JACQUES DERRIDA：

STRUCTURE, SIGN AND PLAY IN

THE DISCOURSE OF HUMAN
SCIENCES
Presented by Wong Hou Lam
 THE TEXT AT A GLANCE
• Lecture at the Colloquium The Languages of Criticism and
the Sciences of Man at John Hopkins University in 1966
• Significance:
• Marks the turn of post-structuralism
• Brings Derrida and his idea of deconstruction to the
international scene
• Looks at:
• How philosophy and human science understand
'structures' abstractly
• The problem of structuralist binary oppositions
 THE AUTHOR:
JACQUES DERRIDA (1930 – 2004)
• Jewish-Algerian-French (Influence: on the Others, the Marginal)
• 1960’s – became largely recognized
• Of Grammatology - *brings deconstruction to the front
• Writing and Difference
• Speech and Phenomena
• Influenced by
• Nietzsche, Heidegger, Saussure, Freud
• Contemporaries include
• Continental philosophers
• Foucault, Lyotard, Barthes, Bourdieu etc
 THE CONTEXT
• Mid 20th century Postmodernism
• Challenging the grand narratives, ideologies, absolute
truth, objective reality
• Political Turbulences in France in the 1960’s and 1970’s
• In the heat of Structuralist debate
• Ahistorical
• Binary oppositions with hierarchies
(Enlightenment/Romantic, male/female,
speech/writing)
• This text is a response to question the dominating or
normal structures and their organizing principles (i.e., Son of Man, 1964, by Magritte -
centers) the visible that is hidden and the
visible that is present
 SOME PRIOR INFO

• Levi-Strauss – key figure in structuralism, ethonology

- Conversations, Race and History, and in The Savage Mind, The Raw and the Cooked
• Saussure – structural linguistics – language as arbitrary units
• Nietzsche – against binary oppositions (questions truth)
• Freud – the Unconscious (questions consciousness)
• Heidegger – the Being (questions presence)
 SOME PRIOR INFO
• Deconstruction
• Not to be fully understood without relating it to Différance, Metaphsyics of
presence and western dialetics
• Caputo, John D. (1997). Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques
Derrida (3rd ed.). New York: Fordham University Press. p. 32.
“Whenever deconstruction finds a nutshell—a secure axiom or a pithy maxim—the
very idea is to crack it open and disturb this tranquility. Indeed, that is a good rule
of thumb in deconstruction. That is what deconstruction is all about, its very
meaning and mission, if it has any. One might even say that cracking nutshells is
what deconstruction is. In a nutshell. ...Have we not run up against a paradox and
an aporia [something contradictory]...the paralysis and impossibility of an aporia is
just what impels deconstruction, what rouses it out of bed in the morning...”
THE READING
 DIVISION OF THE TEXT
1. Basis - The structurality of structure
a) Rupture, center and play
b) Brief history of structure – substitutions of center
c) Decentering and Signs
2. Analysis of Levi-Strauss’s works
a) Nature/culture
b) Bricolage
c) Totalization
3. Conclusion
a) Play
b) Interpretations of Interpretations
c) Common ground
 1. STRUCTURALITY - RUPTURE, CENTER, PLAY
• Rupture (in the word “event”)
• A break in western philosophy (the episteme) where the whole way it thought about
itself shifted, the structurality of structure was reconsidered

• Center (Qua center, transcendental signified)

• Crucial to structure, organizes the structure, irreplaceable (e.g., God, dictator)
• Contradictorily coherent – escapes structurality but governs it (outside/within
structure)(e.g., God creates the world but is not part of it)

• Play (flexible movement of elements in the structure)

• Limited by Center
• To be fully present and have fixed meanings = no play at all
 1. STRUCTURALITY – HISTORY
• Before the rupture,
• A series of substitutions of center for center”, a linked chain
• E.g. God > rationality> unconscious > deconstructionism
• These philosophical systems all look for a center for fixed
presence
• E.g., essence, existence, substance, subject

• Moment of rupture,
• Center known as a construct, a function Where is the center?
• Decentering vs. the illusionary need of a center
 1. STRUCTURALITY – DECENTER, SIGN
• We can't talk about any system without using the terms of that system
"We have no language--no syntax and no lexicon--which is foreign" to a system; "we
can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip
into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to
contest." (bottom of p.2)
• Sign
• If all signs are equal, there is no centre
• If all signs are equal, all signs have infinite play
• The way to talk about sign is the word sign(and assume it had fixed meaning)

• Decentering example - ethnology

 2. ANALYSIS OF LEVI-STRAUSS –
NATURE /CULTURE
• Structuralist – see basic structures of myth as binary oppositions
(e.g. Light/dark, sensible/intelligeble, existence/essence etc)
• Nature/Culture Dichotomy:
• Natural – universal
• Cultural –norms of social organizations
• Scandal – prohibition against incest is BOTH

Derrida: Deconstruction is operated here

Deconstruction looks for binary oppositions and disrupts them->play
but the differentiation between nature and culture is diminished.
 2. ANALYSIS OF LEVI-STRAUSS –
BRICOLAGE
• Like nature/culture, myths and archaic music are center-less too
• “Language bears within itself the necessity of its own
critique”(p.5), therefore:
• Build another structure with no play (substitution), or
• Keep using the structure as a tool, but to recognize it’s
flawed and not attributing truth value to it (bricolage)
• Bricolage – not caring about the purity of the system, but
rather uses what is available to get a job done.
• Bricolage (mythopoetic, play) vs, Engineer (stable, no play)
 2. ANALYSIS OF LEVI-STRAUSS –
TOTALITY
• Totalization – the desire to have a system that explain everything.
• Useless and Impossible because:
• Infinite information (classical, e.g., South American myths)
• Infinite Play (center-less)

• Supplementarity
• Floating supplement
• Added towards the meaning of the system as time goes on
• Infinite play – exhausts totalisation
 3. CONCLUSION
• Play is the disruption of presence of a structure
• Two interpretations of the interpretation of play (as a disruption), structure and signs
• Dicerpher a truth without play (nostalgic)
• Affirmation of Play (Derrida, Neitsche)

• To relate to the human sciences,

• The two interpretations are irreconcilable but shared the human sciences as a
common ground where their difference is conceived, and not to turn away from
new unforeseen structures.
 3. CONCLUSION
“For my part, although these two interpretations must acknowledge and accentuate their différence
and define their irreducibility, I do not believe that today there is any question of choosing in the first
place because here we are in a region (let's say, provisionally, a region of historicity) where the
category of choice seems particularly trivial; and in the second, because we must first try to conceive
of the common ground, and the difference of this irreducible difference. Here there is a sort of
question, call it historical, of which we are only glimpsing today the conception, the formation, the
gestation, the labor. I employ these words, I admit, with a glance toward the business of childbearing-
but also with a glance toward those who, in a company from which I do not exclude myself, turn their
eyes away in the face of the as yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is
necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the non-species, in the formless,
mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity. “(p.13)
 QUESTIONS/DISCUSSIONS
• Derrida never explicitly defined deconstruction and he refused to do so. While this text is
considered by many to be a manifesto of deconstruction itself, what do you think is
deconstruction after reading this text? Do you think it helps to democratize education and
politicize mass media? Can you see its influence on literary studies, architecture, arts etc?
How would you link it with creativity?
• “From then on it was probably necessary to begin to think that there was no center, ..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..”(p.2)
• Would you think “language” is the new “god”, the new “center” then?