Clark- I have his Of Grammatology; and his Speech and Phenomena, also his
Limited Inc.
The way I read Derrida (and I admit, some time ago) in his 'Linguistics and
Grammatology' and 'The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing', they were
filled with Saussurian terms (signifer and signified; distinction between
language and speech) which he didn't seem to question. And his focus on Peirce
was only a few pages - he never examines the triadic semiosic action. He seems
more to focus on the symbol - but this is not the semiosic action. That is, for
Derrida, the focus is on rhetoric - which is all about 'signs' - but not the
triadic semiosic action. Derrida even calls the 'thing itself' (which i take to
be the Dynamic Object) as a 'representamen'!! (Of Grammatology, p 49).
Edwina
----- Original Message -----
From: Clark Goble
To: Edwina Taborsky
Cc: PEIRCE-L
Sent: Friday, October 23, 2015 3:33 PM
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Seeing things
On Oct 23, 2015, at 1:19 PM, Edwina Taborsky <[email protected]> wrote:
Thomas - I think that Gary F's outline is, as I said, postmodernism -
grounded in Derrida's 'differance' and 'presence'...and 'rhetoric' [taking
names]. Nothing to do with Peirce and I don't see that Derrida was a scholar
of Peirce (he was more firmly Saussurian).
???
Derrida’s whole point was that Saussure was wrong and Pierce was right. The
whole first half of On Grammatology, one of his most famous works, is just
about this.
Even if you dislike Derrida and that style of philosophy, I think the first
half of On Grammatology is worth reading.
http://www.mohamedrabeea.com/books/book1_3997.pdf (Sorry, this seems to be
OCRed and is pages 49 - 50)
In his project of semiotics, Peirce seems to have been more attentive than
Saussure to the irreducibility of this becoming-unmotivated. In his
terminology, one must speak of a becoming-unmotivated of the symbol, the notion
of the symbol playing here a role analogous to that of the sign which Saussure
opposes precisely to the symbol:
Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other signs,
particularly from icons, or from mixed signs partaking of the nature of icons
and symbols. We think only in signs. These mental signs are of mixed nature;
the symbol parts of them are called concepts. If a man makes a new symbol, it
is by thoughts involving concepts. So it is only out of symbols that a new
symbol can grow. Omne symbolum de symbol.
Peirce complies with two apparently incompatible exigencies. The mis-take
here would be to sacrifice one for the other. It must be recognized that the
symbolic (in Peirce’s sense: of “the arbitrariness of the sign”) is rooted in
the nonsymbolic, in an anterior and related order of signification: “Symbols
grow. They come into being by development out of other signs, particularly from
icons, or from mixed signs.” But these roots must not compromise the structural
originality of the field of symbols, the autonomy of a domain, a production,
and a play: “So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol can grow. Omne
symbolum de symbol.”
But in both cases, the genetic root-system refers .from sign to sign. No
ground of nonsignification—understood as insignificance or an intuition of a
present truth—stretches out to give it foundation under the play and the coming
into being of signs. Semiotics no longer depends on logic. Logic, according to
Peirce, is only a semiotic: “Logic, in its general sense, is, as I believe I
have shown, only another name for semiotics (semeiotike), the quasi- necessary,
or formal, doctrine of signs.” And logic in the classical sense, logic
“properly speaking,” nonformal logic commanded by the value of truth, occupies
in that semiotics only a determined and not a fundamental level. As in Husserl
(but the analogy, although it is most thought-provoking, would stop there and
one must apply it carefully), the lowest level, the foundation of the
possibility of logic (or semiotics) corresponds to the project of the
Grammatica speculativa of Thomas d’Erfurt, falsely attributed to Duns Scotus.
Like Husserl, Peirce expressly refers to it. It is a matter of elaborating, in
both cases, a formal doctrine of conditions which a discourse must satisfy in
order to have a sense, in order to “mean,” even if it is false or
contradictory. The general morphology of that meaning 10 (Bedeutung,
vouloir-dire) is independent of all logic of truth.
The science of semiotic has three branches. The first is called by Duns
Scotus grammatica speculativa. We may term it pure grammar. It has for its task
to ascertain what must be true of the representamen used by every scientific
intelligence in order that they may embody any meaning. The second is logic
proper. It is the science of what is quasi-necessarily true of the
representamina of any scientific intelligence in order that they may hold good
of any object, that is, may be true. Or say, logic proper is the formal science
of the conditions of the truth of representations.. The third, in imitation of
Kant’s fashion of preserving old associations of words in finding nomenclature
for new conceptions, I call pure rhetoric. Its task is to ascertain the laws by
which in every scientific intelligence one sign gives birth to another, and
especially one thought brings forth another.
Peirce goes very far in the direction that I have called the
de-construction of the transcendental signified, which, at one time or another,
would place a reassuring end to the reference from sign to sign. I have
identified logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence as the exigent,
powerful, systematic, and irrepressible desire for such a signified. Now Peirce
con-siders the indefiniteness of reference as the criterion that allows us to
recognize that we are indeed dealing with a system of signs. What broaches the
movement of signification is what makes its interruption impossible. The thing
itself is a sign. An unacceptable proposition for Husserl, whose phenomenology
remains therefore—in its “principle of principles”—the most radical and most
critical restoration of the metaphysics of presence. The difference between
Husserl’s and Peirce’s phenomenologies is fundamental since it concerns the
concept of the sign and of the manifestation of presence, the relationships
between the re-presentation and the originary presentation of the thing itself
(truth). On this point Peirce is undoubtedly closer to the inventôr of the
word phenomenology: Lambert proposed in fact to “reduce the theory of things to
the theory of signs.” Ac-cording to the “phaneoroscopy” or “phenomenology” of
Peirce, manifestation itself does not reveal a presence, it makes a sign. One
may read in the Principle of Phenomenology that “the idea of manifestation is
the idea of a sign.” 12 There is thus no phenomenality reducing the sign or the
representer so that the thing signified may be allowed to glow finally in the
luminosity of its presence. The so-called “thing itself” is always already a
representamen shielded from the simplicity of intuitive evidence. The
representamen functions only by giving rise to an interpretant that itself
becomes a sign and so on to infinity. The self-identity of the signified
conceals itself unceasingly and is always on the move. The property of the
representamen is to be itself and another, to be produced as a structure of
reference, to be separated from itself. The property of the representamen is
not to be proper [propre], that is to say absolutely proximate to itself
(prope, proprius). The represented is always already a representamen.
Definition of the sign:
Anything which determines something else (its interpretant) to refer to
an object to which itself refers (its object) in the same way, this
interpretant be-coming in turn a sign, and so on ad infinitum. . . . If the
series of successive interpretants comes to an end, the sign is thereby
rendered imperfect, at least
From the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We think
only in signs. Which amounts to ruining the notion of the sign at the very
moment when, as in Nietzsche, its exigency is recognized in the absoluteness of
its right. One could call play the absence of the transcendental signified as
limitlessness of play, that is to say as the destruction of onto- theology and
the metaphysics of presence. It is not surprising that the shock, shaping and
undermining metaphysics since its origin, lets itself be named as such in the
period when, refusing to bind linguistics to semantics (which all European
linguists, from Saussure to Hjemslev, still do), expelling the problem of
meaning outside of their researches, certain American linguists constantly
refer to the model of a game. Here one must think of writing as a game within
language. (The Phaedrus (277e) condemned writing precisely as play—paidia—and
opposed such childishness to the adult gravity [spoudè] of speech). This play,
thought as absence of the transcendental signified, is not a play in the world,
as it has always been defined, for the purposes of containing it, by the
philosophical tradition and as the theoreti- cians of play also consider it (or
those who, following and going beyond Bloomfield, refer semantics to psychology
or some other local discipline). To think play radically the ontological and
transcendental problematics must first be seriously exhausted; the question of
the meaning of being, the being of the entity and of the transcendental origin
of the world—of the world-ness of the world—must be patiently and rigorously
worked through, the critical movement of the Husserlian and Heideggerian
questions must be effectively followed to the very end, and their effectiveness
and legibility must be conserved. Even if it were crossed out, without it the
concepts of play and writing to which I shall have recourse will remain caught
within regional limits and an empiricist, positivist, or metaphysical
discourse. The counter- move that the holders of such a discourse would oppose
to the precritical tradition and to metaphysical speculation would be nothing
but the worldly representation of their own operation. It is there-fore the
game of the world that must be first thought; before attempting to understand
all the forms of play in the world.
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