The Myth of Presence

In reading logos as presence, it would be a mistake to interpret mythos, or any silences, as simple absences. Mythos follows a different structure of logic entirely: an aporetic structure.

Myth is ontologically formed of the existential play of difference between presence and absence, which exists in the absence of a transcen­dental signified (logos) and cannot be contained by the philosophical tradi­tion. Building upon the Platonian understanding of myth as neither true nor false, mythos cannot be encompassed within an enclosed conceptual framework. In this respect, mythos in terms of presence/absence resem­bles Yanow’s structure of the mythic as two incommensurable principles. This structure provides us with an analytically useful tool, yet contrary to Yanow’s theory, presence/absence cannot be resolved or otherwise cease to be mythos. Such play is undecidable and limitless (Derrida 1997, 50). Instead, resolution is deflected onto more play and more myth.

This deflection, or evasion, of meaning resembles Derridean difference, in which plenitudinous meaning is eternally deferred in its difference to other signifiers and so on ad infinitum. Just as Sisyphus was eternally cursed to almost reach the pinnacle of the mountain only to see the rock roll back down, so must any definition appeal to other words from which it differs, and begin its labour of defining anew.

This means that any definition is never absolute—that definition is myth and must succumb to the logic of the supplement.

The first and most immediate implication is to demonstrate that the foundation of logos is mythos. Counter to the Hegelian dialectic, which homogenises differences into a unified force, myths present a dialectic without synthesis. Mythos cannot form a univocal foundation but is rather plurivocal. It presents an inexhaustible alterity with which logos and phi­losophy can construct their identities, which grants them presence but also signifies their infinite lack or absence through the logic of supple­ment. The simultaneous excess and absence provides a non-foundational foundation, and establishes possibility out of its very impossibility (Spitzer 2011, 66-8).

Mythos therefore acts as the trace, which is the mark or imprint of absence that haunts presence, as the undecidable otherness that haunts logos. As ‘the unheard difference’ of the trace, mythos acts as ‘the difference which opens appearance and signification’ (Derrida 1997, 65). But this means that ‘the trace is not only the disappearance of the origin’, but that the origin ‘was never constituted except reciprocally by a non-origin, the trace’ (Derrida 1997, 61).

This shows how the inversion of the logos/mythos dichotomy at the expense of l ogos, in search of an alternative foundation, is as absurd as logocentrism.

Mythos makes both logos possible and its absolute hegemony impossible. Yet to achieve this, the trace of mythos also effaces itself, becoming silent and tacit. Derrida refers to metaphysics as a ‘white mythology’, which has ‘effaced in itself that fabulous scene which brought it into being’, by which he refers to difference as the trace which remains ‘active and stir­ring, inscribed in white ink’ (Derrida 1974, 11).

The second implication directly concerns epistemology and knowl­edge production. Yanow (1992, 403) conveniently highlights how myths ‘direct attention toward what can be known’. But as we have seen in the (non-)foundation to logos, as well as the enabling difference which is able to produce (the myth of) definition, to know is to mythologise. The estab­lishment of epistemic presence in the form of truths, facts, or definitions can never be fully realised. These forms of knowledge serve to mask the underlying and incommensurable tension of ontology. There is also no ‘tacit’ knowledge, in Yanow’s sense, as an underlying truth that is not already always itself a myth because it remains underpinned by mythos. As such, frameworks of knowledge such as paradigms or ideologies signify an intertextuality of myths along a mythographical sign-chain. Myths, there­fore, act as the silent conditions for our logocentric reality, enabling the potential expansion of myth analysis to all forms of knowledge.

This, however, produces its own more practical problems.

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 (Derrida 1997, 112).

In rupturing the infinite play of difference, this first violence gives birth to finite speech as no longer endless. To decide is an ontological violence, establishing discursive coherence, which inevitably excludes the Other ( mythos)—like the transcendental signified, placing ‘a reassuring end to the reference from sign to sign’, thereby achieving a closure (cloture) of metaphysics and founding ‘the origin and end of its study in presence’ (Derrida 1997, 49; Spivak 1997, xli). More than a simple ‘temporal finishing-point of metaphysics’, Spivak (1997, xx) argues, ‘[i]t is also the metaphysical desire to make the end coincide with the means, create an en-closure, make the definition coincide with the defined’. In this respect, myth is decision, as the point of resolution and self-effacement.

The metaphysical act of ‘the decision’ remains, nevertheless, deeply necessary. Undermining the basis of knowledge also carries implications

for all things in relation to the sign, including speech.

From a mythographical perspective, however, although myth is deci­sion, it remains equally important to assert decision is myth. Spitzer reminds us that ‘closure is impossible, since undertaking it always unwit­tingly dis-closes’ (Spitzer 2011, 78). The rupture (re)creates an opening through its finity. As Derrida argues, ‘this field is in effect that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite...there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions’ (Derrida 2005, 365). The non-central centre is the trace. As the metaphysical Other and non-foundational foundation, it exemplifies the undecidable in any decision as the fundamental elusion which consti­tutes our illusion that cannot be wholly arrested or excluded: ‘One could say.this movement of play, permitted by the lack or absence of a center or origin, is the movement of supplementarity’ (Derrida 2005, 365).

Our third implication, therefore, is to draw comparisons between this meta-mythography and other forms of the trace, such as writing and metaphor. Even a fairly traditional mythologist such as Campbell has made such a connection, analysing myth as a composition of metaphori­cal language (Campbell 2002). In Ricrcur’s The Rule of Metaphor, meta­phor is understood as a ‘trope of resemblance’.

The metaphorical is antipodal to the literal, but the function of met­aphor reinforces the privilege of the logos. Parallel to the relationship between myth and metaphysics, the metaphor is the non-foundational foundation of writing. As Derrida (1974, 60) writes that ‘it is not so much that metaphor is in the text.rather these texts are in metaphor’. In this sense, metaphor forms an Other language and is, similarly, ‘not, there­fore, a matter of inverting the literal meaning and the figurative mean­ing but of determining the “literal” meaning of writing as metaphoricity itself’ (Derrida 1997, 15). All forms of language are metaphor in one form or another as translation, such as translating a non-philosopheme (or mytheme) into a philosopheme, or how the sign seeks to translate the signified. But even the signified itself is never fully present or immediate ‘as the sign is always the supplement to the thing itself’ (Derrida 1997, 145). As will be seen in the following section, neither writing nor mythos conform to logocentric forms but find metatheoretical overlap in the form of the pharmakon.