Jacques Derrida: "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences", i
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. London, Routledge 1978.
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HHJ 17.06.2005
"Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the
Human Sciences"
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge, pp
278-294
Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be
called an "event," if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the
function of structural-or structuralist-thought to reduce or to suspect. But let me use the
term "event" anyway, employing it with caution and as if in quotation marks. In this
sense, this event will have the exterior form of a rupture and a redoubling.
It would be easy enough to show that the concept of structure and even the word
"structure" itself are as old as the episteme -that is to say, as old as western science and
western philosophy-and that their roots thrust deep into the soil of ordinary language, into
whose deepest recesses the episteme plunges to gather them together once more, making
them part of itself in a metaphorical displacement. Nevertheless, up until the event which
I wish to mark out and define, structure-or rather the structurality of structure-although it
has always been involved, has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process
of giving it a center or referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin. The function of
this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure-one cannot in fact
conceive of an unorganized structure-but above all to make sure that the organizing
principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure. No
doubt that by orienting and organizing the coherence of the system, the center of a
structure permits the freeplay of its elements inside the total form. And even today the
notion of a structure lacking any center represents the unthinkable itself.
Nevertheless, the center also closes off the freeplay it opens up and makes possible. Qua
center, it is the point at which the substitution of contents, elements, or terms is no longer
possible. At the center, the permutation or the transformation of elements (which may of
course be structures enclosed within a structure) is forbidden. At least this permutation
has always remained interdicted (I use this word deliberately). Thus it has always been
thought that the center, which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within a
structure which governs the structure, while escaping structurality. This is why classical
thought concerning structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, within the
structure and outside it. The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center
does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center
elsewhere. The center is not the center. The concept of centered structure-although it
represents coherence itself, the condition of the episteme as philosophy or science-is
contradictorily coherent. And, as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force
of a desire. The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a freeplay based on
a fundamental ground, a freeplay which is constituted upon a fundamental immobility
and a reassuring certitude, which is itself beyond the reach of the freeplay. With this
certitude anxiety can be mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of
being implicated in the game, of being caught by the game, of being as it were from the
very beginning at stake in the game. From the basis of what we therefore call the center
(and which, because it can be either inside or outside, is as readily called the origin as the
end, as readily arché as telos), the repetitions, the substitutions. the transformations, and
the permutations are always taken from a history of meaning [sens]-that is, a history,
period-whose origin may always be revealed or whose end may always be anticipated in
the form of presence. This is why one could perhaps say that the movement of any
archeology, like that of any eschatology, is an accomplice of this reduction of the
structuralality of structure and always attempts to conceive of structure from the basis of
a full presence which is out of play.
If this is so, the whole history of the concept of structure, before the rupture I spoke of,
must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center, as a linked chain of
determinations of the center. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the center receives
different forms or names. The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the
history of these metaphors and metonymies. Its matrix-if you will pardon me for
demonstrating so little and for being so elliptical in order to bring me more quickly to my
principal theme-is the determination of being as presence in all the senses of this word. It
would be possible to show that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to
the I center have always designated the constant of a presence-eidos, arche, telos,
energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject) aletheia [truth], transcendentality,
consciousness, or conscience, God, man, and so forth.
The event I called a rupture, the disruption alluded to at the beginning of this paper,
would presumably have come about when the structurality of structure had to begin to be
thought, that is to say, repeated, and this is why I said that this disruption was repetition
in all of the senses of this word. From then on it became necessary to think the law which
governed, as it were, the desire for the center in the constitution of structure and the
process of signification prescribing its displacements and its substitutions for this law of
the central presence-but a central presence which was never itself, which has always
already been transported outside itself in its surrogate. The surrogate does not substitute
itself for anything which has somehow pre-existed it. From then on it was probably
necessary to begin to think that there was no center, that the center could not be thought
in the form of a beingpresent, that the center had no natural locus, that it was not a fixed
locus but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions
came into play. This moment was that in which language invaded the universal
problematic; that in which, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became
discourse-provided we can agree on this word-that is to say, when everything became a
system where the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never
absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental
signified extends the domain and the interplay of signification ad infinitum.
Where and how does this decentering, this notion of the structurality of structure, occur?
It would be somewhat naive to refer to an event, a doctrine, or an author in order to
designate this occurrence. It is no doubt part of the totality of an era, our own, but still it
has already begun to proclaim itself and begun to work. Nevertheless, if I wished to give
some sort of indication by choosing one or two "names," and by recalling those authors in
whose discourses this occurrence has most nearly maintained its most radical
formulation, I would probably cite the Nietzschean critique of metaphysics, the critique
of the concepts of being and truth, for which were substituted the concepts of play,
interpretation, and sign (sign without truth present); the Freudian critique of self-
presence, that is, the critique of consciousness, of the subject, of self-identity and of self-
proximity or self-possession; and, more radically, the Heideggerean destruction of
metaphysics, of onto-theology, of the determination of being as presence. But all these
destructive discourses and all their analogues are trapped in a sort of circle. This circle is
unique. It describes the form of the relationship between the history of metaphysics and
the destruction of the history of metaphysics. There is no sense in doing without the
concepts of metaphysics in order to attack metaphysics. We have no language-no syntax
and no lexicon-which is alien to this history; we cannot utter a single destructive
proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit
postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest. To pick out one example from many:
the metaphysics of presence is attacked with the help of the concept of the sign. But from
the moment anyone wishes this to show, as I suggested a moment ago, that there is no
transcendental or privileged signified and that the domain or the interplay of signification
has, henceforth, no limit, he ought to extend his refusal to the concept and to the word
sign itself-which is precisely what cannot be done. For the signification "sign" has always
been comprehended and determined, in its sense, as sign-of, signifier referring to a
signified, signifier different from its signified. If one erases the radical difference
between signifier and signified, it is the word signifier itself which ought to be abandoned
as a metaphysical concept. When Levi-Strauss says in the preface to The Raw and the
Cooked that he has "sought to transcend the opposition between the sensible and the
intelligible by placing [himself] from the very beginning at the level of signs," the
necessity, the force, and the legitimacy of his act cannot make us forget that the concept
of the sign cannot in itself surpass or bypass this opposition between the sensible and the
intelligible. The concept of the sign is determined by this opposition: through and
throughout the totality of its history and by its system. But we cannot do without the
concept of the sign, we cannot give up this metaphysical complicity without also giving
up the critique we are directing against this complicity, without the risk of erasing
difference [altogether] in the self-identity of a signified reducing into itself its signifier,
or, what amounts to the same thing, simply expelling it outside itself. For there are two
heterogenous ways of erasing the difference between the signifier and the signified: one,
the classic way, 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:
first and foremost, the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible. The paradox
is that the metaphysical reduction of the sign needed the opposition it was reducing. The
opposition is part of the system, along with the reduction. And what I am 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 many ways of being caught in this
circle. They are all more or less naive, more or less empirical, more or less systematic,
more or less close to the formulation or even to the formalization of this circle. It is these
differences which explain the multiplicity of destructive discourses and the disagreement
between those who make them. It was within concepts inherited from metaphysics that
Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger worked, for example. Since these concepts are not
elements or atoms and since they are taken from a syntax and a system, every particular
borrowing drags along with it the whole of metaphysics. This is what allows these
destroyers to destroy each other reciprocally-for example, Heidegger considering
Nietzsche, with as much lucidity and rigor as bad faith and misconstruction, as the last
metaphysician, the last "Platonist." One could do the same for Heidegger himself, for
Freud, or for a number of others. And today no exercise is more widespread.
What is the relevance of this formal schema when we turn to what are called the "human
sciences"? One of them perhaps occupies a privileged place-ethnology. One can in fact
assume that ethnology could have been born as a science only at the moment when a de-
centenng had come about: at the moment when European culture-and, in consequence,
the history of metaphysics and of its concepts-had been dislocated, driven from its locus,
and forced to stop considering itself as the culture of reference. This moment is not first
and foremost a moment of philosophical or scientific discourse, it is also a moment which
is political, economic, technical, and so forth. One can say in total assurance that there is
nothing fortuitous about the fact that the critique of ethnocentrism-the very condition of
ethnology-should be systematically and historically contemporaneous with the
destruction of the history of metaphysics. Both belong to a single and same era.
Ethnology-like any science-comes about within the element of discourse. And it is
primarily a European science employing traditional concepts, however much it may
struggle against them. Consequently, whether he wants to or not-and this does not depend
on a decision on his part-the ethnologist accepts into his discourse the premises of
ethnocentrism at the very moment when he is employed in denouncing them This
necessity is irreducible; it is not a historical contingency. We ought to consider very
carefully all its implications. But if nobody can escape this necessity, and if no one is
therefore responsible for giving in to it, however little, this does not mean that all the
ways of giving in to it are of an equal pertinence. The quality and the fecundity of a
discourse are perhaps measured by the critical rigor with which this relationship to the
history of metaphysics and to inherited concepts is thought. Here it is a question of a
critical relationship to the language of the human sciences and a question of a critical
responsibility of the discourse. It is a question of putting expressly and systematically the
problem of a discourse which borrows from a heritage the resources necessary of that
heritage itself. A problem of economy and strategy.
If I now go on to employ an examination of the texts of Levi-Strauss as an example, it is
not only because of the privilege accorded to ethnology among the human sciences, nor
yet because the thought of Levi-Strauss weighs heavily on the contemporary theoretical
situation. It is above all because a certain choice has made itself evident in the work of
Levi-Strauss and because a certain doctrine has been elaborated there, and precisely in a
more or less explicit manner, in relation to this critique of language and to this critical
language in the human sciences.
In order to follow this movement in the text of Levi-Strauss, let me choose as one guiding
thread among others the oppostion between nature and culture. In spite of all its
rejuvenations and its disguises, this opposition is congenital to philosophy. It is even
older than Plato. It is at least as old as the Sophists. Since the statement of the opposition
- Physis/nomos, physis/techne [nature/culture, nature/art or making] - it has been passed
on to us by a whole historical chain which opposes "nature" to the law, to education, to
art, to technics - and also to liberty, to the arbitrary, to history, to society, to the mind, and
so on. From thebeginnings of his quest and from his first book, The Elementary
Structures of Kinship, Levi-Strauss has felt at one and the same time the necessity of
utilizing this opposition and the impossibility of making it acceptable. In the Elementary
Structures, he begins from this axiom or definition: that belongs to nature which is
universal and spontaneous, not depending on any particular culture or on any determinate
norm. That belongs to culture, on the other hand, which depends on a system of norms
regulating society and is therefore capable of varying from one social structure to
another. These two definitions are of the traditional type. But, in the very first pages of
the Elementary Structures, Levi-Strauss, who has begun to give these concepts an
acceptable standing, encounters what he calls a scandal, that is to say, something which
no longer tolerates the nature/culture opposition he has accepted and which seems to
require at one and the same time the predicates of nature and those of culture. This
scandal is the incest-prohibition. The incest-prohibition is universal; in this sense one
could call it natural. But it is also a prohibition, a system of norms and interdicts; in this
sense one could call it cultural.
Let us assume therefore that everything universal in man derives from the order of nature
and is charactenzed by spontaneity, that everything which is subject to a norm belongs to
culture and presents the attributes of the relative and the particular. We then find
ourselves confronted by a fact, or rather an ensemble of facts, which, in the light of the
preceding definitions, is not far from appeanog as a scandal: the prohibition of incest
presents without the least equivocation, and indissolubly linked together, the two
characteristics in which we recognized the contradictory attributes of two exclusive
orders. The prohibition of incest constitutes a rule, but a rule, alone of all the social rules,
which possesses at the same time a universal character.
Obviously, there is no scandal except in the interior of a system of concepts sanctioning
the difference between nature and culture. In beginning his work with the factum of the
incest-prohibition, Levi-Strauss thus puts himself in a position entailing that this
difference, which has always been assumed to be self-evident, becomes obliterated or
disputed. For, from the moment that the incest-prohibition can no longer be conceived
within the nature/culture opposition, it can no longer be said that it is a scandalous fact, a
nucleus of opacity within a network of transparent significations. The incest-prohibition
is no longer a scandal one meets with or comes up against in the domain of traditional
concepts; it is something which escapes these concepts and certainly precedes them--
probably as the condition of their possibility. It could perhaps be said that the whole of
philosophical conceptualization, systematically relating itself to the nature/culture
opposition, is designed to leave in the domain of the unthinkable the very thing that
makes this conceptualization possible: the origin of the prohibition of incest.
I have dealt too cursorily with this example, only one among so many others, but the
example nevertheless reveals that language bears within itself the necessity of its own
critique. This critique may be undertaken along two tracks, in two "manners." Once the
limit of nature/culture opposition makes itself felt, one might want to question
systema
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