Vincent Kundukulam
A great number of thinkers have taken the gap between thought and its expressions as an interesting area of research. The general understanding among the Western metaphysicians was that man is able to make fully present what he is through varied forms of verbal articulations due to mainly two factors: there exists in man’s mind an absolute ground of reference for knowledge and a capacity to make real what s/he wishes to manifest.
According to the postmodern authors and especially to Jacques Derrida, the Cartesian claim that human mind is absolutely self-present in its expressions is impossible. He believes that there is a chasm between feeling and thought as well as thought and communication. He explains this impossibility of completely translating what is in mind into its manifestations through the example of the sight we get of the moon. When we look at moon in the sky, we think that we see it. But scientifically speaking, the picture of the moon we see at present is the moon that existed several minutes prior to our current perception. That means there is a temporal gap between the real one and the perceived one. In the similar manner, all perceptions grasp only a trace or an echo of the real. Thus, there is an unbridgeable gap between having a thought and registering it, and between experiencing a feeling and knowing it. On account of this break, the actual knowledge that we think to have, is imperfect. The process of registration depends on a complex network of various other elements within and outside the individual.
During modernity, a certain priority or privilege was accorded to speech over writing. The argument was that the speech directly expresses speaker’s thought as it is heard in the ‘head of the speaker’ whereas writing is exterior to one’s thought as it can function even in the absence of its producer. Speech immediately embodies thought while writing is merely a sign of speech. But Derrida shows that speech also expresses inadequately speakers’ intention and often the orator is forced to use other vocabularies in order to give clarity to his thought. The intent of author takes shape and becomes determinate in the speech under the guidance of many other elements. Meaning is determined from many directions by the context.
Derrida furnishes his views on the itinerary of meaning around the term called writing. To him, the linearity, univocity and the system of references which normally characterize the meaning of a term and assure the traditional safeguards of understanding are reworked until the dispersion of the signifier and signified. That means one can never say what a thing means. Meaning depends on factors of time and space. The difference in articulations constitutes the possibility of language. Derrida used a special term like ‘arche-writing’ or ‘originary writing’ to denote the archival character of thought. Writing is different from the mere recording of pure thought. He wanted to free up writing from its metaphysical interpretation.
Derrida’s thoughts on writing have significant epistemological consequences: he allows a review of the founding principles of linguistics, semiotics, hermeneutics, anthropology and other human sciences. He questions the edges that separate traditional literature and philosophy. For Derrida there is an irreducibility of literature to philosophy and the philosophy to art in general, and at the same time this irreducibility doesn’t help us to fix the boundaries determining the types and species of speech. Derridean definition of writing can be extended to the whole field of linguistic signs and paralinguistic communication.
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