Derrida’s critique of presence relies on a ‘myth of the given’ Sellars already refuted

Evidence

This move, while a legitimate response to contradictions internal to Saussurian theory, had the distinct attraction for Derrida of providing support for a philosophical critique of what he calls the metaphysics of presence, the doctrine that reality is directly given to the subject. For any attempt to halt the endless play of signifiers, above all by appealing to the concept of reference, must, he argues, involve postulating a ‘transcendental signified’ which is somehow present to consciousness without any discursive mediation. … Rejection of a (radicalized) Saussurian theory of meaning thus depends on what Wilfred Sellars called ‘the myth of the given’, of a parousia in which reality is immediately given to the subject. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 304

Categorization

• XREF: Connects Derrida’s anti-presence argument to Sellars’s ‘myth of the given’ — a surprising philosophical alliance that undercuts poststructuralism’s self-image. — connects to: Derrida systematically replaces logic with graphic across his conceptual vocabulary — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 719
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: whether Sellars’s critique of the given actually applies to Derrida’s transcendental signified argument, or whether Callinicos skates over a real disanalogy.