Post Structuralism and Derrida

 

Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of a Human Science‟ was a lecture presented at a conference titled “The Language of Criticism and the Science of Man” held at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA in 1966, which was published in 1967.

 

Derrida begins his text with a reference to a recent event in the history of the concept of structure. He is concerned that the word “event” is too loaded with meaning. He calls the history of the concept of structure as "event".

 The event evolves changes in structuralism, precisely in structure and the structurality of structure. Derrida is concerned that the word event is also loaded with meaning. This event is now identified as rapture and redoubling. 

It is believed that every event of the history consists structure and the structure has center. The function of the center is not orient, balance and organize the structure , but also to resist the doubts raised by the orienting and organized coherence of the system. 

The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center. The concept of centered structure—although it represents coherence itself, the condition of the epistémé as philosophy or science—is contradictorily coherent.

 The concept of structure can be read as a series of substitutions of centre for centre, of a chain of determinations of the center. Since the centre needed to be both in the structure (part of it), and yet out. The different ways of describing or determining the centre through which the philosophical structure gained its coherence and freeplay .

According to Derrida,  structure has always been neutralised or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a centre or referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin” all structures or systems oriented themselves through a centre, a moment at which the substitution of elements ceased, something that fixed or held the structure in place.

Further ,  Derrida gives the example of famous French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. From his text , Derrida discusses the opposition between nature and culture, which is a very old opposition even before Plato. A whole historical chain exists which opposes nature to law, to education, to art, to history and soon. In his book „The Elementary Structure of Kinship‟ he discusses the matter, where he tries to differentiate the natural and cultural.

On the other hand, Derrida brings the idea of bricolage, a discourse of method which affirms that it utilizes those instruments which already exist and which had not been specially conceived. So bricolage is cultural language itself that is being applied in literary criticism. One does not devise terms, engineer of a language is a myth, one inherits them from treasure. In his book "The Savage Mind" he describes bricolage not only an intellectual activity but also a mythopoetical one.

By explaining the criticality of structure, Derrida points out that Nietzsche is the critique of being and truth and Freud is the critique of self-presence, consciousness, self-identity, Heidegger is the critique of radical destruction of metaphysics. Here Derrida states that it is impossible to destroy a concept without using it. 

Derrida speaks about reciprocal destruction, that the destroyer allows destroying each other reciprocally.

As he said, there is no sense in doing without the concept of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics, like ( thorn should be taken out from thorn itself)  sign must signify something, once the signified is eliminated, the notion of signs must be rejected. 

That is to say, when everything became a system where the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the interplay of signification ad infinitum.

 In a way Deconstruction aims at liberating language from the traditional concept of text along with the ways of dealing with it , because structurality is necessary to produce sense and to bring a new meaning to the structure. 

At the end of the essay Derrida indicates the historical significance of interpretation. There is nothing to choose between them. He says wherever new formation appears in the history, in the process of decentering of a presence ,eyes are conveniently turned away and emergent realities denied.

According to Derrida there are two interpretation of interpretation of structure, of sign, of play. They are

*acknowledge and accentuate history's différence and 

* defining it's irreducibility, and to encode the secret of history.