"Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences"

Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge, pp 278-294

Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an
"event," if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural-
or structuralist-thought to reduce or to suspect. But let me use the term "event" anyway, employing
it with caution and as if in quotation marks. In this sense, this event will have the exterior form of a
rupture and a redoubling.

It would be easy enough to show that the concept of structure and even the word "structure" itself
are as old as the episteme -that is to say, as old as western science and western philosophy-and that
their roots thrust deep into the soil of ordinary language, into whose deepest recesses the episteme
plunges to gather them together once more, making them part of itself in a metaphorical
displacement. Nevertheless, up until the event which I wish to mark out and define, structure-or
rather the structurality of structure-although it has always been involved, has always been
neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or referring it to a point of
presence, a fixed origin. The function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the
structure-one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure-but above all to make sure that the
organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure.
No doubt that by orienting and organizing the coherence of the system, the center of a structure
permits the freeplay of its elements inside the total form. And even today the notion of a structure
lacking any center represents the unthinkable itself.

Nevertheless, the center also closes off the freeplay it opens up and makes possible. Qua center, it is
the point at which the substitution of contents, elements, or terms is no longer possible. At the
center, the permutation or the transformation of elements (which may of course be structures
enclosed within a structure) is forbidden. At least this permutation has always remained interdicted
(I use this word deliberately). Thus it has always been thought that the center, 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 center is,
paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. 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 episteme as philosophy or science-is contradictorily coherent.
And, as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire. The concept of centered
structure is in fact the concept of a freeplay based on a fundamental ground, a freeplay which is
constituted upon a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which is itself beyond the
reach of the freeplay. With this certitude anxiety can be mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result
of a certain mode of being implicated in the game, of being caught by the game, of being as it were
from the very beginning at stake in the game. From the basis of what we therefore call the center
(and which, because it can be either inside or outside, is as readily called the origin as the end, as
readily arché as telos), the repetitions, the substitutions. the transformations, and the permutations
are always taken from a history of meaning [sens]-that is, a history, period-whose origin may
always be revealed or whose end may always be anticipated in the form of presence. This is why
one could perhaps say that the movement of any archeology, like that of any eschatology, is an
accomplice of this reduction of the structuralality of structure and always attempts to conceive of
structure from the basis of a full presence which is out of play.

If this is so, the whole history of the concept of structure, before the rupture I spoke of, must be
thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center, as a linked chain of determinations of the
center. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the center receives different forms or names. The
history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and
metonymies. Its matrix-if you will pardon me for demonstrating so little and for being so elliptical
in order to bring me more quickly to my principal theme-is the determination of being as presence
in all the senses of this word. It would be possible to show that all the names related to
fundamentals, to principles, or to the I center 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.

The event I called a rupture, the disruption alluded to at the beginning of this paper, would
presumably have come about when the structurality of structure had to begin to be thought, that is to
say, repeated, and this is why I said that this disruption was repetition in all of the senses of this
word. From then on it became necessary to think the law which governed, as it were, the desire for
the center in the constitution of structure and the process of signification prescribing its
displacements and its substitutions for this law of the central presence-but a central presence which
was never itself, which has always already been transported outside itself in its surrogate. The
surrogate does not substitute itself for anything which has somehow pre-existed it. From then on it
was probably necessary to begin to think that there was no center, that the center could not be
thought in the form of a beingpresent, that the center had no natural locus, that it was not a fixed
locus but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into
play. This moment was that in which language invaded the universal problematic; that in which, in
the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse-provided we can agree on this word-
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.

Where and how does this decentering, this notion of the structurality of structure, occur? It would
be somewhat naive to refer to an event, a doctrine, or an author in order to designate this
occurrence. It is no doubt part of the totality of an era, our own, but still it has already begun to
proclaim itself and begun to work. Nevertheless, if I wished to give some sort of indication by
choosing one or two "names," and by recalling those authors in whose discourses this occurrence
has most nearly maintained its most radical formulation, I would probably cite the Nietzschean
critique of metaphysics, the critique of the concepts of being and truth, for which were substituted
the concepts of play, interpretation, and sign (sign without truth present); the Freudian critique of
self-presence, that is, the critique of consciousness, of the subject, of self-identity and of self-
proximity or self-possession; and, more radically, the Heideggerean destruction of metaphysics, of
onto-theology, of the determination of being as presence. But all these destructive discourses and all
their analogues are trapped in a sort of circle. This circle is unique. It describes the form of the
relationship between the history of metaphysics and the destruction of the history of metaphysics.
There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to attack metaphysics. We
have no language-no syntax and no lexicon-which is alien to this history; we cannot utter a single
destructive proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit
postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest. To pick out one example from many: the
metaphysics of presence is attacked with the help of the concept of the sign. But from the moment
anyone wishes this to show, as I suggested a moment ago, that there is no transcendental or
privileged signified and that the domain or the interplay of signification has, henceforth, no limit, he
ought to extend his refusal to the concept and to the word sign itself-which is precisely what cannot
be done. For the signification "sign" has always been comprehended and determined, in its sense, as
sign-of, signifier referring to a signified, signifier different from its signified. If one erases the
radical difference between signifier and signified, it is the word signifier itself which ought to be
abandoned as a metaphysical concept. When Levi-Strauss says in the preface to The Raw and the
Cooked that he has "sought to transcend the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible by
placing [himself] from the very beginning at the level of signs," the necessity, the force, and the
legitimacy of his act cannot make us forget that the concept of the sign cannot in itself surpass or
bypass this opposition between the sensible and the intelligible. The concept of the sign is
determined by this opposition: through and throughout the totality of its history and by its system.
But we cannot do without the concept of the sign, we cannot give up this metaphysical complicity
without also giving up the critique we are directing against this complicity, without the risk of
erasing difference [altogether] in the self-identity of a signified reducing into itself its signifier, or,
what amounts to the same thing, simply expelling it outside itself. For there are two heterogenous
ways of erasing the difference between the signifier and the signified: one, the classic way, consists
in reducing or deriving the signifier, that is to say, ultimately in submitting the sign to thought; the
other, the one we are using here against the first one, consists in putting into question the system in
which the preceding reduction functioned: first and foremost, the opposition between the sensible
and the intelligible. The paradox is that the metaphysical reduction of the sign needed the
opposition it was reducing. The opposition is part of the system, along with the reduction. And what
I am saying here about the sign can be extended to all the concepts and all the sentences of
metaphysics, in particular to the discourse on "structure." But there are many ways of being caught
in this circle. They are all more or less naive, more or less empirical, more or less systematic, more
or less close to the formulation or even to the formalization of this circle. It is these differences
which explain the multiplicity of destructive discourses and the disagreement between those who
make them. It was within concepts inherited from metaphysics that Nietzsche, Freud, and
Heidegger worked, for example. Since these concepts are not elements or atoms and since they are
taken from a syntax and a system, every particular borrowing drags along with it the whole of
metaphysics. This is what allows these destroyers to destroy each other reciprocally-for example,
Heidegger considering Nietzsche, with as much lucidity and rigor as bad faith and misconstruction,
as the last metaphysician, the last "Platonist." One could do the same for Heidegger himself, for
Freud, or for a number of others. And today no exercise is more widespread.

What is the relevance of this formal schema when we turn to what are called the "human sciences"?
One of them perhaps occupies a privileged place-ethnology. One can in fact assume that ethnology
could have been born as a science only at the moment when a de-centenng had come about: at the
moment when European culture-and, in consequence, the history of metaphysics and of its
concepts-had been dislocated, driven from its locus, and forced to stop considering itself as the
culture of reference. This moment is not first and foremost a moment of philosophical or scientific
discourse, it is also a moment which is political, economic, technical, and so forth. One can say in
total assurance that there is nothing fortuitous about the fact that the critique of ethnocentrism-the
very condition of ethnology-should be systematically and historically contemporaneous with the
destruction of the history of metaphysics. Both belong to a single and same era.

Ethnology-like any science-comes about within the element of discourse. And it is primarily a
European science employing traditional concepts, however much it may struggle against them.
Consequently, whether he wants to or not-and this does not depend on a decision on his part-the
ethnologist accepts into his discourse the premises of ethnocentrism at the very moment when he is
employed in denouncing them This necessity is irreducible; it is not a historical contingency. We
ought to consider very carefully all its implications. But if nobody can escape this necessity, and if
no one is therefore responsible for giving in to it, however little, this does not mean that all the ways
of giving in to it are of an equal pertinence. The quality and the fecundity of a discourse are perhaps
measured by the critical rigor with which this relationship to the history of metaphysics and to
inherited concepts is thought. Here it is a question of a critical relationship to the language of the
human sciences and a question of a critical responsibility of the discourse. It is a question of putting
expressly and systematically the problem of a discourse which borrows from a heritage the
resources necessary of that heritage itself. A problem of economy and strategy.
If I now go on to employ an examination of the texts of Levi-Strauss as an example, it is not only
because of the privilege accorded to ethnology among the human sciences, nor yet because the
thought of Levi-Strauss weighs heavily on the contemporary theoretical situation. It is above all
because a certain choice has made itself evident in the work of Levi-Strauss and because a certain
doctrine has been elaborated there, and precisely in a more or less explicit manner, in relation to this
critique of language and to this critical language in the human sciences.

In order to follow this movement in the text of Levi-Strauss, let me choose as one guiding thread
among others the oppostion between nature and culture. In spite of all its rejuvenations and its
disguises, this opposition is congenital to philosophy. It is even older than Plato. It is at least as old
as the Sophists. Since the statement of the opposition - Physis/nomos, physis/techne [nature/culture,
nature/art or making] - it has been passed on to us by a whole historical chain which opposes
"nature" to the law, to education, to art, to technics - and also to liberty, to the arbitrary, to history, to
society, to the mind, and so on. From thebeginnings of his quest and from his first book, The
Elementary Structures of Kinship, Levi-Strauss has felt at one and the same time the necessity of
utilizing this opposition and the impossibility of making it acceptable. In the Elementary Structures,
he begins from this axiom or definition: that belongs to nature which is universal and spontaneous,
not depending on any particular culture or on any determinate norm. That belongs to culture, on the
other hand, which depends on a system of norms regulating society and is therefore capable of
varying from one social structure to another. These two definitions are of the traditional type. But,
in the very first pages of the Elementary Structures, Levi-Strauss, who has begun to give these
concepts an acceptable standing, encounters what he calls a scandal, that is to say, something which
no longer tolerates the nature/culture opposition he has accepted and which seems to require at one
and the same time the predicates of nature and those of culture. This scandal is the incest-
prohibition. The incest-prohibition is universal; in this sense one could call it natural. But it is also a
prohibition, a system of norms and interdicts; in this sense one could call it cultural.

Let us assume therefore that everything universal in man derives from the order of nature and is
charactenzed by spontaneity, that everything which is subject to a norm belongs to culture and
presents the attributes of the relative and the particular. We then find ourselves confronted by a fact,
or rather an ensemble of facts, which, in the light of the preceding definitions, is not far from
appeanog as a scandal: the prohibition of incest presents without the least equivocation, and
indissolubly linked together, the two characteristics in which we recognized the contradictory
attributes of two exclusive orders. The prohibition of incest constitutes a rule, but a rule, alone of all
the social rules, which possesses at the same time a universal character.

Obviously, there is no scandal except in the interior of a system of concepts sanctioning the
difference between nature and culture. In beginning his work with the factum of the incest-
prohibition, Levi-Strauss thus puts himself in a position entailing that this difference, which has
always been assumed to be self-evident, becomes obliterated or disputed. For, from the moment that
the incest-prohibition can no longer be conceived within the nature/culture opposition, it can no
longer be said that it is a scandalous fact, a nucleus of opacity within a network of transparent
significations. The incest-prohibition is no longer a scandal one meets with or comes up against in
the domain of traditional concepts; it is something which escapes these concepts and certainly
precedes them--probably as the condition of their possibility. It could perhaps be said that the whole
of philosophical conceptualization, systematically relating itself to the nature/culture opposition, is
designed to leave in the domain of the unthinkable the very thing that makes this conceptualization
possible: the origin of the prohibition of incest.

I have dealt too cursorily with this example, only one among so many others, but the example
nevertheless reveals that language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique. This critique
may be undertaken along two tracks, in two "manners." Once the limit of nature/culture opposition
makes itself felt, one might want to question systematically and rigorously the history of these
concepts. This is a first action. Such a systematic and historic questioning would be neither a
philological nor a philosophical action in the classic sense of these words. Concerning oneself with
the founding concepts of the whole history of philosophy, de-constituting them, is not to undertake
the task of the philologist or of the classic historian of philosophy. In spite of appearances, it is
probably the most daring way of making the beginnings of a step outside of philosophy. The step
"outside philosophy" is much more difficult to conceive than is generally imagined by those who
think they made it long ago with cavalier ease, and who are in general swallowed up in metaphysics
by the whole body of the discourse that they claim to have disengaged from it.

In order to avoid the possibly sterilizing effect of the first way, the other choice-which I feel
corresponds more nearly to the way chosen by Levi-Strauss-consists in conserving in the field of
empirical discovery all these old concepts, while at the same time exposing here and there their
limits, treating them as tools which can still be of use. No longer is any truth-value attributed to
them; there is a readiness to abandon them if necessary if other instruments should appear more
useful. In the meantime, their relative efficacy is exploited, and they are employed to destroy the
old machinery to which they belong and of which they themselves are pieces. Thus it is that the
language of the human sciences criticizes itself. Levi-Strauss thinks that in this way he can separate
method from truth, the instruments of the method and the objective significations aimed at by it.
One could almost say that this is the primary affirmation of Levi-Strauss; in any event, the first
words of the Elementary Structures are: "One begins to understand that the distinction between state
of nature and state of society (we would be more apt to say today: state of nature and state of
culture). while lacking any acceptable historical signification, presents a value which fully just)fies
its use by modern sociology: its value as a methodological instrument."

Levi-Strauss will always remain faithful to this double intention: to preserve as an instrument that
whose truth-value he criticizes.

On the one hand, he will continue in effect to contest the value of the nature/culture opposition.
More than thirteen years after the Elementary Structures, The Savage Mind faithfully echoes the
text I have just quoted: "The opposition between nature and culture which I have previously insisted
on seems today to offer a value which is above all methodological." And this methodological value
is not affected by its "ontological" non-value (as could be said, if this notion were not suspect here):
"It would not be enough to have absorbed particular humanities into a general humanity; this first
enterprise prepares the way for others . . . which belong to the natural and exact sciences: to
reintegrate culture into nature, and finally, to reintegrate life into the totality of its physiochemical
conditions."

On the other hand, still in The Savage Mind, he presents as what he calls bricolage what might be
called the discourse of this method. The bricoleur, says Levi-Strauss, is someone who uses "the
means at hand," that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are
already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they
are to be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them
whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of them at once, even if their form and their origin
are heterogenous -- and so forth. There is therefore a critique of language in the form of bricolage,
and it has even been possible to say that bricolage is the critical language itself. I am thinking in
particular of the article by G[erard] Genette, "Structuralisme et Critique litteraire," published in
homage to Levi-Strauss in a special issue of L'Arc, where it is stated that the analysis of bricolage
could "be applied almost word for word'' to criticism, and especially to "literary criticism."

If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one's concept from the text of a heritage which is
more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur. The engi~eer,
whom Levi-Strauss opposes to the bricoleur, should be one to construct the totality of his language,
syntax, and lexicon. In this sense the engineer is a myth. A subject who would supposedly be the
absolute origin of his own discourse and would supposedly construct it "out of nothing," "out of
whole cloth," would be the creator of the verbe, the verbe itself. The notion of the engineer who had
supposedly broken with all forms of bricolage is therefore a theological idea; and since Levi-Strauss
tells us elsewhere that bricolage is mythopoetic, the odds are that thee engineer is a myth produced
by the bricoleur. From the moment that we cease to believe in such an engineer and in a discourse
breaking with the received historical discourse, as soon as it is admitted that every finite discourse
is bound by a cenain bricolage, and that the engineer and the scientist are also species of bricoleurs
then the very idea of bricolage is menaced and the difference in which it took on its meaning
decomposes.

This brings out the second thread which might guide us in what is being unraveled here.

Levi-Strauss describes bricolage not only as ;n intellectual activity but also as a mythopoetical
activity. One reads in The Savage Mind, "Like bricolage on the technical level, mythical reflection
can attain brilliant and unforeseen results on the intellectual level. Reciprocally, the mythopoetical
character of bricolage has often been noted."

But the remarkable endeavor of Levi-Strauss is not simply to put forward, notably in the most
recent of his investigations, a structural science or knowledge of myths and of mythological activity.
His endeavor also appears-I would say almost from the first-in the status which he accords to his
own discourse on myths, to what he calls his "mythologicals." It is here that his discourse on the
myth reflects on itself and criticizes itself. And this moment, this critical period, is evidently of
concern to all the languages which share the field of the human sciences. What does Levi-Strauss
say of his "mythologicals"? It is here that we rediscover the mythopoetical virtue (power) of
bricolage. In effect, what appears most fascinating in this critical search for a new status of the
discourse is the stated abandonment of all reference to a center, to a subject, to a privileged
reference, to an origin, or to an absolute arche'. The theme of this decentering could be followed
throughout the "Overture" to his last book, The Raw and the Cooked. I shall simply remark on a
few key points.

1. From the very start, Levi-Strauss recognizes that the Bororo myth which he employs in the book
as the "reference-myth" does not merit this name and this treatment. The name is specious and the
use of the myth improper. This myth deserves no more than any other its referential privilege: In
fact the Bororo myth which will from now on be designated by the name reference-myth is, as I
shall try to show, nothing other than a more or less forced transformation of other myths originating
either in the same society or in societies more or less far removed. It would therefore have been
legitimate to choose as my point of departure any representative of the group whatsoever. From this
point of view, the interest of the reference-myth does not depend on its typical character, but rather
on its irregular position in the midst of a group.

2. There is no unity or absolute source of the myth. The focus or the source of the myth are always
shadows and virtualities which are elusive, unactualizable, and nonexistent in the first place.
Everything begins with the structure, the configuration, the relationship. The discourse on this
acentric structure, the myth, that is, cannot itself have an absolute subject or an absolute center. In
order not to short change the form and the movement of the myth, that violence which consists in
centering a language which is describing an acentric structure must be avoided. In this context,
therefore, it is necessary to forego scientific or philosophical discourse, to renounce the episteme
which absolutely requires, which is the absolute requirement that we go back to the source, to the
center, to the founding basis, to the principle, and so on. In opposition to epistemic discourse,
structural discourse on myths- mythological discourse-must itself be mythomorphic. It must have
the form of that of which it speaks. This is what Levi-Strauss says in The Raw and the Cooked,
from which I would now like to quote a long and remarkable passage:
In effect the study of myths poses a methodological problem by the fact that it cannot conform to
the Cartesian principle of dividing the difficulty into as miany piarts as are necessiary to resolve it.
There exists no veritable end or term to mythical analysis, no secret unity which could be grasped at
the end of the work of decomposition. The themes duplicate themselves to infinity. When we think
we have disentiangled them from each other and can hold them separate, it is only to realize that
they are joining together again, in response to the attraction of unforeseen affinities. In
consequence, the unity of the myth is only tendential and projective; it never reflects a state or a
moment of the myth. An imaginary phenomenon implied by the endeavor to interpret, its role is to
give a synthetic form to the myth and to impede its dissolution into the confusion of contraries. It
could therefore be said that the science or knowledge of myths is an anaclastic, taking this ancient
term in the widest sense authorized by its etymology, a science which admits into its definition the
study of the reflected rays along with that of the broken ones. But, unlike philosophical reflection,
which claims to go all the way back to its source, the reflections in question here concern rays
without any other than a virtual focus. . . . In wanting to imitate the spontaneous movement of
mythical thought, my enterprise, itself too brief and too long, has had to yield to its demands and
respect its rhythm. Thus is this book, on myths itself and in its own way, a myth.

This statement is repeated a little farther on: "Since myths themselves rest on second-order codes
(the first-order codes being those in which language consists), this book thus offers the rough draft
of a third-order code, destined to insure the reciprocal possibility of translation of several myths.
This is why it would not be wrong to consider it a myth: the myth of mythology, as it were." It is by
this absence of any real and fixed center of the mythical or mythological discourse that the musical
model chosen by Levi Strauss for the composition of his book is apparently justified. The absence
of a center is here the absence of a subject and the absence of an author: "The myth and the musical
work thus appear as orchestra conductors whose listeners are the silent performers. If it be asked
where the real focus of the work is to be found, it must be replied that its determination is
impossible. Music and mythology bring man face to face with virtual objects whose shadow alone
is actual. . . . Myths have no authors."

Thus it is at this point that ethnographic bricolage deliberately assumes its mythopoetic function.
But by the same token, this function makes the philosophical or epistemological requirement of a
center appear as mythological, that is to say, as a historical illusion.

Nevertheless, even if one yields to the necessity of what Levi-Strauss has done, one cannot ignore
its risks. If the mythological is mythomorphic, are all discourses on myths equivalent? Shall we
have to abandon any epistemologica; requirement which permits us to distinguish between several
qualities of discourse on the myth? A classic question, but inevitable. We cannot reply-and I do not
believe Levi-Strauss replies to it-as long as the problem of the relationships between the
philosopheme or the theorem. on the one hand, and the mytheme or the mythopoem(e), on the other,
has not been expressly posed. This is no small problem. For lack of expressly posing this problem,
we condemn ourselves to transforming the claimed transgression of philosophy into an unperceived
fault in the interior of the philosophical field. Empiricism would be the genus of which these faults
would always be the species. Trans-philosophical concepts would be transformed into philosophical
naivetes. One could give many examples to demonstrate this risk: the concepts of sign, history,
truth, and so forth. What I want to emphasize is simply that the passage beyond philosophy does not
consist in turning the page of philosophy (which usually comes down to philosophizing badly), but
in continuing to read philosophers in a certain way. The risk I am speaking of is always assumed by
Levi-Strauss and it is the very price of his endeavor. I have said that empiricism is the matrix of all
the faults menacing a discourse which continues, as with Levi-Strauss in particular, to elect to be
scientific. If we wanted to pose the problem of empiricism and bricolage in depth, we would
probably end up very quickly with a number of propositions absolutely contradictory in relation to
the status of discourse in structural ethnography. On the one hand, structuralism justly claims to be
the critique of empiricism. But at the same time there is not a single book or study by Levi-Strauss
which does not offer itself as an empirical essay which can always be completed or invalidated by
new information. The structural schemata are always proposed as hypotheses resulting from a finite
quantity of information and which are subjected to the proof of experience. Numerous texts could
be used to demonstrate this double postulation. Let us turn once again to the "Overture" of The Raw
and the Cooked, where it seems clear that if this postulation is double, it is because it is a guestion
here of a language on language:
Critics who might take me to task for not having begun by making an exhaustive inventory of South
American myths before analyzing them would be making a serious mistake about the nature and the
role of these documents. The totality of the myths of a people is of the order of the discourse.
Provided that this people does not become physically or morally extinct, this totality is never
closed. Such a criticism would therefore be equivalent to reproaching a linguist with writing the
grammar of a language without having recorded the totality of the words which have been uttered
since that language came into existence and without knowing the verbal exchanges which will take
place as long as the language continues to exist. Experience proves that an absurdly small number
of sentences . . . allows the linguist to elaborate a grammar of the language he is studying. And even
a partial grammar or an outline of a grammar represents valuable acquisitions in the case of
unknown languages. Syntax does not wait until it has been possible to enumerate a theoretically
unlimited series of events before becoming manifest, because syntax consists in the body of rules
which presides over the generation of these events. And it is precisely a syntax of South American
mythology that I wanted to outline. Should new texts appear to enrich the mythical discourse, then
this will provide an opportunity to check or modify the way in which certain grammatical laws have
been formulated, an opportunity to discard certain of them and an opportunity to discover new ones.
But in no instance can the requirement of a total mythical discourse be raised as an objection. For
we have just seen that such a requirement has no meaning.

Totalization is therefore defined at one time as useless, at another time as impossible. This is no
doubt the result of the fact that there are two ways of conceiving the limit of totalization. And I
assert once again that these two determinations coexist implicitly in the discourses of Levi-Strauss.
Totalization can be judged impossible in the classical style: one then refers to the empirical
endeavor of a subject or of a finite discourse in a vain and breathless quest of an infinite richness
which it can never master. There is too much, more than one can say. But nontotalization can also
be determined in another way: not from the standpoint of the concept of finitude as assigning us to
an empirical view, but from the standpoint of the concept of freeplay. If totalization no longer has
any meaning, it is not because the infinity of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite
discourse, but because the nature of the field-that is, language and a finite language-excludes
totalization. This field is in fact that of freeplay, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions in the
closure of a finite ensemble. This field permits these infinite substitutions only because it is finite,
that is to say, because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead
of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and founds the freeplay
of substitutions. One could say-rigorously using that word whose scandalous signification is always
obliterated in French-that this movement of the freeplay, permitted by the lack, the absence of a
center or origin, is the movement of supplementarily. One cannot determine the center, the sign
which supplements it, which takes its place in its absence-because this sign adds itself, occurs in
addition, over and above, comes as a supplement. The movement of signification adds something,
which results in the fact that there is always more, but this addition is a floating one because it
comes to perform a vicarious function, to supplement a lack on the part of the signified. Although
Levi-Strauss in his use of the word supplementary never emphasizes as I am doing here the two
directions of meaning which are so strangely compounded within it, it is not by chance that he uses
this word twice in his "Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss,'' at the point where he is speaking
of the "superabundance of signifier, in relation to the signifieds to which this superabundance can
refer":
In his endeavor to understand the world? man therefore always has at his disposition a surplus of
signification (which he portions out amongst things according to the laws of symbolic thought-
which it is the task of ethnologists and linguists to study). This distribution of a supplementary
allowance [ration supplementaire]-if it is permissible to put it that way-is absolutely necessary in
order that on the whole the available signifier and the signified it aims at may remain in the
relationship of complementarity which is the very condition of the use of symbolic thought.

(It could no doubt be demonstrated that this ration supplementaire of signification is the origin of
the ratio itself.) The word reappears a little farther on, after Levi-Strauss has mentioned "this
floating signifier, which is the finite thought":
In other words-and taking as our guide Mauss's. precept that all social phenomena can be
assimilated to language-we see in mana, Wakau, oranda and other notions of the same type, the
conscious expression of a semantic function, whose role it is to permit symbolic thought to operate
in spite of the contradiction which is proper to it. In this way are explained the apparently insoluble
1 antinomies attached to this notion. . . . At one and the same time force and action, quality and
state, substantive and verb; abstract and concrete, omnipresent and localized-mana is in effect all
these things. But is it not precisely because it is none of these things that mana is a simple form, or
more exactly, a symbol in the pure state, and therefore capable of becoming charged with any sort
of symbolic content whatever? In the system of symbols constituted by all cosmologies, manawould
simply be a valeur symbolique zero, that isto say, a sign marking the necessity of a symbolic
content supplementary [my italics] to that with which the signified is already loaded, but which can
take on any value required, provided only that this value still remains part of the available reserve
and is not, as phonologists put it, a group-term.

Levi-Strauss adds the note:

Linguists have already been led to formulate hypotheses of this type. For example: "A zero
phoneme is opposed to all the other phonemes in French in that it entails no differential chararacters
and no constant phonetic value. On the contrary, the proper function of the zero phoneme is to be
opposed to phoneme absence." (R. Jakobson and J. Lutz, "Notes on the French Phonemic Pattern"
Word, vol. 5, no. 2 [August, 1949], p. 155). Similarly, if we schematize the conception I am posing
here, it could almost be said that the function of notions like mana is to be opposed to the absence
of signification, without entailing by itself any particular signification.

The superabundance of the signifier, its supplementary character, is thus the result of a finitude, that
is to say, the result of a lack which must be supplemented.

It can now be understood why the concept of freeplay is important in Levi-Strauss. His references
to all sorts of games, notably to roulette, are very frequent, especially in his Conversations, in Race
and Histotory, and in The Savage Mind. This reference to the game or free-play is always caught up
in a tension.

It is in tension with history, first of all. This is a classical problem, objections to which are I now
well worn or used up. I shall simply indicate I what seems to me the formality of the problem: by
reducing history, Levi-Strauss has treated as it deserves a concept which has always been in
complicity with a teleological and eschatological metaphysics, in other words, paradoxically, in
complicity with that philosophy of presence to which it was believed history could be opposed. The
thematic of historicity, although it seems to be a somewhat late arrival in philosophy, has always
been required by the determination of being as presence. With or without etymology, and in spite of
the classic antagonism which opposes these significations throughout all of classical thought, it
could be shown that the concept of episteme has always called forth that of historia, if history is
always the unity of a becoming, as tradition of truth or development of science or knowledge
oriented toward the appropriation of truth in presence and self-presence, toward knowledge in
consciousness-of-self. History has always been conceived as the movement of a resumption of
history, a diversion between two presences. But if it is legitimate to suspect this concept of history,
there is a risk, if it is reduced without an express statement of the problem I am indicating here, of
falling back into an anhistoricism of a classical type, that is to say, in a determinate moment of the
history of metaphysics. Such is the algebraic formality of the problem as I see it. More concretely,
in the work of Levi-Strauss it must be recognized that the respect for structurality, for the internal
originality of the structure, compels a neutralization of time and history. For example, the
appearance of a new structure, of an original system, always comes about-and this is the very
condition of its structural specificity-by a rupture with its past, its origin, and its cause. One can
therefore describe what is peculiar to the structural organization only by not taking into account, in
the very moment of this description, its past conditions: by failing to pose the problem of the
passage from one structure to another, by putting history into parentheses. In this "structuralist"
moment, the concepts of chance and discontinuity are indispensable. And Levi-Strauss does in fact
often appeal to them as he does, for instance, for that structure of structures, language, of which he
says in the "Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss" that it "could only have been born in one
fell swoop":
Whatever may have been the moment and the circumstances of its appearance in the scale of animal
life, language could only have been born in one fell swoop. Things could not have set about
signifying progressively. Following a transformation the study of which is not the concern of the
social sciences, but rather of biology and psychology, a crossing over came about from a stage
where nothing had a meaning to another where everything possessed it.

This standpoint does not prevent Levi-Strauss from recognizing the slowness, the process of
maturing, the continuous toil of factual transformations, history (for example, in Race and History).
But, in accordance with an act which was also Rousseau's and Husserl's, he must "brush aside all
the facts" at the moment when he wishes to recapture the specificity of a structure. Like Rousseau,
he must always conceive of the origin of a new structure on the model of catastrophe -an
overturning of nature in nature, a natural interruption of the natural sequence, a brushing aside of
nature.

Besides the tension of freeplay with history, there is also the tension of freeplay with presence.
Freeplay is the disruption of presence. The presence of an element is always a signifying and
substitutive reference inscribed in a system of differences and the movement of a chain. Freeplay is
always an interplay of absence and presence, but if it is to be radically conceived, freeplay must be
conceived of before the alternativeof presence and absence; being must be conceived of as presence
or absence beginning with the possibility of freeplay and not the other way around. If Levi-Strauss,
better than any other, has brought to light the freeplay of repetition and the repetition of freeplay,
one no less perceives in his work a sort of ethic presence, an ethic of nostalgia for origins, an ethic
of archaic and natural innocence, of a purity of presence and self-presence in speech-an ethic,
nostalgia, and even remorse which he often presents as the motivation of the ethnological project
when he moves toward archaic societies-exemplary societies in his eyes. These texts are well
known.

As a turning toward the presence, lost or impossible, of the absent origin, this structuralist thematic
of broken immediateness is thus the sad, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauist facet of the
thinking of freeplay of which the Nietzschean affirmation-the joyous affirmation of the freeplay of
the world and without truth, without origin, offered to an active interpretation-would be the other
side. This affirmation then determines the non-center otherwise than as loss of the center. And it
plays the game without security. For there is a sure freeplay: that which is limited to the substitution
of given and existing, present, pieces. In absolute chance, affirmation also surrenders itself to
genetic indetermination, to the seminal adventure of the trace.

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" (again from the "Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss").

There are more than enough indications today to suggest we might perceive that these two
interpretations of interpretation-which are absolutely irreconcilable even if we live them
simultaneously and reconcile them in an obscure economy-together share the field which we call, in
such a problematic fashion, the human sciences.

For my part, although these two interpretations must acknowledge and accentuate their difference
and define their irreducibility, I do not believe that today there is any question of choosing-in the
first place because here we are in a region (let's say, provisionally, a region of historicity) where the
category of choice seems particularly trivial; and in the second, because we must first try to
conceive of the common ground, and the difference of this irreducible difference. Here there is a
sort of question, call it historical, of which we are only glimpsing today the conception,
theformation, the gestation, the labor. I employ these words, I admit, with a glance toward the
business of childbearing-but also with a glance toward those who, in a company from which I do
not exclude myself, turn their eyes away in the face of the as yet unnameable which is proclaiming
itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species
of the non-species, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity.

Updated 02/14/2009 05:20:10

Hydra Design: Peter Krapp
All rights reserved © 1995-2003.