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remained "the most Kantian of thinkers" (161). But even though Rorty prudently puts Peirce at the margins of such a kind of pragmatism, he puts deconstruction and Derrida within its boundaries. And it is exactly Derrida who summons Peirce. |
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In the second chapter of his Grammatology, Derrida looks for authorities able to legitimize his attempt to outline a semiosis of infinite play, of difference, of the infinite whirl of interpretation. Among the authors he quotes after Saussure and Jakobson, there is also Peirce. Derrida finds a series of fascinating passages according to which, for Peirce, symbols (here taken as equivalent to Saussurean signs) grow: |
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In his project of semiotics, Peirce seems to have been more attentive than Saussure to the irreducibility of this becoming-unmotivated. In his terminology, one must speak of a becoming-unmotivated of the symbol, the notion of the symbol playing here a role analogous to that of the sign which Saussure opposes precisely to the symbol. . . . |
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. . . Peirce complies with two apparently incompatible exigencies. The mistake here would be to sacrifice one for the other. It must be recognized that the symbolic (in Peirce's sense: of "the arbitrariness of the sign") is rooted in the nonsymbolic, in an anterior and related order of signification: "Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other signs, particularly from icons, or from mixed signs." But these roots must not compromise the structural originality of the field of symbols, the autonomy of a domain, a production, and a play: ''So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol can grow. Omne symbolum de symbolo." (Of Grammatology, Eng. tr., 48) |
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In another passage Derrida finds that pure rhetoric, the third branch of semiotics, "has the task to ascertain the laws by which in every scientific intelligence one sign gives birth to another" (49). Derrida can therefore conclude: |
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Peirce goes very far in the direction that I have called the de-construction of the transcendental signified, which, at one time or another, would place a reassuring end to the reference from sign to sign. I have identified logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence as the exigent, powerful, systematic, and irrepressible desire for such a signified. Now Peirce considers the indefiniteness of reference as the criterion that allows us to recognize that we are indeed dealing with a system of signs. What broaches the movement of signification is what makes its interruption impossible. The thing itself is a sign. An unacceptable proposition for Husserl, whose phenomenology remains thereforein its "principle of principles"the most radi- |
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