Page 99 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

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

of those "series of substitutions of center for center," another in the line, for example, of "authorial Notes
intention," "text," "reader," and so on. The answer is going to be yes and no---it succeeds
partway but doesn’t ultimately come to grips with the radical implications of decentering, and
thereby ends up being another substitution for the centre it claimed to be doing away with. For,
Derrida argues, even the most radical attempts to think through the absence of the centre, to
decentre the centre, remain trapped in a circle, which takes the form "of the relationship between
the history of metaphysics and the destruction of the history of metaphysics."
That is, in order to attack centred structures, one has to make use of concepts that come from them,
and in so doing one resurrects these, gives them validity, at the very moment at which one makes
use of them.
And this is inescapable. There is ultimately no outside where we can stand, where we can centre
ourselves to critique metaphysics; because its conceptual assumptions run so deep we are always
caught in them, always part of the game. The most basic concepts we use to try and topple the
structures come from these very structures, and thus we give them back their power at the very
moment we are striving to deprive them of it. Now, there are always kinds of questions that need
not confront the problem of what underpins them (large areas of physics, e.g., can simply take
nature as given, objects as occupying a defined spatial and temporal place), but this simply means
that the metaphysical centres have been assumed in the very demarcation of the field (thus, the
field of Newtonian physics, e.g. builds into its frame the very assumptions that quantum mechanics
later renders unstable---and the theological dimension of this was manifest in Newton, who insisted,
for example, on absolute space rather than relative space on essentially theological grounds).
But there are nonetheless different ways of being "caught in the game" and these are not the same,
and do not have the same consequences. And through the exemplary case of Levi-Strauss, Derrida
(1) addresses this problem of decentering existing conceptual and ideational frameworks while
having to rely on the ideas and concepts that constitute them, and (2) examines specifically the
implications of how one decenters them, what difference the way in which one enters the circle
makes.
8.3 Part Two

Rather than to try and follow through this section step by step, I think it will become clearer if we
abandon that attempt and reverse course, starting from near the end of the essay. Specifically, the
paragraph, which I quote extracts from:
"As a turning toward the presence, lost or impossible, of the absent origin, this structuralist
thematic of broken immediateness is thus the sad, negative, nostalgic, guilty Rousseauistic facet
of thinking the free play of which the Nietzschean affirmation...would be the other side. This
affirmation then determines the non-center otherwise than as loss of centre." If there is a thesis
that Derrida proposes regarding Levi-Strauss, this is about as close as you are going to get. The
basic point is that there are two opposed ways of approaching structures without centres: as
acentric or non-centered or as something that once had a centre, but no longer does. And in the
case of the latter, that moment of anterior presence, of fullness (that is now absent) haunts the
decentered structure, and thus remains present as it were, precisely in the form of an absence .
This present absence re-centres the structure at the very moment at which it is claimed that the
structure has no centre.
This basic critique also underpins Derrida’s remarks on the structuralist "neutralisation of time
and history". On the one hand, by "reducing" history, by bracketing it off, Levi-Strauss (rightly)
undermines the link between history and the metaphysics of presence (exposes futility of a search
for the historical origin, for example).
Let me set aside the question of what "affirmation" of acentricity and free play would look like
(Derrida doesn?t himself answer this question, except to acknowledge the problem that such an
affirmation could itself be seen as constituting yet another centre). Instead, we need to see that
Derrida’s reading of Levi-Strauss repeatedly emphasises the basic tension/contradiction between

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 93