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immediacy seems guarantee the notion that in the spoken word we know
what we mean, mean what we say, say what we mean, and know what we
have said. Derrida has termed this belief in the self-presentation of meaning
“logocentrism” from the Greek word Logos (meaning speech, logic, reason,
the Word of God). Writing, on the other hand, is considered by the
logocentric system to be only a representation of speech, a secondary
substitute designed for use only when speaking is impossible. Writing is thus
a second-rate activity that tries to overcome distance by making use of it: the
writer puts his thought on paper, distancing it from himself, transforming it
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into something that can be read by someone far away.
Responding to the constraint of an originary programmation – in
fine, the Platonic determination of being as eidos/idea, and therefore of being
as the fundamental tupos, or repeating formula, of a transcendental
production – the epoch of onto-theology is nothing other than the epoch of
the bestowal of (the) meaning (of being, of existing) through figures. And
this means, most decisively, through the figure of man, the figure of a human
tupos determined as the subjectum or as the Subject of meaning. It is in this
sense that, following Derrida’s analyses in “The Ends of Man”, also Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy will speak of what completes itself is
the discourse of the actualisation of the genre of the human. It is this
actualisation, and hence exhaustion, of the human as the absolute figure of
meaning that Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy identify as the figural completion
of metaphysics. Distinguishing themselves from Martin Heidegger, they
insist upon the figure not as the metaphysical echo of a more originary
experience of being, but being itself as an original mimeme; as the mark of an
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originary fiction at the heart of metaphysics.
Derrida challenges the metaphysical assumption of an original unity
of meaning and being in discourse and suggests means of introducing the
effects of passion, irony, and ambiguity into the semiotic study of
representation. He thus enables us to locate the limitations of (Saussurian)
sign theory. Deconstruction is Derrida’s term for the critical manoeuvre that
reveals the moment of negation inscribed in any notion of presence, including
the presence of the subject to consciousness as the condition of possibility of
meaning, the presence of signifier to signified, and the presence of reality to
perception. Deconstruction calls into question metaphysical hierarchies that
allow self-presence, meaning, and reality supposedly to transcend the
moment of their inscription in representations. Derrida argues that because
metaphysical philosophy defines being with reference to its other (nonbeing),
the meaning of discourse with reference to its negation in graphic notation,
and reality in terms of its capacity to be copied in representations, then
nonbeing, writing, and representation can no longer be considered
supplements to an original reality or perversions of an original closure of the