure is outlined’, it ‘perhaps, will, never end’. In this column, I examine the significance of ‘sign’ to the central argument of the thesis in ‘Of Grammatology’.

Derrida further enunciates the thesis as, “Since these concepts are indispensable for unsettling the heritage to which they belong, we should be even less prone to renounce them.

Within the closure, by an oblique and always perilous movement, constantly risking falling back within what is being deconstructed, it is necessary to surround the critical concepts with a careful and thorough discourse—to mark the conditions, the medium, and the limits of their effectiveness and to designate rigorously their intimate relationship to the machine whose deconstruction they permit; and, in the same process, designate the crevice through which the yet unnameable glimmer beyond the closure can be glimpsed. The concept of the sign is here exemplary. We have just marked its metaphysical appurtenance.

We know, however, that the thematics of the sign have been for about a century the agonised labour of a tradition that professed to withdraw meaning, truth, presence and being, from the movement of signification. Treating as suspect, as I just have, the difference between signified and signifier, or the idea of the sign in general, I must state explicitly that it is not a question of doing so in terms of the instance of the present truth, anterior, exterior or superior to the sign, or in terms of the place of the effaced difference.

Jacques Derrida

Quite the contrary. We are disturbed by that which, in the concept of the sign—which has never existed or functioned outside the history of (the) philosophy (of presence)—remains systematically and genealogically determined by that history. It is there that the concept and above all the work of deconstruction, its “style,” remain by nature exposed to misunderstanding and non-recognition. The exteriority of the signifier is the exteriority of writing in general, and I shall try to show later that there is no linguistic sign before writing.

Decay

Without that exteriority, the very idea of the sign falls into decay. Since our entire world and language would collapse with it, and since its evidence and value keep to a certain point of derivation, an indestructible solidity, it would be silly to conclude from its placement within an epoch that it is necessary to “move on to something else,” to dispose of the sign, of the term and the notion.

For a proper understanding of the gesture that we are sketching here, one must understand the expressions “epoch,” “closure of an epoch,” “historical genealogy” in a new way; and must first remove them from all relativism.

Thus, within this epoch, reading and writing, the production or interpretation of signs, the text in general as fabric of signs, allow themselves to be confined within secondariness. They are preceded by a truth, or a mean-ing already constituted by and within the element of the logos. Even when the thing, the “referent,” is not immediately related to the logos of a creator God where it began by being the spoken/thought sense, the signified has at any rate an immediate relationship with the logos in general (finite or infinite), and a mediated one with the signifier, that is to say with the exteriority of writing.

‘When it seems to go otherwise, it is because a metaphoric mediation has insinuated itself into the relationship and has simulated immediacy; the writing of truth in the soul, opposed by Phaedrus to bad writing (writing in the “literal” and ordinary sense, “sensible” writing, “in space”), the book of Nature and God’s writing, especially in the Middle Ages; all that functions as metaphor in these discourses confirms the privilege of the logos and founds the “literal” meaning then given to writing: a sign signifying a signifier itself signifying an eternal verity, eternally thought and spoken in the proximity of a present logos.

Deconstruction

The paradox to which attention must be paid is this: natural and universal writing, intelligible and nontemporal writing, is thus named by metaphor. A writing that is sensible, finite, and so on, is designated as writing in the literal sense; it is thus thought on the side of culture, technique, and artifice; a human procedure, the ruse of a being accidentally incarnated or of a finite creature. Of course, this metaphor remains enigmatic and refers to a “literal” meaning of writing as the first metaphor.

This “literal” meaning is yet unthought by the adherents of this discourse. It is not, therefore, a matter of inverting the literal meaning and the figurative meaning but of determining the “literal” meaning of writing as metaphoricity itself. ”

Potters points out that deconstruction does not attack the concepts of logcentric epoch from a vantage point of new epoch but within the ‘logcentric epoch’ itself; “The “closure” (or bounds) of the logocentric epoch lies in the recognition of this radical incoherence: the concepts of being, truth, sense, logos, and so forth, cannot be made good within the logocentric framework. It is the work of deconstruction to expose the tail-swallowing nature of these concepts and thereby reveal the bankruptcy of logocentrism Deconstruction does not attack the concepts of the logocentric epoch from the vantage point of a new epoch but from within the logocentric epoch--the only place from which they can be conceived at all. ”

So, the arsenal of ‘de-construction theory’ is made up of weapons manufactured not out of ‘new epoch’ outside the ‘logcentric epoch’ but conceived out of the ‘logcentric epoch’ itself.