Now... the obvious question is: is the preference for a lack of logos over logocenterism not a logos in itself? (I am sure this is a stupid question)
Yes, though Derrida is not arguing for a lack of
logos, but rather attempting to destabilize
logos such that its classificatory binaries (you mention the Modernist and the pre-modern)lose their hierarchical structure, leaving the question of meaning to resist either "traditional" or "inverted" signifying structures but remain open in the play of
differance.
Deconstruction can never entirely escape metaphysics (yes, it works within
logos) but uses the tools of metaphysics to destabilize the logocentric structure.
And two more: is there any way "out" of Derrida? It seems like the most negative idea of all. We can happily "dwell" in meaninglessness, but what next? How do we appreciate art, for example, from Derrida's point of view?
An interesting question. In my view - though I acknowledge this is to misinterpret it - deconstruction resonates primarily on an ethical level, whereby questions of profound political and moral significance are understood with an intense sensitivity and openness. I think the later Derrida reveals this ethical dimension when he writes on topics such as justice: for him a non-deconstructable (and hence ineffable) ideal which we strive to realize within the destabilized field of metaphysics. It is not difficult to draw religious significance from this thought.
To understand Derrida on art one must understand something of what he called
arche-writing.
In
Plato’s ********, Derrida examines the origins of writing through the mythology of Ancient Egypt. The Egyptian god of writing, Theuth, serves to carry the message of his father, Ra. Paradoxically, while Ra’s authority is evoked by the written message that preserves his orders, the message functions only through the absence of Ra himself. This dual function of writing gives it the status of what Derrida terms a
pharmakon. The word pharmakon has connotations of both the medicinal and the poisonous. A pharmakon was a scapegoat: a supposedly peccant animal kept within a city to symbolize the evil of the outside (other) before being ritualistically expelled into the wilderness; emblematic of evil yet a vector for its expulsion. Similarly, writing could on the one hand preserve the speech of God; on the other supplant his presence. God becomes suspicious of this. Derrida explores Plato’s account of Theuth’s visit to king Thamuz (a symbol for Amon-Ra), noting that Thamuz’s denouncement of language constitutes a rejection of the
pharmakon.
From [his] position, without rejecting the homage, the god-king will depreciate it, pointing out not only its uselessness but its menace and its mischief. Another way of not receiving the offering of writing. In so doing, god-the-king-that-speaks is acting like a father. The pharmakon is here presented to the father and is by him rejected, belittled, abandoned, disparaged. The father is always suspicious and watchful of writing. - Derrida,
Dissemination p. 81
The father’s suspicion arises because writing is linked with his absence and will eventually become patricidal in that it is able to take his place. Presence is destabilized by writing; writing supplants its writer in the process of being written. In a certain way, writing is the death of the author.
Derrida notes that every act of language is in fact destabilized in this way. This includes even internal monologue. Husserl tried to found his phenomenological
logos on an absolute, idealized consciousness, present to itself, but Derrida notes that even in internal monologue one "part" of consciousness communicates with another, and hence destabilizes itself by effacing its own presence to itself. Hence he developed the notion of
arche-writing, which is an expanded notion of destabilized textuality. Every act of language is arche-writing: there is nothing outside the text.
Certain acts of literature reveal this destabilisation either within particular binaries of the logos or - most notably in the example of James Joyce's
Finnegans Wake - of the logocentric (and phonocentric*) system itself. The
Wake mimics Ra's act of self-effacement, in so doing presenting a signifying structure of diabolical equivocity (contrasted with Husserl's attempted univocity).
And another: is Heidegger preference for ontological Being over ontic being not a logocentric thought?
I submit that Derrida's notion of
arche-writing is close to being a restatement of Heidegger’s ontological difference but here understood in terms of presence and writing instead of
Sein and
Seiendes. In proposing that arche-writing echoes, and usurps, but is not synonymous with presence, Derrida comes close to identifying presence with being and writing with beings. That is, for Derrida, presence remains under erasure and is merely reflected in writing, which preserves only its memory, disclosing destabilized beings whose meaning is forever differed. Presence is equated to being in that neither can be conceptualized but while the structure of this arche-writing (which encompasses every written, performative and phenomenal utterance, act, appearance or gesture) may destabilise
Bedeutung (formal meaning), it does not destabilise
Sinn (general sense of meaning). This, I believe, is the root of Derrida's misreading of Heidegger.
Presence and identity in the discipline of semiotics are questions of epistemology, not ontology. Fundamental ontology enquires into
Dasein’s preontological understanding of being. This understanding is not something
Dasein has but rather what it constitutively is. Only in the clearing of Dasein’s preontological understanding can anything like presence, writing or signatures show up as the destabilized things they are. Therefore, what Derrida identifies as a preontological telephonics of difference is in fact only pre-epistemological, determining the conditions of a subject’s identity to itself or to an other. Before it constitutes itself as an “I-yes” to itself or another,
Dasein’s preontological understanding of being must allow something like a “subject” to show up as the thing it is, regardless of the purported instability of that subject’s formal meaning (note: for Heidegger, as Dreyfus notes,
Dasein takes a public stand on its being and is hence revealed as occupying a social station and Derrida seems skeptical of such communal meaning).
Derrida confuses being with presence and understands Heidegger to have offered a substance ontology (the very method of enquiry from which Heidegger was attempting to break free). He proposes that Heidegger offers being as what, in the preface of Derrida's
Of Grammatology, Spivak calls a “transcendental signified,” whereby each being signifies Being as its grounded presence. He replaces this semiotic structure with
arche-writing. Being, however, is not, like Amon-Ra, a destabilized presence or substance. It is rather that in terms of which substance shows up. Heidegger does not posit "Being" as a transcendental signified but, rather, as that in terms of which epistemology, and semiotics as a subset of epistemology, are possible. Destabilising epistemology and its laws of identity does not destabilise the project of fundamental ontology. Preontology is prior to epistemology as the epistemological, destabilised signature is first
en-owned in a cultural world of being, and any “structure” whatsoever presupposes an understanding of being in terms of which it shows up.**
* = Logocentrism (e.g. "central" over "marginal") and phonocentrism (voice over text) are nominally different but both represent structural binaries that deconstruction destabilises.
** = Even if we take the destabilisation as a pre-epistemological phenomenon (more simply: that which preconditions the destabilisation of the semiotic structure) the point holds, as even pre-epistemological phenomena, as phenomena, do not evade the question of the meaning of being.
