Logocentrism

“Logocentrism” is one of Jacques Derrida’s signature concepts. It refers to the reduction within Western thought of writing to a direct representation of speech, which also reduced speech to the speakers “self-presence” or intentionality. For Derrida, logocentrism suppressed what is central to writing—that it involves difference and distance. To put it simply, the text can’t mean the same thing to the writer and all its readers (and the writer is himself one of the readers); the text is a tissue of other texts and no individual can hold all of the “threads.” Adam Katz uses David Olson’s theory of writing and especially his concept of the “metalanguage of literacy” to ground logocentrism anthropologically and historically in a way Derrida and his deconstructionist successors were unable to.