Phenomenological Understanding on the Deconstruction: Voice In the Letters
1) Plato once made distinction between speechs and letters, namely logos and grammata. But this distinction do not mean that speechs by dint of traveling of sound and letters t...
Phenomenological Understanding on the Deconstruction: Voice In the Letters
1) Plato once made distinction between speechs and letters, namely logos and grammata. But this distinction do not mean that speechs by dint of traveling of sound and letters to be written are just formally different. They could be distinguished by one standard, which judges the truth. That is, speechs is basic language to which a subject carries a guaranteed truth, indeed letters is no more than a secondary language is derived from speechs. Letters is wandering language without any foundations. So Plato say about the fact that letters lack its own voice.
2) Plato points out insufficiency of letters, moreover puts emphasis on the possibility of pure thought do not depend upon letters at all. But Jacques Derrida grasps the point which the origin of metaphysics places to that Plato's idea. Because pure thought beyond letters presupposes consciousness that could penetrate into the essence of being on the whole without any medium. To follow Derrida, however, there is no speechs was not corrupted by letters. The act of speaking, and composing of letters, indeed thinking is naturally interrelated each other. Letters is a physical condition which is indispensible to either support or supplement to all the thought. So Derrida thinks that a voice of self-presence is adequate ground bears a metaphysical fantasy.
3) Derrida understands that the presence of the first person, so to speak, the voice has led our history of metaphysics. He validates again this fact by means of referring to linguistic thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But he pays attention to the notion of passion, in which is origin of the genesis of all the language. It is passion that a speaker acquaints the others with his own being and also the fact that he has yet approached to the time and space, and has occupied the primordial spatiotemporal thing, that is, passion is an auto-affection to notify the others of all these things. And a voice of speaking subject as self-presence and passion is consistent with the same origin. But there still remains a problem not to be resolved, whether passion which is the origin of language and generates it is only auto-affective. When we go back to Rousseau, that notion of passion is already a move of the decentralization and desubjectivation forward to the others.
4) The presence of the speaker is assumed to be entered into speechs is the voice of words. Letters employs another kind of voice. ㅆhe voice of letters cannot be attributed to a particular subject of the first person, and which is anonymous. Because writing and reading is in principle accomplished among the anonymity. There will be another sort of presence different from the visible first person speaker in the literal text.
5) The work of writing and reading, which depends on letters, is always a fulcrum in the philosophical communication. People in the philosophical sphere from ancient to even today always write and read, and which is their central task. Yet we can raise several question of what is writing and reading, of what is in the outer sphere from the work, and of what kind of relation is between the work and outer world. If these questions required, for that reason is never different from the question for the essential meaning of the philosophical act and communication.
6) What kind of things are on the outside of writing and reading Life and world. If there is neither life nor world on the outside of letters, the work of writing and reading will be no more than a useless thing. Let's define our life as a being in the relation of man who writes also reads and the world, or as ex-sistance, which means that man steps forward to the world and indeed the others. The voice in the letters has nothing to do with a physical resonance of sounds, while that of words in the real conversation has. The voice of letters is power to make man to see the world and the others very closely.