absolute proximity of voice and being, of voice and the meaning of being, of voice and the
ideality of meaning. Hegel demonstrates very clearly the strange privilege of sound in
idealization, the production of the concept and the self-presence of the subject.
This ideal motion, in which through the sound what is as it were the simple subjectivity
[Subjektivität], the soul of the material thing expresses itself, the ear receives also in a
theoretical [theoretisch] way, just as the eye shape and colour, thus allowing the interiority of
the object to become interiority itself [läßt dadurch das Innere der Gegenstände fur das
Innere selbst werden] (Esthétique, III. I tr. fr. p. 16).* . . . The ear, on the contrary, perceives
[vernimmt] the result of that interior vibration of material substance without placing itself in a
practical relation toward the objects, a result by means of which it is no longer the material
form [Gestalt] in its repose, but the first, more ideal activity of the soul itself which is
manifested [zum Vorschein kommt] (p. 296) . **
What is said of sound in general is a fortiori valid for the phone by which, by virtue of hearing
(understanding)-oneself-speak—an indissociable system—the subject affects itself and is
related to itself in the element of ideality.
We already have a foreboding that phonocentrism merges with the historical determination of
the meaning of being in general as presence, with all the subdeterminations which depend on
this general form and which organize within it their system and their historical sequence
(presence of the thing to the sight as eidos, presence as substance/essence/existence [ousia],
temporal presence as point [stigmè] of the now or of the moment [nun], the self-presence of
the cogito, consciousness, subjectivity, the co-presence of the other and of the self,
intersubjectivity as the intentional phenomenon of the ego, and so forth). Logocentrism would
thus support the determination of the being of the entity as presence. To the extent that such a
logocentrism is not totally absent from Heidegger’s thought, perhaps it still holds that thought
within the epoch of onto-theology, within the philosophy of presence, that is to say within
philosophy itself. This would perhaps mean that one does not leave the epoch whose closure
one can outline. The movements of belonging or not belonging to the epoch are too subtle, the
illusions in that regard are too easy, for us to make a definite judgment.
The epoch of the logos thus debases writing considered as mediation of
xxx fotnote start xxx
•
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Werke, Suhrkamp edition (Frankfurt am Main, 1970),
vol. 14, p. 256; translated as
The Philosophy of Fine Art by
F. P. Osmaston (London, 1920),
vol. 3, pp. 15-16.
** Hegel, p. 134; Osmaston, p. 341.13
xxx fotnote slutt xxx
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mediation and as a fall into the exteriority of meaning. To this epoch belongs the difference
between signified and signifier, or at least the strange separation of their “parallelism,” and
the exteriority, however extenuated, of the one to the other. This appurtenance is organized
and hierarchized in a history. The difference between signified and signifier belongs in a pro-
found and implicit way to the totality of the great epoch covered by the history of
metaphysics, and in a more explicit and more systematically articulated way to the narrower
epoch of Christian creationism and infinitism when these appropriate the resources of Greek
conceptuality. This appurtenance is essential and irreducible; one cannot retain the
convenience or the “scientific truth” of the Stoic and later medieval opposition between
signans and signatum without also bringing with it all its metaphysicotheological roots. To
these roots adheres not only the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible—already
a great deal—with all that it controls, namely, metaphysics in its totality. And this distinction
is generally accepted as self-evident by the most careful linguists and semiologists, even by
those who believe that the scientificity of their work begins where metaphysics ends. Thus,
for example:
As modem structural thought has clearly realized, language is a system of signs and
linguistics is part and parcel of the science of signs, or semiotics (Saussure’s sémiologie). The
mediaeval definition of sign—“aliquid stat pro aliquo”—has been resurrected and put
forward as still valid and productive. Thus the constitutive mark of any sign in general and of
any linguistic sign in particular is its twofold character: every linguistic unit is bipartite and
involves both aspects —one sensible and the other intelligible, or in other words, both the
signans “signifier” (Saussure’s
signifiant) and the
signatum “signified”
(signifié) . These two
constituents of a linguistic sign (and of sign in general) necessarily sup-pose and require each
other. 6
But to these metaphysico-theological roots many other hidden sediments cling. The
semiological or, more specifically, linguistic “science” cannot therefore hold on to the
difference between signifier and signified—the very idea of the sign—without the difference
between sensible and intelligible; certainly, but also not without retaining, more profoundly
and more im plicitly, and by the same token the reference to a signified able to “take place” in
its intelligibility, before its “fall,” before any expulsion into the exteriority of the sensible here
below. As the face of pure intelligibility, ii refers to an absolute logos to which it is
immediately united. This absolutf logos was an infinite creative subjectivity in medieval
theology: the intelli gible face of the sign remains turned toward the word and the face of God
Of course, it is not a question of “rejecting” these notions; they an necessary and, at least at
present, nothing is conceivable for us withou them. It is a question at first of demonstrating
the systematic and historica
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solidarity of the concepts and gestures of thought that one often believes can be innocently
separated. The sign and divinity have the same place and time of birth. The age of the sign is
essentially theological. Perhaps it will never end. Its historical closure is, however, outlined.
Since these concepts are indispensable for unsettling the heritage to which they belong, we
should be even less prone to renounce them. Within the closure, by an oblique and always
perilous movement, constantly risk-ing falling back within what is being deconstructed, it is
necessary to surround the critical concepts with a careful and thorough discourse—to mark
the conditions, the medium, and the limits of their effectiveness and to designate rigorously
their intimate relationship to the machine whose deconstruction they permit; and, in the same
process, designate the crevice through which the yet unnameable glimmer beyond the closure
can be glimpsed. The concept of the sign is here exemplary. We have just marked its