/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.16029730]

>[Writing] seems to favor rather the exploitation than the enlightenment of mankind. … Writing, on this its first appearance in their midst, had allied itself with falsehood. – Tristes Tropiques --
wrote Lévi-Strauss about the Nambikwara, “the little bands of nomads who are among the most genuinely ‘primitive’ of the world’s peoples” on “a territory the size of France”.

The despising of writing, evinced in Lévi-Strauss, Rousseau and many other ethnographers and writers, coupled to the idealization of illiterate peoples turns around this same ethnocentric conception. Communities without (narrow) writing become an "ethnocentric reverie" dependent upon an ethnocentric (mis)conception of writing.

Proper names were taboo, among the Nambikwara: they may not be spoken.
Derrida picks this up to argue for his conception of arche-writing, the writing always already inhering to speech and language. IF we do not consider writing in its restricted sense -- linear and phonetic notation -- we understand how
>from the moment that the proper name is erased in a system, there is writing, there is a “subject” from the moment the obliteration of the proper is produced, that is to say from the first appearing of the proper and from the first dawn of language. This proposition is universal in essence and can be produced a priori.

Derrida considers this prohibition as a derivation vis-à-vis the founding erasure of the proper name in arche-écriture, in the game of difference. All communities that produce proper names bring classificatory difference into play

Derrida's famed argument states that language does not get violence exerted upon it from the outside - speech by writing. Rather, language is violent in and of itself. Language is already already a writing, and violence is not derived -- contra Claude Levi-Strauss -- from writing vis-à-vis natural innocent speech. The proper name was possible only by functioning within a classification, a system of differences, and the prohibition was possible only through this system, as was its transgression.

>To name, to give names that it will on occasion be forbidden to pronounce, such is the originary violence of language which consists in inscribing within a difference, in classifying, in suspending the vocative absolute.
>To think the unique within the system, to inscribe it there, such is the gesture of the arche-writing: arche-violence, loss of the proper, of absolute proximity, of self-presence, in truth the loss of what has never taken place, of a self presence which has never been given but only dreamed of and always already split, repeated, incapable of appearing to itself except in its own disappearance.

The metaphysics or onto-theology of the logos elides the originary writing within language, "as the irreducibility of metaphor". Onto-theology attempts to "master absence by reducing the metaphor within the absolute parousia (presence) of sense".