[D66] The problems of presence

[A.O.]

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/jacques-derrida-problems-presence/

Footnotes to Plato
November 9, 2018
© Giovanni Giovannetti/Effigie/Writer Pictures
Jacques Derrida: The problems of presence
Derek Attridge explores différance, deconstruction and the role of the
impossible in the work of the divisive philosopher
DEREK ATTRIDGE

Footnotes to Plato is a TLS Online series appraising the works and
legacies of the great thinkers and philosophers

[...]
The set of assumptions at which much of Derrida's work takes aim ­–
assumptions at the heart of both the Western philosophical
tradition and of what goes for “common sense” – can be labelled
presence. When I reflect on my own consciousness what I experience is
self-presence: there seems to be no intervening medium between my sense
of myself and that self. Similarly, the world I see and hear is present
to me without mediation. The meanings I constantly encounter seem
immediately present; it’s hard to see how the apparently simple
(spatial) here and (temporal) now of being in the world could be divided
or complicated.

Presence is implicit in Western philosophy’s reliance on reason, which
distinguishes sharply between what is present (now, here) and what is
absent (past or future, somewhere else), and searches for a pure origin
and secure ground for thought, summed up in the Greek word logos – hence
Derrida’s name for this way of thinking, logocentrism. If presence is
fundamental and inalienable, anything that threatens to complicate or
sully it must be regarded as secondary, derivative and regrettable. For
presence is a value; it is what is proper, proper to meaning, to
consciousness, to existence, but also good and correct (the French
propre carries a suggestion of cleanliness and purity). Derrida defines
the “metaphysics of presence” as “the enterprise of returning
‘strategically’, ‘ideally’, to an origin or to a priority thought to be
simple, intact, normal, pure, standard, self-identical, in order then to
think in terms of derivation, complication, deterioration, accident, etc”.

But what if presence were a fantasy, a product of our desires rather
than the way things are?
[...]

Derek Attridge is a Professor in the Department of English and Related
Literature at the University of York