Let’s begin at the beginning - but remember, Derrida would already raise an eyebrow at that. Beginnings are always suspicious. They claim to stand outside the system they inaugurate, offering themselves up as origin, foundation, truth. But what if the beginning is already contaminated, already written, already deferred?
Welcome to the metaphysics of presence - Western thought’s love affair with immediacy, origin, and self-identity. From Plato to Rousseau to Husserl to Heidegger (and many in between), there’s been a deep, if rarely confessed, belief that presence - of thought, of being, of the speaker - secures meaning. That when someone says what they mean, and means what they say, something pure happens: the self, transparent and fully present to itself, speaks the truth.
This is what Derrida calls logocentrism: the philosophical (and cultural) tendency to center meaning on some foundational logos - be it reason, God, consciousness, the subject, or speech itself. Logos means “word,” but also “reason” and “order.” Logocentrism assumes there must be a final authority grounding things: a center that is not itself deconstructible. But that’s the trick. Deconstruction shows us that this center is a fantasy that the whole system depends on but cannot contain.
Now let’s take a detour - or rather, let’s follow Derrida into one of his many careful, chaotic passages. In Of Grammatology, he takes on phonocentrism, the belief that speech is the most direct route to meaning. Why? Because the speaker is present when they speak. The voice seems to carry intention unmediated by distance, delay, or distortion. Writing, by contrast, is exiled from this Eden. It is seen as mere representation, derivative, secondary.
But what if speech is not as innocent as it sounds? What if it too is structured by absence, by repetition, by difference? Derrida argues that even speech, even the voice, is not self-contained. Meaning depends on systems of signs - and signs work only by differing from other signs. There is no “pure” moment of meaning that isn’t already caught up in a web of differences. And every sign, to be understood, must be repeatable, iterable - able to be detached from its origin. Even when I speak to you now, dear reader (yes, you), my words arrive long after their departure.
So, where does that leave us?
It leaves us with a textual world, not in the literary sense, but in the sense that everything - speech, writing, thought, even being - is mediated. There is no outside-the-text, Derrida provocatively declares. Not because the world doesn’t exist, but because meaning doesn’t appear without mediation, structure, spacing, and - yes - absence.
So let us laugh, gently, at the philosopher who insists that their concepts “speak for themselves,” or who believes they’ve reached a final ground. Derrida teaches us that the ground is always shifting, that the center is a trace, that presence is a seductive illusion propped up by the very differences it tries to hide.
If we listen closely - not just to what texts say, but to what they must repress in order to say it - we begin to hear something else. A rustling. A ghost. A voice that is both there and not-there. Welcome to deconstruction.
And don't worry: you're not late. Meaning always arrives after it’s too late to be present.
