Closure, Decline, End

End and Closure

This, for me, is the main situation, horizon or context of thinking that we have named Heidegger/Derrida. I want to maintain that this is still the most radical position that 20th century Continental thought has attained in anticipating the end of metaphysics and mapping out its closure.
(Jussi Backman)

Obviously, closure doesn’t mean end. Western cultural history is not coming to a simple end but is moving into its closure (Abschluss, Auflösung). There will be many endings, also ends, like the end of being the only super-power, but some beginnings, too.

The world as the Ultimate Yellow Pages

In his 1989 essay “Heidegger’s Ear: Philopolemology,” Derrida very subtly studies Heidegger’s reading of Heraclitus and emphasizes that Heidegger retains from this fragment two features that could – even though Derrida does not say this out loud – be deemed “logocentric.” First of all, even in this “original” Heraclitean form, logos is something to be heard, a voice. The plenitude of auditory metaphors in the economy of Heidegger’s thinking is one of Derrida’s favorite deconstructive targets. Being as logos is something that is heard, something whose address needs listening to. (Jussi Backman)

Avital Ronell: Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech.
University of Nebraska Press. December 1989, 465 pp.

Logocentrism

What is “logocentrism?” It is, obviously, a certain approach to logos – discursivity, language, articulation of meaning, rationality. Derrida does not really define logocentrism but instead specifies its workings at the outset of Of Grammatology:
[…] what we will call logocentrism: the metaphysics of phonetic writing […] that has fundamentally been nothing […] but the most original and the most powerful ethnocentrism, […] commanding, within one and the same order,
1. the concept of writing where the phonetization of writing must disguise its own history in producing itself;
2. the history of metaphysics which […] has always attributed the origin of truth in general to the logos: the history of truth, of the truth of truth, has always been […]
abasement of writing and its repudiation outside “full” speech;
3. the concept of science or of the scientificity of science – which has always been determined as logical […]. (Jussi Backman)

Heidegger on logos

This, for Heidegger, is precisely the original Greek sense of logos, the original essence of reason, of rationality, of discursively articulate meaningfulness – originally understood not as some subjective faculty but as the very way in which meaningful reality in itself is articulated. This also allows him to call logos an original Greek name for Being, i.e., for the articulation of meaningfulness as such:
The Logos of which Heraclitus speaks is, as reading [Lese] and collection [Sammlung], as the One that unifies all, not a feature among beings. This Logos is the original gathering that preserves [verwahrt] beings as the beings that they are. This Logos is Being [Sein] itself, where all beings [das Seiende] hold sway [west].
In Heidegger’s reading, this original sense of logos is best captured by Heraclitus’ famous fragment 50:
“Having heard not me but discursive articulation [Logos] itself, it is well-advised [sophon] to go along with it and, in so doing, to articulate [homologein]: All is One [hen panta].”

http://www.helsinki.fi/filosofia/tutkijaseminaari/backman.doc
http://www.medienwissenschaft.hu-berlin.de/theorien/skripte/pader2.200406.pdf