Book Title: Sambodhi 1989 Vol 16
Author(s): Ramesh S Betai, Yajneshwar S Shastri
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

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Page 123
________________ 114 Phonocentrism : Phonocentrism privileges speech over writing. The binary hierarchical opposition speech/writing implies that writing is external, contingent, secondary, derivative, degrading, deviant and corrupt, while speech is primary and valuable because it symbolizes experience, origin, self-presence and self-contained meaning. Thus phonetic writing has valuc only because it follows speech. Derrida deconstructs such an opposition firstly by reversing the hierarchy and secondly by displacing and dislocating the system that sustains such an opposition. Derrida uises 'writing in its standard sense and 'writing' in its special sense. In its special sense writing as archewriting (“Urschrift" in German) is prior to speech and writing, is subjectless, is anonymous and leaves its traces. The archewriting is the "subjectless generator of structures". Whether they are phonemes or graphemes, "all linguistic expressions arc to a certain extent set in operation by an archewriting not itself present."98 In a certain sense Radliakrishnan's intuitionism and his Śrutivada illustrate what Derrida has characterized as phonocentrism. For example Radhakrishnan finds the concept of the logos as analogous to the Vedic Vāc. Of course, an Indian philosophical history of the concept of writing in Derrida's grammatological sense has yet to be written and till then it is difficult to say whicther the Indian philosophers have subscribed to the same implications of the hierarchichal opposition speech writing, highlighted by Derrida with reference to the Western thought. VT Metaphysics of Presence : We find in Radhakrishnan's intuitionism, absolutism and mysticism a foundational metaphysics of presence. For Radhakrishnan, the gap between truth and Beng is closed in the direct apprehension of Being, Svatahsiddha Svasam vedya and Svayam-prakas'a are the terms used by Radhakrishnan which illustrate the Derridean thematics of presence. According to Radhakrishnan, Buddha, Plato, Christ, Eckhart, Blake, etc. spoke of the real not as scribes but as those who were in immediate presence of the Supreme Being, Radhakrishnan's theory of religious experience is a logocentric theory of presence,

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