Page 105 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

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

Self-Assessment Notes
1. Choose the correct options:
(i) Derrida first read his paper ‘Structure, Sign, and Plan in the Discourse of the Human
Science in ............... .
(a) 1966 (b) 1970
(c) 1965 (d) 1980
(ii) Derrida uses the classical debate on the opposition between ............... .
(a) Religion an culture (b) Culture and society
(c) Nature and culture (d) None of these
(iii) Derrida concludes his seminal work regarded as the ............... .
(a) Post-structuralist manifesto (b) Industrialist manifesto
(c) Both (a) and (b) (d) None of these
(iv) Derrida asserts that there are heterogeneous ways of erasing the difference between the
signifies and the signified ............... .
(a) Three (b) Two
(c) Four (d) Five
8.5 Summary

• 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".
• 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". 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". 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". 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". 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.

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