French philosopher Derrida, Jacques’s term, now widely used, for what he sees as a pervasive form of idealism in language philosophy which assumes that neither speech nor writing can be thought without first of all presupposing an abstract and idealized notion of language which actual speech and writing imperfectly represent. Derived from the Greek word ‘logos’ meaning ‘word’ in the sense of the word of God or some other authority, logocentrism names a tendency in philosophy to suppose that there must be some kind of ultimate authority guaranteeing the meaning of language. When Barthes, Roland writes of the death of the author, it is precisely the death of this logocentric notion of language that he is referring to. In the little collection of interviews, Positions (1972), translated as Positions (1981), Derrida states that logocentrism is the principal focus of the reading strategy he developed, namely deconstruction, for which he is best known. For Derrida, particularly in his earlier work, the most pernicious symptom of logocentrism is the widespread privileging of speech over writing in philosophy, usually taking the form of the assumption that writing is secondary or parasitical to speech. longue durée A term that literally means ‘long duration’ introduced by the French historian Braudel, Fernand. It is a standard term of reference in the work of the Annales School, which Braudel helped to establish. It is used to indicate a perspective on history that extends further into the past than both human memory and the archaeological record so as to incorporate climatology, demography, geology, and oceanology, and chart the effects of events that occur so slowly as to be imperceptible to those who experience them, such as the changing nature of the planet or the steady increase in population in a particular area.