Logocentrism is a key term in deconstruction; it argues that there is a persistent but morbid centering of Logos (meaning thought, truth, law, reason, logic, word, and the Word) in Western thought since Plato. Putting Logos at the center of discourse gives it an unquestioned status of priority and privilege—a maneuver sometimes extended to a privileging of the male order in the form of “phallogocentrism.” Jonathan Culler, following Jacques Derrida, defines logocentrism as “the orientation of philosophy toward an order of meaning… conceived as existing in itself, as foundation.” Logocentrism is the fundamental error of mistaking what is an arbitrary and artificial construct for a verifiable event. (Handbook to Literature)
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Sources
The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present
A Handbook to Literature
“Cogito et Histoire de la Folie.” Jacques Derrida.
Cognitive Neuropsychology Section, Laboratory of Brain and Cognition.
Eats Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
The Elements of Style.
New Oxford American Dictionary
The Norton Anthology of World Literature
The Norton Introduction to Philosophy
Woe is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English
Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft
Writing the Other
