Page 103 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 8: Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’—Jacques Derrida: Detailed Study

what it seeks to contest." Semiotics and Phenomenology are similarly compromised. Semiotics Notes
stresses the fundamental connection of language to speech in a way that it undermines its insistence
on the inherently arbitrary nature of sign. Phenomenology rejects metaphysical truths in the favor
of phenomena and appearance, only to insist for truth to be discovered in human consciousness
and lived experience. To an extent Derrida seems to see this as inevitable, "There is no sense in
doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to attack metaphysics"; however, the awareness
of this process is important for him - "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." It is important to note that Derrida does not assert
the possibility of thinking outside such terms; any attempt to undo a particular concept is likely to
become caught up in the terms which the concept depends on. For instance: if we try to undo the
centering concept of 'consciousness' by asserting the disruptive counterforce of the 'unconscious',
we are in danger of introducing a new center. All we can do is refuse to allow either pole in a
system to become the center and guarantor of presence.
In validate this argument, Derrida takes up the example of Saussure's description of sign. In
Saussure, the 'metaphysics of presence' is affirmed by his insistence on the fact that a sign has two
components - the signifier and the signified, the signified which the mental and psychological.
This would imply that the meaning of a sign is present to the speaker when he uses in, in defiance
of the fact that meaning is constituted by a system of differences. That is also why Saussure insists
on the primacy of speaking. As soon as language is written down, a distance between the subject
and his words is created, causing meaning to become unanchored. Derrida however critiques this
'phonocentrism' and argues that the distance between the subject and his words exist in any case,
even while speaking - that the meaning of sign is always unanchored. Sign has no innate or
transcendental truth. Thus, the signified never has any immediate self-present meaning. It is itself
only a sign that derives its meaning from other signs. Hence a signified can be a signifier and vice
versa. Such a viewpoint entails that sign thus be stripped off its signified component. Meaning is
never present at face-value; we cannot escape the process of interpretation. While Saussure still
sees language as a closed system where every word has its place and consequently its meaning,
Derrida wants to argue for language as an open system. In denying the metaphysics of presence
the distances between inside and outside are also problematized. There is no place outside of
language from where meaning can be generated.
Derrida next considers the theme of decentering with respect to French structuralist Levi Strauss's
ethnology. Ethnology too demonstrates how although it sets out as a denouncement of Eurocentrism,
its practices and methodologies get premised on ethnocentricism in its study and research of the
'Other' - "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". Derrida uses the classical debate on the opposition between nature and culture with
respect to Levi Strauss's work. In his work, Elementary Structures, Strauss starts with the working
definition of nature as the universal and spontaneous, not belonging to any other culture or any
determinate norm. Culture, on the other hand, depends on a system of norms regulating society
and is therefore capable of varying from one social structure to another. But Strauss encountered
a 'scandal' challenging this binary opposition - incest prohibition. It is natural in the sense that is
it almost universally present across most communities and hence is natural. However, it is also a
prohibition, which makes it a part of the system of norms and customs and thereby cultural.
Derrida argues that this disputation of Strauss's theory is not really a scandal, as it the pre-
assumed binary opposition that makes it a scandal, the system which sanctions the difference
between nature and culture. To quote him, "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."

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