A central premise of deconstruction is that all of Western literature and philosophy implicitly relies on a metaphysics of presence,1213 where intrinsic meaning is accessible by virtue of
pure presence.1415 Deconstruction denies the possibility of a pure presence and thus of essential or intrinsic and stable meaning — and thus a relinquishment of the notions of absolute
truth, unmediated access to "
reality" and consequently of conceptual hierarchy. "From the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs."Language, considered as a system of signs, as Ferdinand de Saussure says,24 is nothing but differences.
Words have meaning only because of contrast-effects with other
words. 'Red' means what it does only by contrast with 'blue', '
green', etc. 'Being' also means nothing except by contrast, not only with 'beings' but with 'Nature', '
God', '
Humanity', and
indeed every other word in the language. No word can acquire meaning in the way in which philosophers from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell have hoped it might—by being the unmediated expression of something non-linguistic (e.g., an emotion, a sense-datum, a physical object, an idea, a Platonic Form).25 Derrida terms logocentrism the philosophical commitment to pure, unmediated, presence as a source of self-sufficient meaning.
