On logocentrism, an introduction to understanding of Jacques Derrida's philosophy

Bibliogr. s. 66

In his early works Jacques Derrida propounds a diagnosis of the metaphysical thought of the West. What he calls the era of logocentrism is governed by the question of speech and its relation to writing. The identification of this very division between graphe and phone is crucial to the understanding of the strategy of Western philosophy, whose aim was to rule out writing as threatening to the living presence and homogeneity of logos. By the same token, speech is regarded as a privileged carrier of meaning. This recognition of Derrida proves useful to grasp the idea of deconstruction. In my article I would like to follow Derrida's discourse on the origin of the strong position of speech in the history of metaphysics and confront this metaphysical point of view with a quasi-ontological movement of that which Derrida himself calls a trace.