Precisely this, is the nature of Jacques Derrida's attempt to deconstruct the Logos (an attempt labeled "shattering the Logos" or even "crucifying the Logos"):
Deconstruction endeavours [sic] to show the operation of logocentrism in all its forms, and to show that the transcendental signifieds are constructed within the province of language and textuality in relation to other concepts. Such concepts move from being a reality beyond language to concepts within language. They become discourses. By virtue of the Derridean concept of differance, meanings become infinitely elusive as they differ and defer in an endless chain of signification, moving from one signifier to another, giving rise to innumerable meanings in the “traces” that are left between signifiers, without ever reaching an absolute signified, thereby deconstructing the myth of the absolute “transcendental signified.”
Mambrol's statement pierces the right side or heart of the Logos and logocentrism in the important sense that Judaism posits the written word as preeminent or antecedent to the spoken word so far as closeness to God is concerned. More than that, the written word doesn't point to some invisible reality, ontology, transcendental signified, or signifier; in its antecedence and preeminence it produces, whether through adulteration or not, the very chain of meaning that since it's endless, produces meaning
without ever reaching an absolute signified.
The tendency to gather various meanings into a one is, as we have seen, characteristic of Greek though in general: it's movement towards the universal, the general, the univocal. The Rabbinic tendency, by contrast, is towards differentiation, metaphorical multiplicity, multiple meaning. . . there is no confinement of meaning within the ontology of substance. (This liberation from ontology of substance is, of course, precisely Derrida's intent).
Susan A. Handelman, The Slayers of Moses, p. 33.
Since Derrida's endless production of meaning has no end, and thus no transcendental, teleological, beginning:
Reading and interpreting as an endless horizontal sequence of knowing-by-part can never render the simultaneous whole prescence that Augustine seeks. Because language cannot express this essence of perfect sameness, and because there is such an irremediable gap between this simultaneous apprehension of truth and man's nature, the incarnation becomes the bridge of an otherwise unfahomable abyss. God descends into human language, into human time and history: the word becomes flesh. And this doctrine becomes the only possible escape from man's exile into langauge. Jesus is the esential link between signifier and signified because with the doctrine of the incarnation the substance and its representation are one and the same.
Ibid. p. 120.
Add to this Boyarin:
Christian theories of the Logos in flesh seem better equipped to address this issue. For Christians, the magic language [able to express perfect sameness of sign and signified] has appeared on earth and spoken itself, thus answering to Philo's aporia. The prologue to the Gospel of John makes this point in its utterance that through the Torah it had proved impossible to communicate Logos to humans and that only through the Logos's actual taking on of human flesh was God made knowable to the people.
Daniel Boyarin, The Word and Allegory; or, Origen on the Jewish Question (bracket mine).
None of this seems to dent the invincible virtue of the Jewish understanding that even if a transcendental signifier makes great sense, nevertheless, finding, labeling, or worshipping, some transcendental signifier is just as likely to be the worship of a devil, a chimera, or a
doppelgänger of the transcendental signifier, as it is to have somehow found the real deal. The latter appears impossible.
Derrida's claims are doubtless true for the Christian tradition. What we have stressed as unique about Rabbinic thought, however, is its escape from precisely this Greco-Christian ontotheological mode of thinking. Writing, the Holy Text, is the privileged term in Rabbinic thought; it not only precedes speech, but precedes the entire natural world. Rabbinic thought does not move from the sensible to the ideal transcendent signified, but from the sensible to the Text. And that is Derrida's path as well, a movement from ontology to grammatology, from Being to Text.
Susan A. Handelman, The Slayers of Moses, p. 168.
A paragraph later, Handelman begins the passion-ed description of a non-Jewish ideology that in context has elevated an idol, a
doppelgänger, as it were, as though it, he, and not the Torah scroll, lied, originally, in the bosom of the Father:
Derrida's analysis is especially intriguing because he shows the persistence of this ontotheology even in the likes of such as Saussure. Writing is seen not merely as exterior, but as a threatening exterior from which spoken language must be protected, a corrupt menace that can erupt and disrupt the self-enclosed interiority of the soul. "Saussure," Derrida tells us, "sees writing as perversion, debauchery, dress of corruption and disguise, a festival mask that must be exorcised, i.e., warded off by the good word," even as "original sin."
Ibid.
Derrida equating Saussure's "written word" with the "original sin" almost seems to justify Saussure in the sense of the written word coming (so to say) precisely from what the "pen-is" that first writes Cain into the world as the poster-child of the fall, as well as being the first word, the original word, associated with the fall from (out of) a paradise existing prior to what the pen-is, and what comes to be when what the pen-is, and what it produces, is considered antecedent and preeminent to any previous set of affairs (so to say). For those who defend grammatology against the logos, what the pen-is, is fancied having written the scroll lying there in the bosom of the Father as the schematic for the world. The Father's writing-device (what his pen-is) is pictured uncut, unscathed, unmarked, or remarked on, having, in that natural, pristine state, written the words from which the world will emanate.
Derrida is a vigorous polemicist, adept at contorting the arguments of others to fit his own needs, but his particular ironic use of passages and adjectives to characterize negative attitudes toward writing is curious:
Ibid.
What comes out of, or after, the colon (so to say), seems like a fitting parallel to the thinking that took place when the Christian Logos was put on trial for the same foul Derrida is about to give an impassioned account of (i.e., negative attitudes toward writing, deriding the very writing ---with what the pen is ---that purports to produce the world without first producing some first, or original, sin).
. . . "the perverse cult of the letter-image," "the sin of idolatry," "perversion that engenders monsters," "deviation from nature," "principle of death," "deformation, sacrilege, crime," "the wandering outcast of linguistics," "expatriated, condemned to wandering and blindness, to mourning," "expelled other." The descriptions are overtly theological, and the logos described as the "historical violence of speech dreaming its full self-presence, living itself as its own resumption. . . . auto-production of a speech declared alive . . . a logos which believes itself to be its own father, being lifted above written discourse," is obviously the Christian logos, the son dreaming himself to be his own father, born into the flesh and elevated above all texts and written discourses. And that exiled, wandering, mourning, condemned outcast, accused of unredeemed original sin, is the Jew, the carrier of the letter, the cultist of Writing.
Ibid. p. 169.
John
