Sean Burke The Death and Return of the Author : Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida.

they open. The difference is both spatial and temporal. 'Spatial' because whilst we can say that
beings are here and there, being itself is never anywhere, but beyond and transcendent of
beings; 'temporal' because being is conceived as the timeless essence of beings whilst beings
themselves are always subject to their seasons in that they can pass in and out of existence at
any time.
This difference is then distributed into the difference between presence and the present in
accordance with the ever-presentness of being and the finitude of beings. Ontological difference,
Heidegger insists, is the primary unthought of metaphysics such that it cannot be thought within
the horizons of Western onto-theology. To think the difference, therefore, is to think the end of
metaphysics, of being-as-presence: 'The essence of presencing, and with it the distinction
between presencing and what is present, remains forgotten. The oblivion of Being is oblivion of
the distinction between Being and beings. 5
What for Heidegger is the finishing line is for Derrida somewhere near the start, in that he accepts
the force and validity of both Heidegger's history of metaphysics as the history of the
determination of being as presence, and the pursuit of a breach with that tradition via the
uncovering of an originary difference. Presupposing, therefore, much that is deeply questionable
in Heidegger's reading of the history of philosophy, the Derridean deconstruction becomes, and
remains, the task of radicalising these two phases of the Heideggerian text. Derrida's first step
along this road is to rework the history of presence in terms of the privileging of speech over
writing. According to Derrida, the notion of speech, as it has been always and everywhere
identified with fully self-present meaning, is related primally to the notion of presence in general:
'The system of language associated with phonetic-alphabetic writing is that within which
logocentric metaphysics, determining the sense of being as presence, has been produced. This
logocentrism, the epoch of the full speech, has always placed in parenthesis, suspended, and
suppressed for essential reasons, all free reflection on the origin and status of writing.' (43) The
basis of this system resides in the association of the signified with presence, and the signifier with
the absence of a signified presence: 'The formal essence of the signified is presence', Derrida
writes, 'and the privilege of its proximity to the logos as phone is is the privilege of presence.' (18)
As its coinage suggests, logocentrism designates thought centred upon the logos, whereby logos
designates not only the word of God, science and logic, but the broad conceptual system of
Western metaphysics: the thing in itself, essence, origin, pure consciousness, identity, presence,
being as presence. Where Derrida's thought here goes beyond Heidegger is in asserting that the
metaphysical determination of being as presence could only have been produced as the outcome
of the repression of writing, and that logocentrism is therefore the prior condition of onto-theology,
the latter being produced as an effect of the valorisation of the logos or fully self-present meaning.
Metaphysics could not have begun to install the thought of presence at the origin without having
always already repressed the primacy of the signifier over the signified, the primacy of the sign
representing presence-in-its-absence over presence itself. Logocentrism is not itself part of the
metaphysics of presence, the metaphysics of presence is the effect of logocentrism. The
reduction of writing is the necessary and sufficient condition, of the epoch of onto-theology; it has
produced 'the greatest totality . . . within which are produced, without ever posing the radical
question of writing, an the Western methods of analysis, explication, reading, or interpretation'.
(46)
This recognition then prepares the way for the second phase of Derrida's attempt to pass through
and beyond the Heideggerian deconstruction. 6 If the forgetting of writing, the sign, or 'trace' as
Derrida often calls it, is the precondition of the epoch of metaphysics—behind and before the
determination of being as presence—then the liberation of the signifier will unleash a preoriginary
difference still more pristine than that between being and beings. Whilst it must be that
all metaphysics rests upon the privileging of the phone via the erasure of writing, then the
breaching of metaphysics will consist in the propagation of writing as a difference which precedes
ontological difference as the unthought of metaphysics; a writing which, as we know, is thought
as différance, a differing and deferring (non)principle which produces not only the illusion of
presence, but the very possibility of differentiation in the first place. Such a writing, if it could be
thought, if it could be written, would represent a breach with metaphysics, more powerful, more
fundamental than the ontological difference which would then take its place as the final limit of
metaphysical conceptuality and the first of the 'intrametaphysical effects of différance':7