Page 97 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

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

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

CONTENTS
Objectives
Introduction
8.1 Essay of Derrida
8.2 Part One
8.3 Part Two
8.4 Text-Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences
8.5 Summary
8.6 Key-Words
8.7 Review Questions
8.7 Further Readings

Objectives

After reading this Unit students will be able to:
• Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences.
• Explain Derrida’s Essays.

Introduction
This essay briefly introduces and discusses Jacques Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play in the
Human Sciences". It contains short sections dealing with the key concepts treated in Derrida's
essay, but the emphasis is on the author's characteristic protocols of re-reading and deconstructing
primary texts. Ideas and methods introduced by Derrida are listed rather than elaborated on.

8.1 Essay of Derrida

Derrida’s essay divides into two parts:
1. "The structurality of structure": An examination of the shifting relationships between structure
and centre, and their implications. The results of this examination is roughly the following:
whereas traditionally, a structure was conceived of as grounded and stabilised by a moment of
presence called the centre, we are now at a time when that centring has been called into
question. And to call the centre into question is to open up a can of worms, destabilising and
calling into question the most basic building blocks of thought (Idea, origin, God, man etc.).
2. An analysis of Levi-Straussian structuralism as an instantiation of the problems of thinking
through the relationship between structure and centre. The basic point here comes at the end
of the essay, and can be stated in one sentence Whereas Levi-Straussian structuralism posits
itself as a decentring, it re-creates the centre in a particular way: as the loss of a centre. In other
words, how one decentres matters; and there is, above all, a crucial difference between conceiving
a structure as simply being acentric (of just not having a centre) and between conceiving of a
structure as being acentric because it has lost a centre it once had. It is precisely these two forms
of decentering that are in perpetual tension in Levi-Strauss? work. And, in the final analysis, his
"centres" itself upon the very loss of the centre it aims at: absence becomes a mode of presence.
So, let me go through each of these parts in some more detail.

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 91