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

movement in thought which appears, for all the world, to interrupt or breach the great epoch of
logocentrism. Of course it might be said that such a silence consolidates the deconstructive
insistence on the presuppositional inherence of logocentrism in Western discourse, that though
so much in this epoch would suggest the contrary, these forces merely register superficial or
illusory displacements, and that the repression of writing continued to operate at the deepest
level. And this is not quite as eristic a point as it might seem. The agency of repression, as we
know, is at its strongest when it operates unawares. But since logocentrism can, and does
surface every now and then, we might expect some historical account of why it enters discourse
at a manifest level at some times and does not at others. Moreover, even if we allow the verity of
each and every grammatological proposition, the absence of explicitly logocentric texts will still
present Derrida with enormous expository difficulties in that there are precious few points at
which deconstruction can seize upon logocentricity and contest its assumptions. That
deconstruction must take place upon a construct is obvious, and to oppose a tacit and
sedimented nexus of phonocentric assumptions across an episteme as old as thought itself would
be a task so problematic as to be all but inconceivable. As a result, Derrida is obliged to exalt
those brief and historically isolated moments of logocentric clarity in which the grounding
assumptions of two-and-a-half millennia surface as a theory of the primacy of speech over
writing. Indeed, the tendency of deconstruction to work so assiduously on the margins—with four
pages of the Phaedrus, a hybrid text like the Essay, Freud's tiny 'Note on the Mystic Writing Pad',
a footnote to Being and Time, with one citation from De Interpretatione, with the implicit, the
scarcely said, the lapsus scribendi, and so forth—all this may well be largely attributable to the
fact that the question of speech's ascendancy over writing had never entered the philosophical
mainframe. From Rousseau onward, it is true, phonocentrism becomes a little more explicit in the
philosophical text, and we owe it to Jacques Derrida that we now know exactly where to look in
Hegel, Husserl, Saussure and Heidegger to find its express formulations. Yet even with these
thinkers phonocentrism does not force a dominant theme at any obvious level: not a text, nor a
chapter of a text is given over to the subject in any direct manner. Thus to the questions Derrida
asks—'Why accord an ''exemplary'' value to the "age of Rousseau"? What privileged place does
Jean-Jacques Rousseau occupy in the entire history of logocentrism?' (97)—we might reply that
without Rousseau there would be neither a single example of logocentrism between Plato and
Hegel, nor a logocentric text of any length in the history of logocentrism. Indeed, we might wonder
if it is correct even to talk of privilege in this context. When a text is sui generis, there is no
valorisation, only tautology involved in allotting it a unique class. What we can say, though, is that
without the Essay, the history of logocentrism would be all but inaudible. Whether it is possible to
write a history of silence—which would also be a silent history—is extremely doubtful. Certainly it
would not have the density imposed upon it by Of Grammatology.
The Grammatology catches Derrida in a position of unaccustomed vulnerability, since rather than
interrogating the systems of others, we find him constructing a certain theoretical structure and
history of his own, as he is obliged to do if the more specific analyses of logocentrism are to have
anything more than a regional significance. All the other works of this period constantly
presuppose the necessity of the logocentric episteme, but nowhere do they forward any
substantial account of its constitution and history. Everything proceeds as though this history
were given, and the deconstructor bringing a decisive moment in its articulation into the sharpest
focus. The Grammatology therefore functions very much as the groundwork since it stands as
reference for the episteme to which these essays have constant recourse. Thus the episteme
acquires an indispensability in reconstruction which it does not have in Foucault's thought, since
Foucault could abandon the concept as an explanatory device whilst continuing his project of
seeking out the rules of formation for discourse.
For Derrida, however, logocentrism, as the privileging of speech, must be the first condition of
two-and-a-half thousand years of metaphysical thought if the thought of writing as différance is to
have the power to force some sort of breach in the metaphysical enclosure. Just as différance
must be (conceptually) older than ontological difference, and (from the revisionist point of view)
younger than Heidegger, so too the privileging of the phone must be older than presence for
différance only acquires its counter-metaphysical force in so far as it derives from and against a
concept of metaphysics which originates not in presence but (before and as the cause of
presence) in the ideal of full speech. And the difficulties facing Derrida here are immense for