1

A Guide to Jacques Derrida’s “Structure, Sign and Play in

the Discourse of the Human Sciences”

John W P Phillips

Revised 17/03/09

Play 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. Play is always play of absence and presence, but if it is to
be thought radically, play must be conceived of before the alternative of presence
and absence (SSP 292).

Derrida wrote “Structure, Sign and Play” to present at a conference in Baltimore at Johns
Hopkins University in 1966. He wrote it very quickly (apparently it took him 15 days) and as a
result it presents an almost magically condensed account of the previous seven years of
philosophical activity, and in its language and vocabulary alone engages with the most current
and controversial discourses of the time, particularly those of Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault,
Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan, although the ostensible topic of the main part of the paper is
the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss.
The paper sets up rather consistently, but most obviously at some key moments, a distinction
between what are called “classical” or “classic” ways of thinking, on one hand, and more recent
“post-structuralist” ways of thinking, on the other.
But it does this from within the framework of the newer ways of thinking, which involve diverse
attempts to understand the generation of knowledge according to a broadly structuralist matrix,
against the classical point of view. Derrida, still ostensibly within this frame, then puts the frame
itself (structuralism) into a further frame that includes the classical way of thinking too, so that
structuralism should now be seen as an event, according to its own laws, in a wider structure, the
history of metaphysics, which it had, in several well publicised accounts, claimed to have
surpassed. In this way Derrida does not make an argument as such. Rather, he puts the
arguments of the most recent and radical elements of contemporary thought into a relation with
themselves. His own principle, which is touched on but not much explored in this essay, is said
to be at the ground—before and beyond—the oppositions that dominate both the classical
conception of conception and those of post-structuralism, too.
1. Classical Thought (the Classical Style or the Classic Way)
The epistēmē (axiomatic knowledge) gives “structure” a centre, neutralizes the “structurality” of
structure, limits the “play” of structure.
The centre is outside the structure
Privilege: the signified, presence, the statement: the intentional role of agents, authors, subjects
etc.
The centre = the form of presence (origin and end in repetition, substitution, transformation,
permutation).
 2

Substitution of metaphors and metonymies (different forms or names)

The “matrix” of the history of metaphysics = the determination of being as presence
Matrix: the womb; the cavity in which anything is formed; that in which anything
is embedded, as ground-mass, gangue, intercellular substance, cementing
material; the bed on which a thing rests, as the cutis under the nail, the hollow in a
slab to receive a monumental brass; a mould; a rectangular array of quantities or
symbols (math.); pl. matrices; adv. Matrical [Latin matrix, a breeding animal,
later, the womb—mater, mother]
Fundamentals or principles designating presence: eidos, arche, telos, energeia, ousia, alethēia
[form, origin, end, act, substance, truth] transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth
[par-ousia actually means “presence” in Greek].
The difference between the sensible and the intelligible (empirical and ideal, matter and spirit,
nature and culture/law/thought)
[JWP note: The difference between nature and culture is also the difference between a womb and
a child or the seed that impregnates the womb (so for metaphysics, a male child)
2. The Event
Begins to think the structurality of structure
The names: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud
(Qui genuit Foucault, Lacan, Barthes and structuralism/poststructuralism)
Saussure, structuralist linguistics and Lévi-Strauss
Ethnology (and the human or social sciences)
Undoing the classical privilege: absent centre, author, agent, subject (or at least decentred
subjects, authors, agents etc.)

The law of structuralism:

Structure (matrix, syntax, grammar, etc.) → event (utterance, process)
Applied to Structuralism:
History of Western Metaphysics → structuralism/poststructuralism
The history of western metaphysics is already the destruction of the history of metaphysics. For
instance: Empiricists destroy idealists, sophists destroy truth, dialectics destroys literary
inspiration, materialists destroy ideology, and philosophers in response destroy the skeptics yet
are destroyed by them (see Montaigne and Descartes).
Structuralism/Poststructuralism
Repeats the epistēmē (axiomatic knowledge)
Gives “structure” a centre (absence)
Neutralizes the “structurality” of structure
Limits the “play” of structure
The centre is outside the structure
Privilege: the signifier, the enunciation, absence: the unintentional role of agents, authors,
subjects etc.
The Two Kinds
A. Two heterogeneous ways of erasing the difference between the signifier and the signified
(281):
The “classic way” and the “way we are using against the first way”
B. “Language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique” (284)
The two paths or “manners” by which this critique may be undertaken:
 3

“A first action” is systematic and rigorous questioning

“A second choice” (Lévi-Strauss): conserving the old concepts but denouncing their limits

Within the second choice: Holds onto the opposition but proposes a bricolage (on the one
hand/on the other)
C. The limit of totalization (288-9)
The classical style: finite richness (too much, more than one can say)
From the standpoint of the concept of play: infinite substitutions in a finite field (something
missing)

D. History (291):
History as the detour of presence
Bracketing or neutralizing history (failing to posit the problem of the transition from one
structure to another)

E. Interpretation (presence and play)

Two interpretations of interpretation …
… of structure,
… of sign,
… of play
… of “Structure, Sign and Play”

Interpretation: (Plato, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Lévi-Strauss)

Backwards looking (absent past)
Forwards looking (unforeseeable future)

The différance of their irreducible difference (as when you are drunk or the earth is shaking or as
it appears in cartoons when this happens—when you are seeing double) two elements are the
same element in its division.

Summary
So Derrida is concerned in this paper to examine what he calls the “shared ground” of two
otherwise incompatible attitudes towards interpretation in knowledge. He calls these attitudes to
interpretation “interpretations of interpretation.” The phrase “interpretation of interpretation” is
worth dwelling on. Derrida had used it before in a short essay from 1964 on the Jewish writer
and poet Edmond Jabès, “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book” (also in Writing and
Difference), where it is question of a fundamental difference between the response of an
exegetical kind of interpretation (that of the Rabbi) and a poetic one (that of the poet):

The necessity of commentary, like poetic necessity, is the very form of exiled speech. In
the beginning is hermeneutics. But the shared necessity of exegesis, the interpretive
imperative, is interpreted differently by the rabbi and the poet. The difference between the
horizon of the original text and exegetic writing makes the difference between the rabbi
and the poet irreducible. Forever unable to reunite with each other, yet so close to each
other, how could they ever regain the realm? The original opening of interpretation
 4

essentially signifies that there will always be rabbis and poets. And two interpretations of
interpretation. (Writing and Difference 67).

The first kind looks back to a lost truth, which it is the task of the exegete to rediscover. The
second kind looks forward to an unforeseeable future of poetic rhapsody. This distinction bears
an uncanny resemblance to one made by Socrates in an apparently early dialogue by Plato, The
Ion. Ion is literally a “rhapsode,” a “stitcher of lays,” that is, he is a performer of poetry. The
rhapsodes would perform at public functions and competitions, enchanting their audiences with
performances from famous sections of Homer or Hesiod. Socrates establishes a fundamental
distinction between the inspiration of poets and rhapsodes and the rational skills (the techne) of
experts. If the poet composes out of divine inspiration then the rhapsode recites the poem under
the influence of this same inspiration, which he in turn passes on to his audience, who are
themselves, in turn, inspired. The rhapsode is, therefore, an interpreter of an interpreter. Plato
uses two senses of the word hermeneus: 1) to signify the work of the inspired “mouthpiece”; and
2) to signify the hermeneutic role of the literary critic. Ion claims to be able to acquit himself of
both tasks. Socrates shows in his dialectic that he could not possible have the knowledge
required for interpretation in this second sense. So first clue: interpretation differs from itself.

Either interpretation can be an explanation of something (a representation of the truth of

some fact or some text); or it can be a process of further signification. In the first case, the
explanation would slip out of sight, thus allowing the things to be explained to emerge into
view. Here the key terms would be Origin, Truth, and End. Or the interpretation itself would act
as a kind of supplement or substitute for the thing itself, whilst the thing itself remains out of the
frame of observation. Here the key terms would be Structure, Sign, Play, and Substitution. In
each case the interpretation of interpretation falls out on one side or the other of the ancient
metaphysical opposition between truth and rhetoric or science and humanism. Furthermore, in
the current milieu (i.e., “today”), there is an acknowledgement on both sides of the absence of
the centre that would otherwise guide our search for truth via interpretation.

Traditionally, Science privileges the mathematical purity of the abstract form, which ought to
have the power to render facts of the universe and the world in clarity and good order.
Humanism is against this and prefers instead the non-scientific, literary, sceptical, rhetorical
mode of address.
Here’s the kicker: the two interpretations of interpretation are incompatible because if one
chooses the former (science) then one is condemned to regard even interpretation as if it was
something that could be explained; and if one chooses the latter then one is condemned to
forever be supplementing one’s sense of what interpretation means with further signifying
productions, without end, ad infinitum. So what, then, is this “shared ground” that Derrida calls
“différance”?

Derrida’s examples are arranged around the concept of structure. There emerges a new
attitude to the concept of structure towards the end of the nineteenth century with Heidegger,
Nietzsche and Freud; but this has been intensified in a certain way by the new language based
sciences of structuralism. This “new attitude” Derrida suggests might be regarded (“perhaps”)
as an event. If so then it would be a rupture. The roles of event and rupture, respectively, are
complex. We’ll come back to them.
 5

For Heidegger the “Structure of Being” for “us” (whoever “we” may be—but this is the
point!) just is interpretation (the Human Being begins as a Dasein, which means “being there” in
German but people tend not to translate it); and its “situated” state is always immediately (or as
we sometimes say “always already”) covered over with “interpretations.” To do good
ontological work (the study of being) we need to uncover our situated state. To be situated is to
be, as we say (grasping for an interpretation), in time. To be in time is always to be not as one is
but as and what one was. The only thing that allows us to carry on being is, therefore, the
future.
Because our situated state is basically covered up by interpretations these need to undergo
destruction. The structure of being is what is left after this destruction of the inherited
interpretations has been fulfilled. What do you suppose would be left of our being if we
succeeded in this task of destruction? Heidegger thinks that it is our “care” and our “being-
towards-death.”
Heidegger’s interpretation cannot allow a concept of truth that would function for the human
being in the way that it does for positive science. Positive science requires a concept of
adequation. The concept must be adequate to the thing of which it is the concept. A statement
should be adequate to the state of affairs of which it is a statement (e.g., the water boiled at 100
degrees; this vase is red). But Nietzsche had already, from his earliest days as a philosopher,
posed terrible problems for this ideal notion in the sciences—especially those that had attempted
to establish a “human science” or a “social Science” or a psychology. The study of Man seems
permanently unable to find the concept for “man” itself. The problem begins not simply with the
question “what is man?” But rather it begins with the very notion of the concept itself, which
Nietzsche believes is nothing better than a rhetorical figure of some kind. The concept, as
Nietzsche asserts, in “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” whether in ordinary language
or in science, is “the burial site of perceptions.” It can thus never reveal a perception. Rather it
will replace one.
Émile Durkheim (one of Levi-Strauss’s key influences) distinguishes the ordinary language
concept, which he calls a “common notion” from the scientific one, which ideally is unaffected
by interference from ordinary language use. Nietzsche would probably have laughed at the
conceit. All concepts are, for Nietzsche, metaphors:
Originally … it is language which works on building the edifice of concepts; later it is
science. Just as the bee simultaneously builds the cells of its comb and fills them with honey,
so science works unceasingly at that great columbarium of concepts, the burial site of
perceptions, builds ever-new, ever-higher tiers, supports, cleans, renews old cells, and strives
above all to fill that framework which towers up to vast heights, and to fit into it in an orderly
way the whole empirical world, i.e., the anthropomorphic world. (150).
With this quotation from Nietzsche we seem to have inscribed a circle back to the earlier remarks
of Montaigne, who Derrida quotes for his epigraph. It might really seem, then, that the question
of interpretation, in its western forms at least, is destined to remain in deadlock between two
incompatible demands, between the incompatible requirements of representation and production
(a recapitulation of the ancient struggle of truth and rhetoric).
Freud, too, had played his part in toppling the scientific concept and the reign of reason from
its throne by asserting an irreducibly unconscious ground of human knowledge and interaction.
The unconscious, for Freud, is an incessant struggle of incompatible demands: those of a
devouring Id (the “IT”) and a stern Superego (the “interpretations” of an internalised social
conscience). The unconscious actually operates through processes (displacement, condensation,
 6

figurative elements and narrative constructions) that produce thought upon thought in
substitutions for a lost or buried prior thought.
So, together, Freud, Nietzsche and Heidegger form a powerful trio of names that can be
regarded as representative of a move away from structure as a concept with a transcendental
“centre” to the question of the structuration of structure: its enunciative or performative basis
[enunciation]. Structuralism picks up on this at the level of the sign (the signified—that locus of
the concept and thus of truth; and the signifier—that locus of differences, substitutions and play.)
The main section of “Structure, Sign and Play,” is concerned with the trouble that Levi-
Strauss gets into when trying simultaneously to operate with scientific principles (empiricism)
and those that confirm the “structuration” principles typical of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Freud
(bricolage). He is very clear that neither the “lost” scientific paradigm nor the new “joyous
affirmation of play” paradigm (we might call it postmodernism for convenience) is an acceptable
option on its own. Some other ground, which both of these incompatibles share, is rather what
Derrida chooses to point towards, with some rather enigmatic remarks about monstrous births in
the future.

The “Structure” of the essay:

Derrida’s essay can be broken down into discrete sections. It is worth getting to know it in this
way, much as one might get to know a large and dusty house (the old European manor houses so
beloved of writers and directors of gothic horror narratives and ghost story adaptations): each
room is connected via a maze of passageways.
Page 278:
The title, epigraph and opening paragraph can be taken as cluster of entryways, each offering
more or less condensed and allusive clues as to the main concerns (see below for an
analysis).

278-282 (top):
Here the history of the concept of structure up to its recent “rupture” is described in a rather
dense way, with some heady references indeed (to Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger as well as
to Levi-Strauss). The “before the rupture” concept of structure involves the assertion (even
legislation) of a centre (an origin, a transcendental determination in the abstract value of
presence) that “grounds” the structure. The “after the rupture” concept affirms the absence
of such a centre but thinks rather the structure’s “structuration” in the effects of infinite
substitution and play independently of the workings of a rational and self-present mind,
which is now regarded as something of a myth. At the bottom of 280 a large “BUT”
intervenes to point out that as ruptures go this one is not that new after all. Rather,
metaphysics, philosophy and science have always moved in a circle of production and
destruction. The example on page 281 explains why. The concept of “sign,” which is
supposed to allow us to move beyond metaphysics, still requires the concepts of metaphysics
in order for us to be able to use them for our critique (the signifier and the signified are only
the latest version of the ancient distinction between the sensible and the intelligible, and thus
the empirical and the transcendental). The signifier is always a sign of … (thus leaving the
signified in the place of origin and truth).

282-292 (middle)
 7

This is the main body of the argument and is taken up entirely with a close reading of the
works of Levi-Strauss, with close attention to the aporia of his method, which seems to
involve the incompatible demands of a traditional empiricism and those of the new concept
of bricolage. The main body itself can be usefully broken down into smaller segments:

282 to the top of 284:

The nature-culture example and the scandal that confounds it: nature is supposedly necessity; and
culture (or society) contingency (accident). The incest prohibition seems to be both natural
(necessary) and cultural (contingent on the structures of society). Here we have a glimpse of
“the unthinkable.”
284 to the top of 286:
“Language bears the necessity of its own critique.” But the “critique can take two paths”:
1. One can question the history (the genesis and structure) of these concepts to the point that one
takes the “step out of philosophy.” Is this possible?
2. By conserving the old concepts, and using them not in terms of their truth value but only as
method, thus distinguishing between method and truth (nature and culture play merely
methodological roles—we need have no faith in their descriptive validity). This is the empirical
method that allows our observations (at base sensory perception) to determine and alter the
concepts we use to describe and interpret things. Preserve the instrument but criticise its value as
truth.
284-286:
The two dimensions of Levi-Strauss’s method:

1. Putting the nature-culture opposition into question (“on the one hand”).
2. bricolage (“on the other hand”).
286-287:
The role of bricolage in a general decentering:

1. no such thing as the “reference myth” but for its “irregular” position in the group.
2. no unity or source: everything begins with structure, difference and relation.
Concluding that “the mythopoetic … function makes the philosophical or epistemological
requirement of a centre appear as mythological, that is to say, as a historical illusion”

287 (bottom) to 290

The big “NEVERTHELESS”:
Seductive as L-S’s new mytho-poetics might seem, do we have to then abandon the
epistemological requirements that allow us to distinguish, to classify?
Empiricism raises its head, troubling the bricoleur’s reduction of concepts to empty methodical
tools.
The critique of empiricism is always nonetheless a kind of justification of empiricism.
The totalization quotation that Derrida interprets here suggests two incompatible definitions of
why totalization is not the business of the ethnographer:
1. It is meaningless and pointless.
2. It is impossible.
The two “ways of conceiving the limit of totalization”:
1. The classical way (more things than there are forms).
 8

2. From the point of view of play (language excludes totalization because there is something
missing from it).

The missing centre determines a need for incessant supplements. The movement of signification
“adds something” each time but maintains the absence of a centre. The absence of a centre is
replaced by the permanent and productive insistence of a “something missing” from the field (of
language, experience, culture, etc.)

290-292:
The tension that the concept of play is “always caught up in”:

The concept of play is always in tension with history and the history of the determination of
“being as presence.”
Middle of 291: history “as the detour between two presences”
THE RISK: the neutralization of time and history in the concept of Structure.

292 (top): the tension (number two) of play and presence. But the concept of play before the
opposition of presence and absence brings to light repetition and the repeatability that grounds
both play and repetition and thus absence and presence.

292 (middle) to the end:

Levi-Strauss represents the negative side of a thinking, of which the Nietzschean
affirmation is just the other side.

The oppositions include:

Sadness/nostalgia affirmation/joy

Conclusion
• The “two interpretations of interpretation”
• truth and origin/structure and play
• No question of choosing between them
• Focus instead on their différance
• The indication of a birth in the offing and the prediction of the monstrous birth
• “the terrifying form of monstrosity”
• The irreducible world of the future.

The Title, Epigraph, and Opening Paragraph

The title can be regarded as a site specific reference (to the conference at which it was first
presented), and includes the curious jointing of humanities and science—the “human sciences”
(the first of many oxymoronic phrases).
 9

The epigraph: from Montaigne (the pinnacle of humanist scepticism towards the sciences of
knowledge): “It is more of a business to interpret the interpretations than it is to interpret the
things/texts.”

1. Montaigne and Descartes

2. An echo of Petrarca.

2. “Perhaps ... ” The provisional nature of the “perhaps” at the opening of the first
sentence/paragraph gestures to a future that we cannot possibly completely know (and thus
foreshadows the final paragraph of the essay). It also does suggest something rather deep in the
relationship posited by the terms structure and event that already problematizes their opposition.
It leaves something open: this is “what gives” (give a little, take a little?)—or it is where play
will emerge. The undecidable or indeterminacy suggested by the perhaps can be related to
moments later in the essay where Derrida talks of the “something missing” in the field of
anthropological research and the question of what the shared ground might be between the two
incompatible “interpretations of interpretation,” the one that favours structure and the one that
favours play.

3. The various oppositions put into play:

Structure (from de stru re to build) Rupture (from rupt-, ppl. stem of rump re to
break)

Evenement (event) Redoublement (repetition ad infinitum)

Structure Event

Structuralism operates as a kind of analysis of oppositions (especially in the work of Levi-

Strauss). Derrida accepts the oppositions to an extent but right from the beginning he makes sure
to find what is undecidable in their relation. Structure implies not only “putting together” but
also the principles that are posited as those according to which the relations between parts are
determined. So “the structurality of structure” implies the principles according to which parts
are related in a whole. If one adds a con (“with”) between the French de (“of” or “to”) and
Struire one will get the multi-hybrid “de-con-struire” and ultimately deconstruction. Rupture
also carries echoes of dis-ruption and inter-ruption. Deconstruction somehow negotiates
between the holding together of the whole and its several ways of coming apart. Perhaps “being
apart” is one of the conditions according to which parts may be related. We also established that
the most basic and deepest meaning of the word difference implies not simply the differences
between things but the difference from itself of anything.

The problematic of the centre shifts the troubling of oppositions to the opposition of inside and
outside. To think the outside and the inside of a structure implies a structure that is bounded but
perhaps not entirely closed. Perhaps this might remind us of the Universe as it was imagined
before Copernicus, whose main contribution to knowledge is understood as a kind of “de-
centring” of Man. Freud also claims in several places to have brought about a revolution
analogous to the Copernican cosmic one with a psychoanalytic “psychic” decentring of
 10

consciousness. Nietzsche had already done this in philosophy and Heidegger with another one,
after Nietzsche. A series of decentring events thus begins to take shape.

Notes for Study

What is it we’ve been forbidden to think ... ?

Deconstruction and Play: permutations, substitutions, repetitions, and presence.

Presence and Absence: in place and time, history, memory, mourning and forgetting.

Repeatability seems to be a force that functions as the shared condition of the following:

Structure
Event
Play
Repetition
Difference
Permutation
Substitution
Presence

This force never determines its effects from outside the structure itself, although it seems to do
so and thus can give rise to illusions and hallucinations.

See Also:
1. Parasite
2. Presence and Absence
3. Deconstruction(ism)
4. Deconstruction (short encyclopaedia entry)

General Remarks and Glossed Terms

1. Iterability
The principle that functions as the shared ground of these incompatible
“interpretations of interpretation” (the classical concept of truth and the modern or
Nietzschean one) is what we now call, among other names, deconstruction. Deconstruction
is not itself a method; but it concerns method. It concerns what allows method and what
problematizes it. The only principle that can be designated by deconstruction is the one
called, variously, iterability, différance, trace etc. It involves the necessity of an ability or
capacity in the groundbreaking or path breaking senses. Specifically it designates the ability
of a mark of some kind to be repeated (canonically a written mark but in general this covers
everything that is meant by sign or language and, more, everything that can be said to belong
 11

to experience but which also gestures beyond it too). It is probably important to note that the
“principle of the mark” is not an invention of Derrida’s but can be discovered animating texts
everywhere. This ability is not only a possibility but it is also a necessity, for without it we
would have no recognisable, communicable sense. So the necessity that a mark can be
repeated—its repeatability—operates as a kind of ground for everything that occurs in the
classification and dissemination of knowledge. One must, however, distinguish this
repeatability of the mark from a classical, even Platonic, notion of eternal abstract form
(eidos) and infinitely repeatable copy; the mark or trace is repeatable but only in itself, which
thus means that it, a priori, differs from itself. Iterability designates the difference of a mark
from itself, which follows necessarily from its repeatability.

2. Entame
Derrida offers a few revealing remarks on the methodology of deconstruction in the
interview “Positions,” which, owing to the untranslatable peculiarity of its key term, entame,
leaves enough open to question for some discusssion:
The incision [L’entame] of deconstruction, which is not a voluntary decision or an
absolute beginning, does not take place just anywhere, or in an absolute
elsewhere. An incision [entame], precisely [in translation this “precisely” is
automatically ironised], can be made only according to lines of force and forces of
rupture that are localisable in the discourse to be deconstructed. The topical and
technical determination of the most necessary sites and operators—beginnings,
holds, levers, etc.—in a given situation depends upon an historical analysis. This
analysis is made in the general movement of the field, and is never exhausted by
the conscious calculation of a “subject.”
The problem—when considering this as a statement of method—is one, again, of translation.
One can see why Alan Bass has chosen “incision” here to translate entame. There is no word
in the English language that begins to approximate the subtle nuances of the French term and
incision is far enough away from most of them to avoid muddle. It also retains in its alien
idiom the key sense of broaching, or cutting into, which entame also suggests (aligning it
with the “path-breaking” sense of method). Furthermore the surgical connotations fit well
with the technical analytic vocabulary of holds, levers, hooks and operators.
What is missing is the colloquial range of the term, its association with the mouth (the
first slice of bread or ham, the opening of the bottle, the commencement of discussions,
negotiations) or the opening indeed of hostilities (invasions, attacks). It is primarily un terme
du bouche (implying to cut off a first part of a whole to eat it). It is descended, after all, not
from technical official but popular Latin, in which the senses of defilement or violation are
turned, in a vulgar form of affirmation, to the good: the entame is the beginning of something
good (a meal or feast whether of food or words).
Deconstruction enters into a discourse, then, not simply to run up against it but, more
to the point, to begin feasting upon it. The “rupture” [also evoking the via-rupture—or path-
breaking] of a counter-movement or counter-discourse would become clear only through
“historical analysis.” Bass’s choice is justified also by its semantic opposition to decision
(which is collocated in the passage with absolute beginning and the conscious “subject”).
Deconstruction would not be the movement of opening implied by a conscious decision, but
its incision would nonetheless be guided by historical trends or movements in the field. This
signals a first rather important methodological issue. The point of incision, the entame,
 12

remains both quite technical (in the medical sense) and quite unmethodical—and anti-
technical—in its connotations. Certain procedures must be followed before one can make a
slice into a discourse yet, and here our own methods are in agreement with (along the same
lines as) Derrida’s remarks suggest, there seems to be considerable flexibility in the choice of
where one takes this “first slice.”

2. Paleonymy
It is worth recalling Kierkegaard’s warning, though, about “what the philosophers say
about actuality,” which, he says, “is as disappointing as when you see a sign in a second hand
store that reads: Pressing Done Here. If you went in with your clothes to have them pressed
you would be fooled: the sign is for sale” (E/O 50). Accordingly, if the first approach
requires attention to what is said, the second requires a shift in focus, an emptying out of the
statement itself, what we might call a paleonymic procedure that retains the old concept but
allows its conventional or traditional designations—its sense and the conceptual or syntactic
space around it—to become loosened before it can be firmed up in a new, more powerful,
designation. “Paleonymy” is a coinage by Jacques Derrida, designating the method
according to which old names can be utilized in novel circumstances where existing terms
are inadequate. Derrida, of course, does not invent the procedure but rather discovers it at
work covertly in the texts of the tradition at significant moments.

3. Différance
Différance is a term that Derrida coins on the basis of a pun that the French language makes
possible. An understanding of this term is helpful because it can explain a lot about
Derrida’s apparently “mischievous” playing with language and ideas. I put “mischievous” in
quotation marks because many people have misunderstood the powerful implications of his
witty strategy. The pun is possible because in French the word différer can mean either to
differ or to defer, depending on context.

Différence: to differ from something and to defer full identity and presence

If I were comparing two different objects of the same generic type (this hat is different from
this one) I’d use différer just as I would if I was putting off an appointment (let’s defer it
until a time when we’ll both be free). The one, take note, implies spatiality (difference)
while the other implies temporality (deferral). What Derrida is asking us to do is to combine
both, normally mutually exclusive, meanings in the one new term différance. The pun
involves the use of the little letter a. The French différence might mean either difference or
deferral. Derrida’s new term, spelt with an “a” instead of an “e,” should be taken to mean
both difference and deferral simultaneously. The first part of the pun we can call the
performative--or auto-referential--aspect. What this means is that by both differing from
itself (it means two different things at once) and deferring until infinity any final meaning (it
cannot at any one time mean both differ and defer) the word itself is a performance of its
meaning. Différance just is what différance means. The second part of the pun involves the
fact that Derrida’s misspelling is only noticeable when the word is written. Saying
différence and différance makes no difference in French. It is pronounced the same way with
or without the alteration. What this brings to our attention is the difference between
phoneme (audible mark) and grapheme (written, visible mark) and a certain imperceptibility
 13

of this particular difference. It is this imperceptible difference that Derrida is using in his
article “Différance” to draw our attention to the simultaneously absent and present trace,
which as a structuring principle is both inaudible and invisible but which allows for the
supplement of the audible for the visible and vice versa. In that article, he then goes on to
show the same structurality at work in the relation between language and ideas, and between
the sensible and intelligible fields of experience, too—that is, thoughts and sensible intuitions
turn out to be related as repetitions of the same in a mutually parasitical structure.

So we can say that Différance is the word that Derrida coins to describe and perform the way
in which any single meaning of a concept or text arises only by the effacement of other
possible meanings, which are themselves only deferred, left over, for their possible activation
in other contexts. Différance thus both describes and performs the situation, or the
conditions, under which all identities and meanings can occur—so that any text can be
repeated in an infinite number of possible contexts for an infinite number of potential but
undetermined addressees. The term operates as a powerful modification of the ordinary
notions of identity and difference.

4. Enunciation
The French linguist Emile Benveniste is responsible for outlining the need to make a
distinction between what he calls the subject of the énoncé and subject of the énunciation. In
two influential arguments Benveniste focuses on the role and implications of the ubiquitous
first person pronoun (and its reciprocal second person), used at least implicitly in every
language known to man and woman. In “On the Nature of Pronouns” he notes that the first
person, “I,” operates in a way quite unlike other pronouns because it is essentially linked to
the exercise of language. In other words, the sign I links Saussure’s two dimensions of
language, the collective intelligence of langue and the ephemeral individual acts of parole: “it
is this property that establishes the basis for individual discourse, in which each speaker takes
over all the resources of language for his own behalf” (220). In fact the I not only links the
otherwise heterogeneous dimensions of langue and parole but it also keeps its speakers
unaware of this profound difference. What is peculiar about the signs I and you is that they
are essentially empty of meaning except when they are being used. So the reality to which I
or you refers is solely a reality of discourse. They refer to nothing but the fact that someone
is speaking or has spoken (and nothing changes when we consider fictional or reported
dialogue). Benveniste states the precise definition for I as follows: “I is the individual who
utters the present instance of discourse containing the linguistic instance I” (218). By taking
the always implicit and often explicit situation of “address” into account, one has the
symmetrical definition for you: “the individual spoken to in the present instance of discourse
containing the instance you.” Now after Saussure we know that all signs are intrinsically
empty of meaning, which is determined only in the repetitions of institutions, systems and
events. However, I and you are instances of signs that lack even the possibility of material
reference. These signs cannot be misused because they “do not assert anything, they are not
subject to the condition of truth and escape all denial” (220). The implications are far
reaching. First by indicating the situation of the speaker yet by escaping the conditions
normally attributed to language (especially when it is regarded as an instrument of
communication), the pronoun tells us something about the relation of the human animal to
the language she speaks. Language is not something the human subject uses (as Rene
 14

Descartes and the traditions of modernity that follow his lead had always asserted), but
rather, the human subject is something only made possible by language. In his 1958 article,
“Subjectivity in Language,” Benveniste underlines this point:
We are always inclined to that naïve concept of a primordial period in which a
complete man discovered another one, equally complete, and between the two of
them language was worked out little by little. This is pure fiction. We can never
get back to man separated by language and we shall never see him inventing it …
It is a speaking man whom we find in the world, a man speaking to another man,
and language provides the very definition of man. (224).
We probably should be a little careful here, because when Benveniste says that language
provides the very definition of man, we mustn’t assume, with theoretical linguistics, that we
know what language is. At this stage language provides us with the definition of man only
because of the peculiarity of personal pronouns. The foundation of “subjectivity” is
determined, according to him, by the linguistic status of the person:
Consciousness of self is only possible if it is experienced by contrast. I use I only
when I am speaking to someone who will be a you in my address. It is this
condition of dialogue that is constitutive of person, for it implies that reciprocally
I becomes you in the address of the one who in his turn designates himself as I”
(224-225).
So the basis of subjectivity, if we take language as a model, would not be those aspects that
constitute either its lexical content (meaning) or its formal and grammatical rules, but it
would only be discoverable in the exercise of language. It thus becomes necessary to
recognize an irreducible division corresponding to that between enunciation and statement
(énoncé). The subject of the statement seems fixed in time, a snapshot of a moment that has
immediately passed, already fading in its enunciation. The speaker is already in principle out
of the picture and all that remains is his representative in language. What this means is
simply that subjectivity comes into being in language alone and that, in speaking, the human
subject is irreconcilably divided in himself. A temporal disjunction between the subject
speaking (enunciation) and the subject represented in speech (statement) implies that with the
single pronoun I, there are always at least two subjects: a subject who is speaking and a
subject represented in speech. By focusing on one we necessarily lose sight of the other.
There are instances that bring this situation to light rather obviously. The old paradox of the
Cretan Liar provides a fine example. When someone says “I am lying,” the I must refer to a
different subject than the one who makes the statement. When someone says “I am dead” a
similar situation arises. The I in principle (and thus in fact) lives on beyond the I who
speaks. This is easily demonstrated by the fact that the meaning of the statement is the same
whether it is true or false at the moment of utterance and is destined to be true anyway
independently of any individual speaker or writer. But it is this “at the moment of utterance”
that loses its anchor once we begin to focus on the modality of personal address. Benveniste
reminds us that “linguistic time is self-referential” (227). The eternally present moment is an
illusion that covers up or sutures the fundamental disjunction in language according to which
a present moment (the moment of utterance) can only ever appear as a representation (the
statement).

Benveniste’s distinction plays a decisive role in the work of Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes,
Julia Kristeva and Michel Foucault, who are some of the “names” we associate with the
 15

category of critical theory called poststructuralism. For Lacan this distinction in language
corresponds exactly to Freud’s distinction between consciousness and the unconscious. For
Lacan, since the subject comes into being through language he does so through the exercise
of signifying articulation—the act of enunciation. As soon as he comes into being he finds
himself not as he is (what Lacan would call the truth of his being) but as he imagines himself
to be—that is as a representation (at the level of the statement). In order to discover the
subject of the unconscious the analyst must focus on the level of enunciation (performance,
expression)—in order to recognize the truth of the subject in the articulation of language—its
enunciation. Lacan puts it like this: “In order to be situated in the locus of the Other, the
presence of the unconscious is to be sought in any discourse in its enunciation” (Ecrits 834).
So the relation between statement and enunciation (the said and the saying) actualizes the
divided structure of the psychoanalytic subject and helps us further to grasp the difference
between the imaginary (fixed and complete image of person) and the symbolic (the
constitutive function of language).

Roland Barthes explicitly draws attention to the imaginary function of the I in classic realist
fiction in his S/Z. He draws attention to the use of the personal pronoun as character forming
and rethinks the distinction énoncé/enunciation as that between a character (for traditional
readings) and a figure:
In principle, the character who says “I” has no name (Proust’s narrator is an
outstanding example); in fact, however, I immediately becomes a name, his
name. In the story (and in many conversations), I is no longer a pronoun, but a
name, the best of names: to say I is inevitably to attribute signifieds to oneself;
further, it gives one a biographical duration, it enables one to undergo, in one’s
imagination, an intelligible “evolution,” to signify oneself as an object with a
destiny, to give a meaning to time. On this level, I (and notably the narrator of
Sarrasine) is therefore a character. The figure is altogether different: it is not a
combination of semes concentrated on a legal name, nor can biography,
psychology, or time encompass it: it is an illegals, impersonal, anachronistic
configuration of symbolic relationships. As figure, the character can oscillate
between two roles, without this oscillation having any meaning, for it occurs
outside biographical time (outside chronology): the symbolic structure is
completely reversible: it can be read in any direction … As a symbolic ideality,
the character has no Name; he is nothing but a site for the passage (and return) of
the figure. (S/Z 68).
All of S/Z’s polarities can be situated on the model of énoncé/enunciation. What is revealed,
if anything, is that, above the bar (on the level of the statement) we find the sum total of
determinations, institutions, codes and systematizations—the whole sedimented world of the
statement and its theoretical conditions of truth and falsity. Beneath the bar, however, we
find the conditions of discourse itself in an essentially empty sign.

Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”
Alan Bass, tr. Writing and Difference (1966), pp. 278-95
 16

Derrida begins his essay by noting that structures have always informed Western thinking but
have not been paid sufficient attention due to the very nature of the structure themselves: because
they are essential to the very process of thought, they have been viewed as natural and inevitable
and therefore more or less unquestionable. Derrida takes up as his subject matter the largely
unexamined structurality of these structures, and he begins by noting that “By orienting and
organizing the coherence of the system, the centre of a structure permits the play of its elements
inside the total form… Nevertheless, the center also closes off the play which is opens up and
makes possible. As center, it is the point at which the substitution of contents, elements, or terms
is no longer possible” (196).

This notion of the center is essential for Derrida’s analysis of the structure of language (which
Derrida argues is the structure of all existence). However, because “the center, which is by
definition unique, constituted the very thing within a structure which while governing the
structure, escapes structurality,” Derrida asserts that, within classical thought, “the center is,
paradoxically, within the structure and outside it… the totality has its center elsewhere. The
center is not the center” (196). Derrida pushes this destabilized notion of the center to the point
of a “rupture” in the history of thought on structurality where “it was necessary to begin thinking
that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that
the center had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of nonlocus in
which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play” (197). This rupture, this
deconstruction of the center thus created a world where “the absence of the transcendental
signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely” (197). In this move, Derrida
has not just taken a new step in a known field but has invented a new way to walk on a piece of
land that is both undiscovered and omnipresent.

Therefore, even the most radical thinkers in the past – Derrida cites Nietzsche, Freud, and
Heidegger – have offered only limited critiques of operations within the traditionally centered
structure. Derrida asserts that “there are two heterogeneous ways of erasing the difference
between the signifier and the signified: one, the classic way [of the aforementioned thinkers],
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” (198). This second way is
ultimately characteristic of all of Derrida’s work in this excerpt: without fail, he seeks to move to
a new and entirely different mode of thinking instead of simply moving to new thoughts within
the same old system.

Derrida goes on to consider a number of areas in which this destabilization, this internal
decentering takes place. He first demonstrates how “the ethnologist accepts into his discourse the
premises of ethnocentrism at the very moment when he denounces them” as a general illustration
of his principle that the application of his critique to the sciences “is a question of explicitly and
systematically posing the problem of the status of a discourse which borrows from a heritage the
resources necessary for the deconstruction of that heritage itself” (199). In short, he seeks “to
preserve as an instrument something whose truth value he criticizes” (201), which is exactly
what Derrida has done with language and discourse (and in so doing has done to every other
field, scientific, linguistic, philosophical or otherwise, because, after all, everything is discourse).
Or, rather, what Derrida has shown language and discourse to be doing to themselves: “No
 17

longer is any truth value attributed to [these old concepts of empirical discovery]; there is a
readiness to abandon them, if necessary, should other instruments 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. This is how the
language of the social sciences criticizes itself” (201).

The remainder of the essay consists of Derrida explaining three key terms that flow from his
deconstruction of the structure of discourse: bricolage, play, and supplementary.

Bricolage is a technique that “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 that are to be used and to which one tries by trial and error
to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appear necessary, or to try several of
them at once, even if their form and their origin are heterogeneous – and so forth” (202). That is,
because any sort of concrete link between signifier and signified has been shown to be
impossible, one is therefore free to use whatever tools in whatever ways and in whatever
combination one wishes to discuss the matter at hand.

Bricolage is permitted by that which Derrida terms “play,” and which he explains in the
following quote: “If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infiniteness 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. The field is in effect that of play,
that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite… instead of being too large,
there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions”
(206). Play is Derrida’s way of simultaneously recognizing the infinite range of deconstruction is
possible not because there is an infinite range of information but because the inherent quality of
all information is to be lacking and for there to be no suitable material (information) with which
to fill that lack. This leads to the notion of the supplementary: “The overabundance 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” (207). Because positive, concrete definition is impossible for
any term, every term necessarily requires a supplement or supplements, something or some
things which help(s) it exist and be understood. Yet, at the same time, the object(s) which the
supplement is (are) supplementing is (are) (a) supplements itself. Extend this web in all
directions and the relationship between bricolage, play, and the supplementary begins to make
sense.

And there you have it: discourse, destabilization, language critiquing itself, bricolage, play, the
supplementary. Of course, the discussion here barely begins to scratch the surface of the
implications made by Derrida, for within not even a full fourteen pages of text, has established
the foundation of one of the most significant revolutions in the history of thought. Of course,
saying that Derrida demonstrated how the history of thought contradicted itself and in so doing
imploded the foundation of Western philosophy would certainly fit better with a
deconstructionist view of the world. Yet, there is scant little chance of denying that Derrida
himself holds some special place in this development: if not as its father then at least as its
catalyst.
 18

………………………

Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences may be read as the
document of an event, although Derrida actually commences the essay with a reservation
regarding the word event, as it entails a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural or
structuralist thought to reduce or suspect (278). This, I infer, refers to the emphasis within
structuralist discourse on the synchronous analysis of systems and relations within them, as
opposed to a diachronic schemata occupied with uncovering genetic and teleological content in
the transformations of history. The event which the essay documents is that of a definitive
epistemological break with structuralist thought, of the ushering in of post-structuralism as a
movement critically engaging with structuralism, but also traditional humanism and empiricism
here it becomes the structurality of structure (278) itself which begins to be thought. Immediately
however, Derrida notes that he is not presuming to place himself outside of the critical circle or
totality in order to so criticise. While the function of the centre of the structure is identified as
that which reduces the possibility of thinking this structurality of structure, even though it has
always been at work (278), that is, it has always been an economic and economising factor
within Western philosophy limiting the play of the structure where I understand play to be
associated with uneconomic deconstructive notions such as supplementarity, the trace, and
differnce, Derrida notes that even today the notion of a structure lacking any center [sic]
represents the unthinkable itself (279).

This appears to present a conundrum. For while the centre closes off play, it apparently cannot be
done without, at least, it cannot be simply discarded without it re-emerging somewhere else
within the totality. The conundrum is in fact a paradox and a coherent contradiction of classical
thought, which echoes the Freudian theory of neurotic symptoms where a symbol at once
expresses the desire to fulfil and suppress a given impulse (339). Hence, the contradiction
expresses the force of a desire (279). The centre is, according to Derrida, both within and without
the totality it is an elsewhere (Derridas italics) of the totality.

It is also a difficult and paradoxical concept to grasp. The notion of a full presence informs
metaphysical discourses in movements aiming to uncover origins or to decode, prophesy even,
the aims of philosophical and metaphysical thought. Derrida then makes what I read as an
important statement: that the entire history of the concept of structuremust be thought of as a
series of substitutions of center [sic] for center, as a linked chain of determinations of the center
(279) and the centre thus receives many different forms or names. The name here refers to the
name as primary concept grounding the subject in the immediate self-presence of the I, rather
than as signifier as part of the constitution of the subject as self-present, and here is reflected the
Lacanian observation in The insistence of the letter in the unconscious (1988: 79 - 106). Lacan
writes that not only here is no meaningsustained by anything other than a reference to another
meaning (83), but like the substitutions of centre for centre, We are forced, then, to accept the
notion of an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier (87).

Echoing Derridas linked chain of determinations, Lacan here also writes that, namely, the
signifying chain, gives an approximate idea: rings of a necklace that is a ring in another necklace
made of rings (86). Derrida continues on to propose a decentring, which refers to thinking the
 19

structurality of structure, and offers several names, not echoing Foucaultian author-functions but
as hints or signals these names being those of Nietzsche, who substituted Being and Truth with
play and sign refusing Truth, the name of Freud who placed the Descartian consciousness qua I
think therefore I am under critique by the construction of the unconscious; and that of Heidegger
and the placing under suspicion of the determination of being as presence (280) Conscious of
limited space, I will move on to Derridas central (aware that this word entails a certain paradox)
concern in this text, which is a deconstruction of certain passages by the structural anthropologist
Claude Levi-Strauss. The guiding thread Derrida chooses is Levi-Strauss opposition between
nature and culture. (I am in parts paraphrasing elements from page 282 287). Derrida writes that
Levi-Strauss encounters a scandal, which is the incest prohibition (283). The scandal is in that
the prohibition is simultaneously universal and thus natural, while also at the same time as a
system of norms and interdicts (283): it is cultural. The contradiction encountered by Levi-
Strauss is that the difference established in the nature/culture binary opposition is erased or at
least questioned.

Due to this erasure of difference the origin of this prohibition becomes unthinkable as the whole
of philosophical conceptualisationis designed (283/284) to leave the possibility of the
conceptualisation unthinkable, that is, the meaning of the construction of meaning, difference
having been erased, becomes itself impossible to bring to account. Levi-Strauss, by way of this
realization, is forced to move from metaphysics to metacommentary (cf. Jameson, 1988) because
even though he criticises the truth-value of the nature/culture distinction, he affirms a certain
logic thereof, fully justifying the use of this logic as a methodological tool. Here Derrida claims a
double-intention (284) on Levi-Strauss part. Whilst continuing (eg in The Savage Mind) to
challenge the worth of the opposition, he nonetheless presents in the same work the notion of
bricolage a type of borrowing of concepts of a ruined text, which borrowing may even be critical
language itself.

Derridas following comments on Levi-Strauss The Raw and the Cooked highlight two points:

1. The reference myth of the book is an arbitrary choice. Levi-Strauss himself states that he could
have taken any one myth as his starting point. But he has chosen this one because of its irregular
position (286).

2.There is no unity or absolute source of the myth (286). It all begins with an already given
structure hence we cannot invoke an absolute source or centre. Indeed structural discourse on
myths mythological discourse must itself be mythomorphic. Derrida quoting from The Raw and
the Cooked: It follows that this book on myths is itself a kind of myth. An important sentence
follows shortly thereafter: The musical model chosen by Levi-Strauss for the composition (my
italics) of his book is apparently justified by this absence of any real or fixed center [sic] of the
mythical or mythological discourse (287). Musical composition like mathematical calculation is
primarily, in post-modern culture even exclusively so I would argue, concerned with form the
absence of a centre foreshadows the dissolution of the concept, of referential meaning breaching
the bar between form and content.

Here Derrida notes that Levi-Strauss cannot answer the question whether all discourses on myth
are finally equivalent. The result of this is that even though structuralism critiques empiricism,
 20

Levi-Strauss always presents his works as empirical essays open to future invalidation, and this
makes the location of a centre impossible Two more points will have to suffice here: 1. The
nature of the linguistic field inevitably excludes totalisation. The field is one of play (289). 2.

A surplus effect occurs as a supplement, which refuses determination of the centre (289). Levi-
Strauss articulates this field of play in terms of a certain nostalgia (see pp. 291/292), for it makes
a totalising aim useless. It is thus negative where Derrida rather proposes a Nietzschian joyous
affirmation of the play of the world and the innocence of becoming (292). It is a determination of
the non-centre in terms other than those of loss, guilt, or nostalgia.

In summary, Derrida sees Levi-Strauss as making [the] disconcerting discovery [that there is no
centre, no secure philosophical ground] in the discovery of his researches and then retreating
[into guilt or nostalgia] from a full recognition of its implications (Lodge, 1988: 107) Derrida
concludes with the question of the difference of this irreducible difference (293) between the
above, noting that it takes the terrifying form of monstrosity (293), which would be a good point
from which to move to the deconstruction of the monster as both the terrifying but that which
also (de)monstrates as monstrance, explored in the essay Geschlecht II: Heideggers Hand
(Derrida, 1987: 161 196).

REFERENCES Derrida, J (1978) Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences, in Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass. London: Routledge, pp 278-294. (1987)
Geschlecht II: Heideggers Hand in Deconstruction and Philosophy, ed.

……………………………..

About Bororo myth.

The Raw and the Cooked is one of the seminal works of structuralist anthropology, and probably
the best known of all of Lévi-Strauss' works. It begins by looking at one Bororo myth and ends
up examining a whole collection of myths from tropical South America. It is not the analysis of
the myths themselves that is important, however, but rather the methodology of the analysis,
where Lévi-Strauss sets out the basic principles of a structural approach to mythology.

The basic idea is that myths cannot be understood in isolation, but only as parts of an entire myth
system. A structural analysis of a myth system involves elucidating the shared features of
different myths and the transformations which link them. It is these relationships and
transformations between myths that are important, rather than the details of individual myths; it
is the systems of these that are significant in the context of the broader culture. Lévi-Strauss'
hope is that this kind of structural approach will provide new insight into the study of mythology,
and the The Raw and the Cooked is the first book in a series devoted to this end.

All this is not presented as abstract theory, but is demonstrated by application to almost two
hundred myths of tropical South America (with some references to North American and
European myths and customs). Lévi-Strauss' immense knowledge of mythology is apparent, and
the result is very impressive.
 21

While some of the connections Lévi-Strauss makes between myths seem a little implausible and
some of his constructions a little contrived, it is hard to argue with the barrage of evidence he
brings to support them. I suspect that some of his analyses are vulnerable to a "neutral model" of
myth employing some kind of statistical analysis, but that such a theory would probably validate
some of his ideas. (I also suspect that he would be very keen on seeing such a theory
formulated.) At any rate, since his avowed goal was only to find a new and fruitful viewpoint
from which to look at mythology, it is hard to see The Raw and the Cooked as anything other
than an unqualified success.

Some of the book is fairly heavy going, but anyone really interested in mythology or
anthropology will be well rewarded for the effort. I look forward to reading the other books in
the Introduction to a Science of Mythology series.

………………………………………………………………….

English 456: C20 Criticism and Theory

Remarks about Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play

in the Discourse of the Human Sciences"

Al Drake | Cyber Cafe | Thurs. 6-7 | 714-434-1612

Home | Syllabus | Policies

Nietzsche's deconstructive analysis of the relation between words and the world leads smoothly
to Derrida's comments about the problem with the structuralist enterprise of anthropologist
Claude Levi-Strauss. Structuralism, after all, has at least partly borrowed its concepts from
Saussurean linguistics. At base, Derrida's criticism is that the very concept of "structure" is a
metaphor; it is not a given reality that might be said to ground the whole project of structuralism,
guaranteeing order and intelligibility to its objects of study. (I am using the word "metaphor" in
the Nietzschean sense that it is a word used to impose order and intelligibility on a world we
cannot access directly.) If the system is based upon structure as a ground or "center," how can
one evade the philosophical baggage that kind of term carries with it? To say that something is
the "center" of the system and that this center is itself beyond analysis or "play" is more or less to
repeat the gesture made by theologians and philosophers who made their center concepts like
"the Forms," "God," "Reason," and so forth.

The way to begin dealing with Derrida's critique is to examine his statements about Levi-Strauss'
use of the traditional binary opposition between "nature" and "culture." This aspect of Levi-
Strauss' work shows both his astuteness as an anthropologist and the philosophical problems he
ends up re-invoking in his attempt to avoid certain road-blocks that his own subject throws up
before him. Levi-Strauss himself is by no means simplistic or naïve: he is well aware of the
problem with the oppositional relation nature/culture. As he points out in a passage that Derrida
cites at length, the practice of incest creates a scandal for the anthropologist in that it is both
universal (which means incest should belong to the realm of "nature") and particular (which
 22

means that it ought to be considered an affair of "culture"). There are many different cultural
ways of prohibiting incest, and yet the prohibition in general appears to be something universal
and thus natural. So as Levi-Strauss knows, the two terms "nature" and "culture" are not
mutually exclusive and stable; they are instead somehow implicated the one in the other. It is
going to be difficult, then, to take such an opposition and use it as the solid foundation for one's
anthropological project.

What is an anthropologist to do? Levi-Strauss' answer is practical: he fashions an intellectual

activity or discourse he calls "bricolage," with the one practicing it to be called a "bricoleur." The
word is an interesting one-the French verb "bricoler" means "to do odd jobs," i.e. to serve as a
handyman of sorts and make things out of the materials one has lying about. This kind of activity
Levi-Strauss opposes to the more systematic operations of an engineer who draws up his plans
with a sense of the whole and only afterwards goes to work on the specific tasks of construction.
In essence, the bricoleur will use an opposition such as "nature/culture" as a tool while not
accepting it as philosophical truth.

The most important example of bricolage that Derrida examines is Levi-Strauss' analysis of the
Bororo Myth. It has less to do with the above binary set of terms as with the notion of structure
itself: Levi-Strauss, Derrida points out, is willing to take as his starting point a certain myth, but
he admits that there is no particular reason for treating this myth as a key to understanding how
myth works. Levi-Strauss, reflecting upon his own methodology, openly acknowledges the need
to abandon (in Derrida's words) "all reference to a center, to a subject, to a privileged reference,
to an origin…. (1121). Levi-Strauss' way of explaining his methodology here is to say that his
book on myth "is itself a kind of myth" (1122). In other words, like myth, it does not try to go
back to the absolute source of the thing in question-there is no central myth, and no truly
"centering" way of dealing with myth, which is after all prolific in its endless variations and
anonymity of authorship. The main problem that Derrida associates with this move on Levi-
Strauss' part is that in his failure to pose questions of epistemology (literally "the theory of
knowledge")-questions that would deal with the first principles or ground of anthropological
discourse about myth-the anthropologist risks becoming a mere empiricist in the specific sense
of one who doesn't think through the reasons for which an activity is being undertaken and the
methods by which it is to be undertaken. The validity of one's methods doesn't come into sharp
enough focus, in other words, and one just goes about the practical tasks and experiments called
for by the field of anthropology or some other discipline.

But perhaps more important is Derrida's commentary about Levi-Strauss's employment of

variants on the term "supplementarity" because it gets to the basis of Derrida's broader critique of
structuralism. Levi-Strauss, as Derrida cites him, seems not to be in despair over the inability to
exhaust his subject matter, myth, to "totalize" it: "In his endeavor to understand the world, man
therefore always has at his disposal a surplus of signification. . . . This distribution of a
supplementary allowance . . . 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" (1124). Yet this "supplementarity" is a curious
and contradictory movement, as Derrida points out on page 1123: it appears both to refer back to
something lacking and to add something new. Levi-Strauss' thought, in attempting to follow this
"overabundance" of signification, comes to depend heavily on concepts like "play,"
 23

"discontinuity," and "chance." In a sense, says, Derrida, Levi-Strauss is rightly rejecting the
traditional alignment between what Derrida (following Martin Heidegger) calls "the
determination of Being as presence" and history, which latter endeavor is oriented toward "the
appropriation of truth in presence and self-presence, toward knowledge in consciousness-of-self"
(1124). The above phrases would take much time to explain adequately, but let's just remind
ourselves from our previous readings in structuralism that it tends to put aside or bracket out
notions of development through time, favoring rather the "synchronic" element of structure. If
you study the structure of something without concern for how it came to be structured as it is,
you can't account for changes in the structure. Derrida's ultimate point about Levi-Strauss'
endeavors as a structuralist is that he remains caught up in a kind of nostalgia for an absent
center or origin or presence: "he must always conceive of the origin of a new structure on the
model of catastrophe" (1125). So even in his advocacy of a structurality that may be analyzed by
means of terms like "supplement" and "play," Levi-Strauss is compelled by the hidden
complexities and contradictions within such terms to conceive of his project in nostalgic terms-a
longing for an anterior and pure society motivates his researches into ancient cultures and their
myths.

This nostalgia Derrida calls "the structuralist thematic of broken immediacy" and "the saddened,
negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauistic side of the thinking of play" (1125). So much for
structuralism as a radical break with traditional philosophy. To this he opposes "the Nietzschean
affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to
an active interpretation." This part of the essay is quite complex in that it seems Derrida is
aligning himself, choosing, the second way of thinking about "play." But is he? Remember that
one of the names he associates with the "rupture" in the thinking about structure is Nietzsche, the
author of that remarkable deconstructive essay we read in a previous class. In writing about this
supposed rupture, Derrida places the word "event" (i.e. the rupture) in quotation marks and
refuses to describe it as a clean break with traditional philosophy. If there is one thread running
all through the essay, it is that attempts to jettison traditional concepts like that of the sign, the
center, and so forth have always involved the attempter in traditional philosophical quandaries.
Affirming a concept like "play," that is, over against rigid older ways of conceiving a thing, does
not necessarily result in perpetual affirmation of the "incredible non-centeredness of being" (to
adapt a phrase from a film title). For that matter, even the joyous Nietzschean affirmation of
which Derrida writes would not necessarily come without consequence or philosophical
predicaments of its own. You cannot even offer a critique of, say, "structure" or "the sign"
without making use of these concepts, which in fact open up the intellectual space within which
the deconstructionist must work. Note that the essay ends on anything but an affirmative note-it
seems almost fearful of what may follow the "region of historicity" (the sixties, scandalously
reductive though my use of such a standard historical term may be) within which the piece is
written.

…………………………………………………..