Page 113 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 9: Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’—Jacques Derrida: Critical Appreciation

a firm principle which accounts for all things and all variance, than accept the necessity of Notes
interpretation. The second interpreration of interpretation is what Derrida calls Neitzschean
affirmation. Briefly put, Nietzsche said that truth was error-that all our cherished concepts of
truth and certainty are merely lies the truth of which we are incapable of doubting because we
desire that they be true. Nietzschean affirmation, a kind of impossible request, would be the
acceptance of this case. It would embrace the necessity of interpretation and not miss truth. Its life
would be fulfilled by play alone, by "the security of play." It would no longer need the security of
a fixed purpose or all-embracing concept.,
We cannot choose between the two. We are the two, half-bricolage and half-engineer. We are
nostalgic for an abiding, all-embracing center as presence and as bricolage, we are capable of
reveling in play. Presently we cannot choose (choice would presuppose some common fixed
ground from which to choose, but this is impossible given the interminable play and differences
which separates any two positions or signs.
"Here there is a kind of question." We cannot choose and yet half of us, the bricoleur, criticizes the
other half with its own language. Something new is in the making. We still look away from what
is being born. Derrida's suggestion is that we be aware of the condition and confront its monstrosity
face to face. And prepare for it.

1. An event--a rupture and a redoubling--has occurred in the concept of structure.
2. Traditionally, structure has had a neutralizing or limiting point of presence, a fixed
origin, a center whose function--to orient, balance, and organize--limited the play of
the structure.
3. The center--which contradictorily (expressing Desire) escapes the structure as the point
where change is interdicted--masters anxiety (in play oneself is at stake) on behalf of
an source or destiny, a full presence beyond play.
4. This history of the concept of structure is . . . the history of the substitution of metaphors
and metonomies expressing Being as presence: essence, existence, substance, subject,
truth, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth.
Once it was realized that the center has never been originally present, it became necessary
to think it as linguistic function: an infinite play of signifiers
This re-[visioning] of structure may be seen in Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, each of
whom still retained, necessarily, the language of metaphysics; therefore there have been
ongoing, mutually destructive commentaries.

There are two ways to erase the difference between signifier and signified:
1. the classic way, to reduce or derive the signifier, to submit the sign to thought [e.g., for Husserl,
the word expresses the thought];
2. JD way, by contrast, "putting into question the system in which the previous reduction
functioned; first and foremost, the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible."
Ethnology perhaps occupies a privileged place among the human sciences. It arose as European
dominance waned, and alongside the destruction of the history of metaphysics, but qua scientific
discourse, it necessarily retains the presuppositions of the ethnocentrism it seeks to deconstruct
. . . and can sustain vigilance regarding those historic metaphysical concepts.
Levi-Strauss is here chosen, mostly for his criticism of the language used in the social sciences.
From his first book, L-S uses and rejects the nature-culture opposition: after defining the first as
what is "universal and spontaneous" and the latter in terms of socially inculcated norms and laws,

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