Logocentrism entails a metaphysics of presence by prioritizing speech over writing.
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Peer-reviewed philosophical literature establishes that logocentrism involves a metaphysics of presence through the prioritizing of speech over writing.
In this article, I read Derrida’s critique of the ‘sign’ over against the challenges of the metaphysics of presence as featured in Western theology and philosophy. Derrida argues that logocentric interpretive interest in theology and philosophy is widely held and contradict by the West, as this somehow reveals the Western belief of the metaphysics of presence. He argues that the idea of metaphysics of presence which is strongly held in Christianity and Judaism is somehow privileged speech (Logos) over against writing which is seen as death and alienated from existential and transcendental reality. Derrida focuses on the reading of Saussure and how presence has been perceived over against writing in Western discourse in terms of the interpretation from Plato to Rousseau. Derrida prefers to deconstruct presence, which is perceived in Western theology and philosophy as truth and the ideal moment of pure, unmediated firstness. This article focuses on the reading of the work of Saussure, who has been greatly influential in the study of oral traditions, verbal arts and the interpretive interest of the sign. For Derrida writing has been suppressed by Western discourse for almost 400 years, as speech has been privileged over writing. The function of deconstruction is to deconstruct the binary opposition between speech and writing. Derrida provides clear examples of his deconstructive activity, which turns the text in traces of more text in opposing speech as unmediated firstness of presence. Derrida’s critique of speech hopes to expose the dishonesty and false consciousness in a Western interpretive discourse that suppressed writing and perceived speech as presence. This relation is both oppositional and hierarchical, with writing as secondariness understood as a fall or lapse from firstness. For Derrida, ‘there is nothing outside of the text’. In the original French, Derrida wrote: ‘ Il n’y a pas de hors-texte ’ [There is no outside-text]. Language is a constant movement of differences and everything acquires the instability and ambiguity inherent in language (Callinicos 2004). The implications of Derrida’s reading based on his work Of Grammatology (1976) have impacted everything in the humanities and social sciences, including law, anthropology, linguistics and gender studies, as the meaning of the text is not only inscribed in the sign (signifier and the signified), but everything is a ‘text’ and meaning and representation are how we interpret it. Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: Derrida sought to subvert the ‘sign’ in structuralism, as it opens the door to dialogue with the socially constructed ‘Other’ in relation to the ‘sign’ and the false consciousness construction of the text by the West. This challenges the existing interpretive paradigm and open oral and written dialogue of the text for the ‘other’ in terms of the meaning and representation of the oral text, the oral archival memory of the other, indigenous knowledge systems, African rituals, folklore, storytelling and verbal arts.
Far from being a banality or a philosophical naivety, there is a quintessential nexus between language and meaning, in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). The thrust of Derrida’s idea is that, language is chaotic and meaning is never fixed, in a way that allows us to effectively determine it (that is, meaning is unstable, undecided, provisional and ever differed). As a Poststructuralist, Derrida’s quarrel was with Logocentrism, which privileges speech over writing, and hitherto assume that, we have an idea in our minds, which our writing or speaking attempts to express. But, this, for Derrida, is not the case, for no one possesses the full significance of their words. Texts, in some sense write themselves: that is, are independent of an author or his intentions. Thus, in Derrida’s thinking, intentionality does not play quite the same role, as is traditionally conceived in the philosophy of language; our intention does not determine the meaning of what we are saying. Instead, the meaning of the words we use, determines our intention, when we speak. This does not mean that we do not mean what we are saying, or that we cannot have intentions in communicating. But, since language is a social structure that developed long before and exists prior to our use of it as individuals, we have to learn to use it and tap into its web of meanings, in order to communicate with others; hence, the need for deconstruction. It is this process of deconstruction, which can point the way to an understanding of language, freed from all forms of structuralism, logocentrism, phonocentrism, phallogocentrism, the myth or metaphysics of presence and also open up a leeway, to the idea of différance. Thus, this paper, attempts an expository-philosophical analysis of Derrida’s eclectic contributions to language and meaning, by drawing insights from his magnus opus, captioned De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology).
Deconstruction is a term identically to the Jacques Derrida’s figure. As one of postmodernsime-post-structuralism figure, he loudly challenges the logocentrism metaphysics of presence, included in the tradition of Semitic religions. This paper—using Derrida’s deconstruction approach—wants to look at the phenomenon of the denial of religious reasoning that has recently occurred in Indonesia. More precisely the phenomenon of “berhala kontemporer”. “Berhala kontemporer” is the attitude of the single truth and condemns the possibility of another truth. The logic used is the binary-opposition; iam right and others are wrong. As if the others were not given the opportunity to simply ask, or digest speech and writing because there was absolutely no room for the others.The author concludes that Derrida’s thinking is still contextually applied in the present era, even as long as there are people who are trapped in rigid logocentrism then deconstruction will never die.
In a lot of research on loneliness and technology, there is an underlying premise that actual, physical presence is more real than 'virtual' presence. This premise is rarely explicit, yet it implies a hierarchy of reality, where the 'here and now' is always on top. In this theoretical paper, we examine this latent hierarchy and the understandings of presence and mediation it implies. We point towards potential consequences of this understanding for research on the role of technology in reducing loneliness and social isolation. To do this, we draw on the philosophical analysis made by Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida of what they called 'the metaphysics of presence'. This is the tendency to privilege presence as the only immediate and truthful access to reality, whereas all forms of mediations constitute mere approximations, derivations and second-rate realities with dubious truth value. First, we present their diagnosis, and then we show how it pertains to research on virtual presence and loneliness by analysing some examples from this research. Finally, we discuss some potential implications of the metaphysics of presence through a case story compiled from our empirical research. Our foundational assertion is that the question of whether anyone experiences loneliness is an empirical and not a metaphysical question. If we want to properly understand loneliness and the potential for alleviating it through the use of teletechnologies, we might get off on the wrong foot if we carry with us assumptions suggesting the existence of ascending levels of reality and presence.
The paper aims to respond to the ethical concern of biases generated by Artificial Intelligence systems. Even though biases enter an AI network via different channels, its presence in the algorithm can pose serious difficulties. AI systems have an algorithmic way of working where language is ‘formal’ and meaning is ‘fixed’. We employ deconstructive strategies of Jacques Derrida to understand the nature of this problem of AI bias through examination of algorithmic/programming language. Derridean philosophy looks at metaphysics as heavily depended on notions such as logocentrism where logos refers to the privileged part in a dichotomy. Logos is the centre of formal language which works as a system of signs. The main point of deconstruction is to apprise us of this privilege given to ‘presence’ of a concept or meaning over its ‘absence’. Derrida’s notion of Undecidables and Aporia, not only destabilizes rigid dichotomies like speech/writing but also give way to an opening of a concept in its ‘impossible -possibility’. In AI systems, programming/algorithmic language conforming to its algorithm offers definitive answers to problems. This takes us a step ahead in ‘formalization’ of language. Derrida, however offers a response via his ethical deconstruction where the process of ‘completion’ of any concept is deferred and its meaning ‘undecided’.
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