Abstract
The notion of trace has taken on a central role in contemporary philosophy and religious thought, bringing it to the fore in the understanding of both the living present and language. Traces are constitutive of signs in the same way that the protentions and retentions as traces are constitutive of the living present. And the different understandings by various thinkers of the role of traces in the living present demand different understandings of the role of trace in signs. Thus Derrida’s view of trace in relation to the living present and to sign will be found to differ essentially from the shared view presented by Mead’s pragmatic and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological perspective, in accordance with their different understandings of the constitution of the living present. In clarifying this relation, however, it will prove beneficial for the sake of clarity to procede, at least initially, from trace in signs to trace in the living present which governs the former.
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Notes
See especially John Caputo, “The Economy of Signs in Husserl and Derrida: From Uselessness to Full Employment,” in Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida ed. John Sallis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 103–104
Paul Ricoeur, “Husserl and Wittgenstein on Language,” in Phenomenology and Existentialism, eds. Edward N. Lee and Maurice Mandelbaum (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), esp. pp. 212 and 216–217.
John Caputo, “The Economy of Signs in Husserl and Derrida,” p. 103.
Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 19.
Ibid., pp. 26–27.
Ibid., p. 33.
Hilary Lawson, Reflexivity: The Post-modern Predicament (La Salle: Open Court, 1985), p. 100.
Rodolphe Gasche, “Infrastructures and Systematicity,” in Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida, pp. 11–12.
John Caputo, “The Economy of Signs in Husserl and Derrida,” p. 105.
Rodolphe Gasche, “Infrastructures and Systematicity,” p. 12.
“The expressions “green is or” and “abracadabra” are not “isolations of this structure and hence a welcome liberation from the rule of intuitionism, a liberation which is in fact made possible by the reduction of the rules of a priori grammar.... This reduction... liberates the signifier from the oppressive regime of intuitionism and its unfair demand that every signifier leads to Being, presence, objectivity, even when such demands cannot be met. Intuitionism exacts a tax which no one can pay.” John Caputo, “The Economy of Signs in Husserl and Derrida,” p. 105.
Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen Blarney and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), Vol. III, p. 26.
Ibid..
Derrida considers Husserl’s view of this instant as a point to be a pivotal concept for his phenomenology, as he says: “we cannot avoid noting that a certain concept of the ‘now,’ of the present as punctuality of the instant, discretely but decisively sanctions the whole system of ‘essential distinctions’.... This spread is nonetheless thought and described on the basis of the self-identity of the now as point, as a ‘source-point’.” Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays of Husserl’s Theory of Signsy trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 65.
Although Derrida exploits this latent tension within Husserl’s account between the “instant as a point” Ibid., p. 60 and the thickness and depth of the present, he is aware that, in spite of this tension, Husserl himself is explicitly convinced that no “now” can be isolated as a pure instant, a pure punctuality. Ibid., pp. 61–62.
Ibid., pp. 64–65.
Ibid., p. 65.
Ibid., p. 65.
Ibid., p. 64.
Ibid., p. 65. It is to be noted that this is not the “point” now, which, even for Derrida, has not lost its identity.
Ibid., p. 66.
Ibid., p. 60.
Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. III, p. 28.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 69.
Jacques Derrida, Positions, p. 28.
Ibid., p. 66.
Ibid., p. 142.
Ibid., p. 85.
Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, pp. 86.
Ibid., p. 142.
Ibid., p. 147.
Ibid., p. 147.
Ibid., p. 66.
Ibid., p. 146.
Derrida, Grammatology, p. 65.
George Herbert Mead, The Philosophy of the Present, ed. Arthur Murphy (La Salle, Illinois: The Open Court Publishing Co., 1959), p. 11.
George Herbert Mead, The Philosophy of the Act, ed. Charles Morris (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1936), pp. 333–335.
The Philosophy of the Present, p. 49. Mead’s technical term for this is “sociality”, which need not be utilized for the present purposes.
George Herbert Mead, “The Nature of the Past”, Mead: Selected Writings, ed. Andrew Reck (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc., 1964), p. 350.
Mead exemplifies the specious present in his analysis of the flight of a bird: “There is not only the flight of a bird before the individual but also the marking to the individual of the separate positions of the bird within his so-called apperceptive grasp. Such a set of indications to himself, which marked the limits of the immediate change in his experience, is the so-called specious present.... The limits of this span are uncertain because it so connects with the coming experience that there is no break in the temporal continuity, and because the passing experience goes over into memory imagery so imperceptibly that with difficulty he draws the line between them. The Philosophy of the Act, pp. 65–66.
The Philosophy of the Act, p. 331.
George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self and Society, ed. Charles Morris (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1934), p. 351.
Ibid., p. 174.
Ibid., p. 176.
The Philosophy of the Present, p. 13.
The Philosophy of the Present, pp. 87–88.
The Philosophy of the Present, p. 88.
The Philosophy of the Act, p. 65.
The Philosophy of the Act, ed. Charles Morris (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1938), pp. 135–136.
Ibid., p. 90, ftn. 20.
Mind, Self and Society, p. 79.
Mind, Self and Society, pp. 11–14.
Ibid., p. 97.
The Philosophy of the Act, p. 518.
Mind, Self and Society, p. 283.
Ibid., p. 433.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), p. 419.
Ibid., p. 424.
Ibid., p. 418.
Ibid., p. 415.
Ibid., pp. 420–421.
Ibid., p. 419.
Merleau-Ponty gives his own twist of interpretation to phenomenological terms, making them existential structures of experience, while he adamantly rejects any transcendental element throughout his Phenomenology of Perception, just as he has done at the end of The Structure of Behavior, cf. p. 224, trans, by Alden Fisher (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963). It is precisely this existential turn of phenomenology, with its inclusion of the practical and affective dimensions of intentional corporeal existence, which makes a link possible between his brand of phenomenology and the pragmatism of Mead. Such a link is not possible between Mead and Husserlian transcendental phenomenology.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 419.
Ibid. “Temporality temporalizes itself as future — which lapses into-the-past-by-coming-into-the-present” (Ibid., p. 420); Merleau-Ponty quoting Heidegger, Sien und Zeit, p. 350.
Ibid., p. 421.
Ibid., p. 421.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 186.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “On the Phenomenology of Language,” in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 88.
Merleau-Ponty, “On the Phenomenology of Language,” Signs, p. 86. He states: “As soon as we distinguish alongside of the objective science of language, a phenomenology of speech, we set in motion a dialectic through which the two disciplines open communications.” Ibid.
Merleau-Ponty, “On the Phenomenology of Language,” p. 89.
This is a paraphrase of Martin Dillon: “The words make sense only when the words make sense.” Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 218.
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Bourgeois, P.L., Rosenthal, S.B. (1996). Contemporary Perspectives and the Functioning of Trace. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Life in the Glory of Its Radiating Manifestations. Analecta Husserliana, vol 48. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1602-9_7
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