데리다의 은유론 - 명사중심주의와 태양중심주의의 해체

• 영문명: Derrida"s Metaphorology: Deconstruction of Onomatism and Heliotrope
• 발행기관: 한국비평이론학회
• 저자명: 윤일환(Ilhwan Yoon)
• 간행물 정보: 『비평과 이론』제12권 2호, 57~83쪽, 전체 27쪽
• 주제분류: 어문학 > 영어와문학
• 파일형태: PDF
• 발행일자: 2007.12.30

영문 초록

  "White Mythology" offers a lengthy, detailed, and a meticulously argued account of the role of metaphor in various texts of the Western philosophical tradition from Aristotle to Gaston Bachelard. But one would be misguided if one took the text as an essay about the deconstruction of philosophy with a nonargumentative, literary, and metaphoric play. The text is not primarily concerned with metaphor but with the difference and its economy between metaphor and concept. In "White Mythology," Derrida examines the general metaphoricity that allows metaphor and concept to relate to one another and organizes the exchanges that take place between them.
  In the first section of "White Mythology," Derrida inquires the position of etymological empiricism which believes that philosophy is full of metaphors, figural expressions that were once recognized as such and vivid but were then literalized, transformed into abstract concepts, and hence became blanched or erased into a kind of subliminal white mythology. But, as Derrrida shows, there are at least two limits in the etymologism: it supposes a purity of sensory language which is deflowered and deteriorated by the history of the concept; it interprets degradation as the gradual passage without any irruptions from the physical to the metaphysical. What the etymological and empirical approaches cannot hope to account for is that the supposed purity of sensory language does not escape the chain and system of differences.
  After showing the limits in etymological empiricism, Derrida turns to Aristotle"s theory of metaphor because Aristotle has proposed the first systematic situating of it and has been retained as such with the most powerful historical effects. Derrida examines the way that in Aristotle"s theory, metaphor figures as a detour on the path to a reappropriation of literal and self-present truth. What guides Aristotelian theory is the idea of language as aspiration to a perfect structural homology between word, idea, and referent such that the noun would provide an anchor point for the process of signification. Derrida then discusses the heliotrope of Aristotle who takes the sun as the paradigm of the sensory and of metaphor, as the self-presence of the idea in its own light. The heliotrope is the dream at the heart of Aristotle"s philosophy that reappropriates a full language without syntax, and with the vocation of a pure nomination.
  Derrida questions such the ideas as onomatism and heliotrope, because they have to be inscribed in the chain and system of differences in order for them to be as they are. If the proper name of the sun can give rise to heliotropic metaphors and can be said to "sow" its flame, then its name is no longer the proper name of a unique thing which metaphor would overtake; it already has begun to say the multiple, divided origin of all seeds. Supplementarity is nothing but the infrastructure that systemizes the possibility of contamination in the origin. Derrida illustrates the movement of supplementarity by turning to the Fontanier"s catachresis. What he ultimately tries to demonstrate is how "the defining tropes," in a catachrestic movement, give birth to the concept and its counterpart metaphor. It is Derrida"s metaphorology as "the defining tropes" that enables metaphor and concept to come into existence in the first place and to enter into a relation, and thence to indulge in a mutual exchange.

키워드

은유 백색신화 명사중심주의 태양중심주의 고유성 데리다 아리스토텔레스 시학 남유 metaphor White Mythology onomatism heliotrope Properness Derrida Aristotle poetics catachresis