My notes on Derrida’s paper, probably not perfect but good enough to post
‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’
Structuralism has undergone an ‘event’ (the term is used under erasure), which from the outside looks like a “rupture and a redoubling”
The idea of a structure is far older than structuralism itself — what makes structuralism unique is that it refuses to neutralise the structure by giving it a fixed point, a centre; in this way, structuralism allows for greater play (the centre creates the possibility of play, but also limits this)
The centre of a structure, insofar as it is a centre, cannot be transformed or replaced in any way, nor can its constitutive elements (which can be structures themselves)
Classical thought noted this behaviour of the centre, and concluded that the centre is essential for the structure without being structural itself; it simultaneously governs the structure and is outside of that structure: “The centre is at the centre of the totality, and yet, since the centre does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its centre elsewhere”
The idea of a centred structure, clearly contradictory, is the very image of rational thought, the foundation of its coherence
The centre, Derrida says, can be “called the origin or end, archē or telos”; this has important implications for understanding any teleology, since the centre will be both origin and end, will cause a progression towards itself
Any change in the structure, when it is (as it must always be) understood as having a centre, must therefore be related to a meaning that, since not yet present, either will be or has been present
The structure is therefore thought of as always fully present; the object of Derrida’s critique is this idea of Being as always fully present
The history of structure up till this rupture is therefore a series of substitutions, where one centre replaces another; structuralism proper begins here, when it considers the way structures themselves operate. Structuralism must introduce techniques for understanding how the centre can play its part without being part of the structure, and this is why the sign (signifier-signified) had to develop, to explain a process of always pointing to the next goal in the search for an actually present meaning
The signifier is a substitute for a signified which has never existed
Signification is always a process of differentiation. Since the signified is never present, the signifier doesn’t get its meaning from the signified, but from an infinite process of differentiating itself from other signifiers (the difference comes before the identity)
The “transcendental signified”, in being absent, governs and relates signs without ever being one
There are a few people in particular who developed this rupture: Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger. Nevertheless, they all (and Derrida too) remain in the realm of the metaphysics they critique, since to even formulate a critique is to be already caught within metaphysics, not only linguistically but also at the level of meaning, ideas, etc.; a sign must be understood as a signifier (sensible) and a signified (intelligible), and yet to critique this opposition by putting the opposition into question at all is to make it metaphysical again
“And what we are saying here about the sign can be extended to all the concepts and all the sentences of metaphysics, in particular to the discourse on “structure”. But there are several ways of being caught in this circle [...] Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, for example, worked within the inherited concepts of metaphysics. Since these concepts are not elements or atoms, and since they are taken from a syntax and a system, every particular borrowing brings along with it the whole of metaphysics. This is what allows these destroyers to destroy each other reciprocally”
Derrida takes the example of ethnology as an indication of the human sciences as a whole; evidently ethnology could not take shape until European discourse had been forcibly decentred, made to focus on something other than itself, by a variety of material circumstances. It is inevitable, since ethnology developed in Europe, that the ethnologist will use Eurocentric concepts, even while they work to undercut those concepts. Nevertheless, this can be done to greater and lesser degrees, and in different ways, which have different consequences: “It is a question of explicitly and systematically posing the problem of the status of a discourse which borrows from a heritage the resources necessary for the deconstruction of that heritage itself. A problem of economy and strategy”
He takes this general idea about ethnology and uses the example of what Lévi-Strauss says about the nature-culture opposition
Lévi-Strauss begins by defining the natural and the cultural, and immediately (literally the next sentence) encounters the incest prohibition, which makes that opposition untenable (he is aware of this, of course; Derridean critique is never a mere claim of hypocrisy). The incest prohibition must escape the nature-culture dichotomy, and possibly structures the entire ethnological conceptualisation
There are two ways to question this opposition: first, one can rigorously study the history of the concepts in a “step outside of philosophy” (he seems to be referring to Foucault); second, explicitly linked to Lévi-Strauss, one can utilise the concepts as tools while refusing to grant them any truth value. This, another opposition, will be used by Lévi-Strauss till his eventual death (in 2009, at 100 years old); it’s the only way to communicate linguistically, and even to think, since nobody can invent an entire discourse on their own
The bricolage method is itself “mythopoetic” (a term Lévi-Strauss uses to describe the structure of myths): he begins by picking a myth as a central point, but immediately states that no such myth has any right to a central role in the study; none of the myths have a source or unity that is ever given, the centre is rather deferred indefinitely. Both elements, aside from being typical of a decentring, are also the way Lévi-Strauss describes the myths he studies, wherein no element of the myth is central and the myth is never unified into a whole
If this is necessary, as Lévi-Strauss claims it is, there are still risks associated with it, including the risk of evaluating all discussion of myths as equally true, a risk which must be accepted and prevented to whatever degree possible
Structuralism is both a critique of empiricism, and a discourse that relies on empiricism at every point
There are two limits to totalisation, both present in Lévi-Strauss: first, totalisation can be impossible because it would require infinite work; second, totalisation can be impossible because the structure inherently prohibits totalisation. This second is implied by play, whereby the lack of a centre makes any totalisation always already impossible
This is quite similar to what Derrida calls “supplementarity”, deliberately playing off a contranym (to supplement something is to supply something that’s missing, but also to supply something additional). Whatever signifier replaces the centre will necessarily add to the structure, since the centre can never be reached. Supplementarity adds something to another thing, but only to a thing that is simultaneously whole and incomplete: “The overabundance of the signifier, its supplementary character, is thus the result of a finitude, that is to say, the result of a lack which must be supplemented”
Derrida claims that history is an essential part of the “metaphysics of presence” that he critiques, since it’s always a history between two presences, but clarifies that we cannot simply be ahistorical, which would require blind faith in the presence of the now
Structuralism itself can never account for the genesis of a structure, for reasons Derrida elaborates on elsewhere, but which can be summarised as: the specificity of any structure, in order to be studied, requires history proper to be subjected to the phenomenological reduction
“The presence of an element is always a signifying and substitutive reference inscribed in a system of differences and the movement of a chain. Play is always play of absence and presence, but if it is to be thought radically, play must be conceived of before the alternative of presence and absence. Being must be conceived as presence or absence on the basis of the possibility of play and not the other way around”
Derrida opposes the structuralist mourning at the discovery of absence to the Nietzschean, affirmative joy in play, where signification is never finished (and truth never reached), but interpretation is active and creative. In thinking in the Nietzschean way, the noncentre is no longer understood as a lack of a centre, it becomes something else entirely. This is a move beyond humanism, truth, presence, origins, ends, and metaphysics
We must, Derrida says, conceive of and study the common ground and différance of these two interpretations of interpretation
Différance is a very difficult idea (and one he hadn’t fully developed when he wrote this piece), but it’s similar to play. One can get an understanding of it by looking at the etymology of the word (it isn’t a word in French, he invented it); it’s a portmanteau of the words “différence” and “différer”, meaning “difference” and “deferral”; if you study what Derrida has to say about writing (particularly in Of Grammatology) it’s quite important to note that “différance” and “différence” are pronounced identically in French