Jacques Derrida · Philosophy
Why has philosophy, from Plato onward, treated <em>writing</em> as a dangerous, second-rate copy of living <em>speech</em>? Derrida shows that this ancient prejudice - phonocentrism - is the master case of the metaphysics of presence, and that when philosophers attack writing they always end up relying on it.
There is a hierarchy so old and so familiar that it feels like common sense: speech is primary and alive; writing is secondary and derivative, merely a way of recording speech. Derrida named the bias phonocentrism - the privileging of the voice (phone) - and argued it runs through the entire Western tradition, from Plato to Saussure. The intuition behind it is powerful. When I speak, I seem present to my words: my meaning is right here, in my mind, as I utter it; if you misunderstand, I can clarify on the spot; the living voice carries the breath, the intention, the soul of the speaker. The word seems transparent to the thought behind it. This is why speech looks like the natural home of meaning - it is the place where signifier and signified, sound and sense, seem to coincide in a single present moment.
Writing, by contrast, has always been regarded with suspicion. The written word is cut off from its author: the writer may be absent, distant, even dead, yet the marks go on functioning. Writing can be copied, forged, quoted out of context, read by people it was never meant for, made to mean things the author never intended. It seems a lifeless husk, a corpse of speech, a mere external aid that always threatens to corrupt the living thought it was supposed to serve. Derrida’s project in his early masterpiece, Of Grammatology (1967), was to show that this ancient ranking is not a neutral observation but a symptom - the clearest expression of the metaphysics of presence - and that it cannot survive close examination.
Here is Derrida’s decisive move. The very features that supposedly make writing inferior - that it works in the absence of its author, that it can be repeated in new contexts, that its meaning is not pinned down by a present intention - are not defects peculiar to writing. They belong to every sign, including the spoken word. Consider: for a word to be a word at all, it must be repeatable - usable again, by other people, in other situations, when I am not there. Derrida calls this iterability. A sound that could be used only once, by one person, in one moment, understood by no one else, would not be a sign at all. But iterability means that every sign, by its very nature, can function in my absence and drift from my intention. The ‘death of the author’ that seems to threaten writing is built into the structure of language as such: my words must be able to mean even when I am gone, or they could not mean now.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Derrida calls philosophy’s bias toward speech over writing phonocentrism : the spoken word seems closest to a meaning fully present in the speaker’s mind, while writing seems a lifeless, absent copy. Derrida reverses this - arguing that the features philosophers fear in writing (absence, the death of…
Leads to Plato.
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