Responses to Dominic Fox, discussion here.
[Dominic Fox]: “The Derrida quote is pivotal: I agree with him that mathematical writing belongs within a system of general writing, and that the “liberation” of mathematical inscription means breaking with phonologocentrism, which is why I think that mathematics is not “a language” but something like a foreign body or ur-prosthesis with respect to language.”
{AK}: “My conception of “language” is not restricted to what humans do.”
I often use the word, “language”, I guess, as a synonym for what Derrida calls the “grammatological”. In this sense, & following my own history of confrontations with what I always felt to be the overt & constrictive univocity of conventional usage, I’m going to continue with my own pattern of use. I’ve been well aware of “phono- & logo- centrism” for over 26 years, but I’m not aiming to repeat Derrida’s work, through substituting his initial analyses of the logocentric as a new centre of overt & constrictive univocity (“This is why it has never been a question of opposing a graphocentrism to a logocentrism, nor, in general, any center to any other center.”).
On the question of mathematics vs. Language, Derrida’s critique concerns particular -centric trends, under those disciplinary rubrics. It’s not a case of essentialised linguistic ‘badness’, & innate mathematical ‘goodness’. The determination of logo- or phono- centrism is not magically tied to the signifier “language”.
Would Derrida consider Joyce’s most polysemic or disseminatory adventure to be logo- or phono- centric, simply because it’s linguistic?
And if it was a case of Mathematics being the exemplar of centreless writing, why would he speak of its “renewal”, here: “The effective progress of mathematical notation thus goes along with the deconstruction of metaphysics, with the profound renewal of mathematics itself, and the concept of science for which mathematics has always been the model.”?
No ‘sign’ or ‘system’ is necessarily ‘logocentric’ in itself. The attribute of being logo- or phono- centric is always context-bound, not tied to an allegedly irreducible essence.