Derrida, Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences (First presented at a Symposium at
John Hopkins, 1966)1
“…what is hastily called deconstruction as such is never a technical set of discursive procedures, still less a
new hermeneutic method operating on archives or utterances in the shelter of a stable and given institution;
it is also and at the least, the taking of a position, in work itself, towards the politico-institutional structures
that constitute and regulate our practice, our competence and our performances.” Derrida, Mochlos; or the
Conflict of Faculties, 1992
1. Structure.
The idea of a structure is not only important for structuralism but has had a crucial role to play in all
systems of western thought since the beginning of the philosophical tradition. All ideas of a structure depend
upon the notion of a centre, a supposed origin or foundation from which meaning flows. The centre arrests
and grounds the play of substitutions.
“The centre closes off the play it opens up and makes possible….Thus it has always been thought that the
centre, which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure which governs the
structure, while escaping structurality. This is why classical thought concerning structure could say that the
centre is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. The centre is at the centre of the totality, and yet,
since the centre does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its centre
elsewhere. The centre is not the centre. The concept of centred structure-although it represents coherence
itself, the condition of the episteme as philosophy or science-is contradictorily coherent …..If this is so, the
whole history of the concept of structure… must be thought of as a series of substitutions of centre for
centre, as a linked chain of determinations of the centre. …The history of metaphysics, like the history of the
West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. ….It would be possible to show that all the names
related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the I centre have always designated the constant of a presence-
eidos, arche, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject) aletheia [truth],
transcendentality, consciousness, or conscience, God, man, and so forth.”
Eg. In a literary work the centre has traditionally been seen as the author (like god standing behind his
material universe), the origin and source of all meaning. But when we try to posit the author at the centre of
a literary work, we find that we can’t stop at that signified. What do we mean by the author? Is the centre
his/her intentions or desires or emotions or anxieties? Is it the unconscious or the historical context? The
author turns out to be a signifier for other signifieds….a series of substitution of centre for centre. “The
author…is the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of
meaning.” Foucualt, What is an Author, 1979 (Also Barthes, The Death of the Author, published in the
same year, 1979)
2. Sign
The centre for structuralism is the idea of the sign itself. But Derrida argues that the sign systems are not
stable structures but never ending play of meanings.
It is a cardinal precept of modern structural linguistics that signs don’t have meaning in and of themselves,
but by virtue of their occupying a distinctive place within the systematic network of contrasts and
differences which make up any given language. Derrida argues that meaning is no where punctually present
in language, that it is always subject to a semantic slippage or deferral which prevents the sign from ever
1
Marked the emergence of literary deconstruction as a force in American criticism. Chris Norris, Derrida, 1987
coinciding with itself in a moment of perfect remainderless grasp. This is suggested by the Derridean word,
différance2 (in French the anomalous a is registered only in the written form).
“We now know that the text consists not of a line of words, releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the
message of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which are married and contested several
writings, none of which is original: the text is a fabric of quotations, resulting from a thousand sources of
culture.” Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author, 1979
3. Play
Play is the move away from looking for the origin and towards the endless chain of substitution.
The first substantial invocation of play as the other of western philosophy was by Nietzsche in his
invocation of Zarathustra (Ecce Homo, the first chapter of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, written 1888, published
1908) as a spirit who plays with various ideas…”a world of signs without faults, without truth and without
origin…” (SSP)
“Besides the tension of freeplay with history, there is also the tension of freeplay with presence. Freeplay is
the disruption of presence…. There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of
freeplay. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering, a truth or an origin which is free from freeplay
and from the order of the sign, and lives like an exile the necessity of interpretation. The other, which is no
longer turned toward the origin, affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name man
being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology-in other words,
through the history of all of his history-has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin
and the end of the game. The second interpretation of interpretation, to which Nietzsche showed us the way,
does not seek in ethnography, as Levi-Strauss wished, the "inspiration of a new humanism"
This play is given a number of names in Derrida (and Post-structuralism in general): écriture (writing),
difference, textuality.
Eg Barthes’ 1970 study of Japan, Empire of Signs’. This is not a semiological study of the signs of Japanese
culture (as he had explored in a text such as The Fashion System What Barthes finds in Japanese culture is
freedom from the western obsession with meanings and for him Japanese is pure sound empty of meanings,
the food unhierarchical (without first course, main dish and dessert) and elaborately packaged gifts ‘as if the
box were the object of gift, not what it contains.
Conclusion
Deconstruction is the vigilant seeking out of aporias; blind spots or moments of self contradiction where a
text involuntarily betrays the tension between rhetoric and logic, between what it manifestly means to say
and what it is nonetheless constrained to mean. Thus deconstruction is interested in margins (which are
decided by powerful normative consensus).
2
The term most frequently used in Speech and Phenomena, 1968, where it marks the point of encounter between Husserlian
phenomenology with its dream of self present intelligible meaning and a radically structuralist account of the sign which
challenges Husserl.