Логоцентризм: от Клагеса до Деррида и постструктурализма

Term in philosophy coined by Ludwig Klages
"Logocentrism" is a term coined by the German philosopher Ludwig Klages in the early 1900s. It refers to the tradition of Western science and philosophy that regards words and language as a fundamental expression of an external reality. It holds the logos as epistemologically superior and that there is an original, irreducible object which the logos represent. According to logocentrism, the logos is the ideal representation of the Platonic ideal.

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), it is claimed by Derrida, follows this logocentric line of thought in the development of his linguistic sign and its terminology. Where the word remains known as the whole sign, the unification of concept and sound image becomes the unification of the signified and the signifier respectively. The signifier is then composed of an indivisible sound and image whereby the graphic form of the sign is exterior. According to Saussure in his Course in General Linguistics, "The linguistic object is not defined by the combination of the written word and the spoken word: the spoken form alone constitutes the object." Language has, he writes, "an oral tradition that is independent of writing."

French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) in his book Of Grammatology responds in depth to what he believes is Saussure's logocentric argument. Derrida deconstructs the apparent inner, phonological system of language, stating in Chapter 2, Linguistics and Grammatology, that in fact and for reasons of essence Saussure's representative determination is " an ideal explicitly directing a functioning which is never completely phonetic". The idea that writing might function other than phonetically and also as more than merely a representative delineation of speech allows an absolute concept of logos to end in what Derrida describes as infinitist metaphysics. The difference in presence can never actually be reduced, as was the logocentric project; instead, the chain of signification becomes the trace of presence absence.

Inherent in Saussure's reasoning, a structuralist approach to literature began in the 1950s to assess the literary text, or utterance, in terms of its adherence to certain organising conventions which might establish its objective meaning. Again, as for Saussure, structuralism in literary theory is condemned to fail on account of its own foundation: ' language constitutes our world, it doesn't just record it or label it. Meaning is always attributed to the object or idea by the human mind, and constructed by and expressed through language: it is not already contained within the thing'. There is no absolute truth outside of construction no matter how scientific or prolific that construction might be. Enter Derrida and post structuralism. Other like minded philosophers and psychoanalysts who have notably opposed logocentrism are Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Freud, as well as those who have been influenced by them in this vein. Literary critic Roland Barthes (1915–1980), with his essay The Death of the Author (1968), converted from structuralism to post structuralism. For the post structuralist the writer must be present in a kind of absence, or 'dead', according to Barthes; just as the reader is absent in a kind of presence at the 'moment' of the literary utterance. Post structuralism is therefore against the moral formalism of the Western literary tradition which maintains only The Greats should be looked to for literary inspiration and indeed for a means of political control and social equilibrium. Modernism, with its desire to regain some kind of lost presence, also resists post structuralist thought; whereas Post modernism accepts the loss (the loss of being as 'presence') and steps beyond the limitations of logocentrism.

Some researchers consider that logocentrism may not be something which exists across all cultures, but instead has a particular bias in Western culture. Dennis Tedlock's study of stories in the Quiché Maya culture leads him to suggest that the development of alphabetic writing systems may have led to a logocentric perspective, but this is not the case in all writing systems, and particularly less prevalent in cultures where writing has not been established. Tedlock writes, "The voice is linear, in [Derrida's] view; there is only one thing happening at a time, a sequence of phonemes," and this is reflected in writing and even the study of language in the field of linguistics and what Tedlock calls "mythologics (or larger scale structuralism)", "are founded not upon a multidimensional apprehension of the multidimensional voice, but upon unilinear writing of the smallest scale articulations within the voice." This one dimensionality of writing means that only words can be represented through alphabetic writing, and, more often than not, tone, voice, accent and style are difficult if not impossible to represent. Geaney, in writing about ming (names) in early Chinese reveals that ideographic writing systems present some difficulty for the idea of logocentrism, and that even Derrida wrote of Chinese writing in an ambivalent way, assuming firstly that "writing has a historical telos in which phonetic writing is the normal 'outcome'", but also "speculat[ing] without irony about Chinese writing as a 'movement of civilization outside all logocentrism'".