Shamelessly ripped, with thanks from enowning (a blog new to me), who in turn ripped it from le Dictionnaire des Termes Literaires – though I would guess enowning’s proprietor would have had to dig it out (of memory, or the source).
And thanks to the ex-IMproPRieTor (in a comment earlier today) for helping me to think beyond my own little self-referential circles of thought, thus stimulating my interest in this quote below:
In Martin Heidegger’s thinking, Plato, claiming the existence of an intelligible world beyond the realm of the senses, is responsible for the development of all the posterior metaphysical systems, according to which thought is the adequacy to eternal, rational realities, denied to the senses. Heidegger’s aim was to recover the primitive meaning of logos, still present among early Greek thinkers, who employed legein as «to gather» and logos as a result of this process. Guided by this interpretation of logos and legein, he investigated in his later writings, the language of the poets, in whose words, as he believed, truth was hidden.
According to Hölderlin, interpreted by Heidegger, poetry, the ability to name things, does not give them names already known. The poetical language has the power to produce essencial words in which and through which the entities become what they are, a virtue lost in current language.
Poetical language, a dialogue with being, creating everything, creates man himself.
Jacques Derrida, more radical than Heidegger, rejects all kinds of logos, center of the Western tradition, metaphysical and logocentric, including the author of Sein und Zeit. In Derrida’s opinion, logocentrism attributes to logos the origin of truth. He adds Saussures’s distinction of signifier and signified to the same metaphysical tradition. Opposing the habitual thinking, in which the order of the signified is always prior to the signifier, Jacques Derrida claims the liberation of the signifier from its dependence on the signified, the logos, origin of truth in the metaphysical, logocentric conceptions.
He declares that writing, which Saussure understood as an external representation of the word, is not to be considered as a mere auxiliary form of language. Seeing that the signifier does not indicate absent signifieds, there is no meaning before writing.
Meaning is the product of writing.
hehehe … not in my case.
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