In Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences Derrida’s

attempt might be seen as threefold: (1) tocharacterize certain features of the history
of Western metaphysics, as issuing fromthe fundamental concepts of “structure”
and “center”; (2) to announce an “event” – ineffect, a complex series of historical
movements – whereby these central notions were challenged, using the work of the
structuralist anthropologist Lévi-Strauss as anexample; and (3) to suggest the ways
in which current and future modes of thoughtand language might deploy and adapt
Lévi-Strauss’ insights in articulating their own relation to metaphysics.

According to Derrida, the concept of structure that has dominated Western

scienceand philosophy has always been referred to as a “center or . . . a point of
presence, afixed origin.” The function of such a center has been both to organize
the structureand to limit the free play of terms and concepts within it, in other
words, to foreclosesuch play. The center, says Derrida, is the point at which any
substitution or permutationof elements or terms is no longer possible. Although the
structure thereby dependson the center, the center itself is fixed and “escapes
structurality,” since it is beyond thetransformative reach of other elements in the
structure. Hence the center is, paradoxically, outside the structure, and the very
concept of a centered structure is only “contradictorilycoherent.” What it expresses
is a desire for a “reassuring certitude”which stands beyond the subversive or
threatening reach of any play which mightdisrupt the structure. The center that
which gives stability, unity, and closure to the structure, can be conceived as an
“origin” or a “purpose terms which invoke thenotion of a “full presence” (such as
the Logos) that can guarantee such stability andclosure.

Derrida suggests that the history of Western metaphysics can be viewed as the
historyof this concept of structure, with various philosophies substituting one
center foranother. These successive centers have received different metaphorical
names, all ofwhich are grounded on “the determination of Being as presence.” The
names of this presence have included eidos (the Platonic Form), arche (the concept
of an absolute beginning), telos (the, often providential, purpose and direction
attributed to human existence), ousia (the Aristotelian concept of “substance” or
“essence” as the underlyingreality of things), as well as the concepts of truth, God,
and man. Each of theseconcepts has served as a center, as a transcendental
signified, stabilizing a given systemof thought or world view.

Derrida announces an “event” which has begun to disrupt this system of

Westernmetaphysics. The “event” metaphorically refers to a complex network of
historical processes.Most fundamentally, the “event” signifies the “moment when
language invadedpart viii: the twentieth centurythe universal problematic, the
moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse.”
Here, Derrida refers to a phase in modernintellectual history when central
problems in a variety of fields – such as the connectionbetween thought and
reality, self and world – were reposited or newly posed asproblems of language,
where “language” was understood as a system of differences. Forexample, where
previously the term “God” was held to refer to an actual entity independentof
language, this term was now seen as one signifier among many others, asignifier
which took its meaning and function from its relation to a vast system ofsignifiers;
the term was no longer exalted above such relational status in a posture ofabsolute
privilege and authority.

Hence, the term “God,” which once acted as a “center”(or origin or purpose) of
many systems of thought, was brought back within the province of relatability to
other elements of language, being dethroned from its status as a transcendental
signified to one more signifier on the same level as other signifiers.In this sense,
the concept of God moves from being a reality beyond language toa concept
withinlanguage: it becomes discourse. And the systems of thought thatdepended on
the understanding of God as a reality become “decentered,” losing theirformer
stability and authority.When did such a process of decentering occur in Western
thought? Derrida suggeststhat certain names can be associated with this process:
Nietzsche, for example, undertooka radical critique of metaphysics, especially of
the concepts of being and truth(and, we might add to Derrida’s list, of space and
time), regarding these as convenientfictions; Freud engaged in a critique of
consciousness and the self-identity of the humansubject; again, Heidegger
reexamined the conventional metaphysics of being and time.The discourses of each
of these thinkers put into question some of the central conceptsand categories that
have dominated Western thought since Plato and Aristotle.

Yet Derrida is careful to point out that each of these newer, radical discourses,
whileattempting to break free of the traditional metaphysical enclosure, is
nonetheless trappedin a circle of its own. The critique of metaphysics is inevitably
a dual gesture, onewhich involves not only confrontation and destruction of
traditional concepts but alsoa necessary complicity with them: we must employ the
very language of metaphysicsto criticize it, a duality that extends even to our
discussion of the sign itself. We might cite as a further example the dilemma of
some modern feministswho wish to break free of “male” language: we cannot
simply create from nothing a“female” language, and are obliged to use in our
critique terms and concepts from thevery language that we wish to undermine.
However, as Derrida acknowledges, thereare “several ways of being caught in this
circle,” and it is these differences between theradical discourses that often lead
them into mutual confrontation and destruction.

Now Derrida concentrates on Levi-Strauss. He begins with Lévi-Strauss’treatment

of an opposition – between nature and culture – that is “congenital tophilosophy,”
an opposition that predates Plato and goes back at least as far as the Sophists of the
fifth century b. c. In fact, this opposition encompasses “a whole historical chain
which opposes ‘nature’ to law, to education, to art, to technics – but also toliberty,
to the arbitrary, to history, to the mind, and so on”. Derrida pointsout that Lévi-
Strauss’ research has entailed both the need to use this opposition andthe
“impossibility of accepting it.” In his first book, The Elementary Structures of
Kinship, Lévi-Strauss defines “nature” as encompassing that which is universal
and spontaneous, whereas “culture” comprehends what is relative, variable, and
dependent on asystem of social norms. However, as Derrida recounts, Lévi-Strauss
encountersa “scandalous” threat to this opposition in the notion of “incest-
prohibition.”This notion, says Lévi-Strauss, refuses to conform to either side of the
opposition, since it is both a norm and universal, thereby combining characteristics
of both cultureand nature. Derrida extends the significance of this recalcitrance to
conventional categoriesto the entire conceptual system of philosophy, in which the
nature–culture opposition operates systematically. He cites this as an example of
the fact that“language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique”.In
general, this critique, suggests Derrida, can follow two broad paths. The first
would be systematically to question the “founding concepts of the entire history of
philosophy, to deconstitute them.” This would indeed be the most daring way to
take“a step outside of philosophy,” but it would be an enormously difficult, if not
impossible, task. The second path would be that effectively taken by Lévi-Strauss:
to conserveall the old concepts while recognizing their limits, to refrain from
attributing anytruth-value to them while using them as tools or instruments. In this
way, they can beused to “destroy the old machinery to which they belong.” In this
way, Lévi-Strauss, according to Derrida, effectively attempts to separate method
from truth, and he uses, for example, the opposition between nature and culture not
as a historical truth but asa methodological truth. Lévi-Strauss’ “double intention”
is to “preserve as an instrumentsomething whose truth value he criticizes.” And
this, says Derrida, is “how thelanguage of the social sciences criticizes itself.”
Hence, in his later book The Savage Mind, Lévi-Strauss both continues to contest
thevalue of the nature–culture opposition and articulates a discourse based on
bricolage. Bricolage means that we use whatever instruments we find at our
disposal, Instruments that are not designed for our specific purposes and which we
may have to adapt orabandon on the basis of trial and error. Derrida sees the
procedure of bricolage as a critique of language, even a critical language itself. Yet
again, however, he extends the implications of this strategy: if bricolage involves
the need to borrow one’s conceptsfrom the very heritage one is challenging, every
discourse is bricoleur. The opposite of the bricoleur, who works piecemeal and in a
tentative manner, would be the engineer, someone who envisages and designs his
entire project beforehand, constructing“the totality of his language, syntax, and
lexicon”. But as far asdiscourse is concerned, such an engineer is a myth: a subject
who would be the “absoluteorigin of his own discourse,” constructing it out of
nothing. Hence the notion ofthe engineer is “a theological idea”. But if this idea is
mythical, and if all discourse, including the language of science and philosophy, is
bricoleur, then the entire opposition of engineer and bricoleur threatens to collapse,
erasing the difference that gave bricolage its meaning in the first place.

In this way, Lévi-Strauss points toward a direction beyond conventional

philosophicaldiscourse. Yet Derrida cautions that “the passage beyond philosophy
does not consist in turning the page of philosophy . . . but in continuing to read
philosophers in a certain way”. We cannot, that is, simply dispense with previous
philosophy and start anew: that would be a project of engineering, whereas we are
obliged to engage in bricolage, to use the materials already at our disposal to read
philosophy in amore radical manner. To illustrate such a radical approach, Derrida
elaborates the divergent relationships that conventional philosophy and Lévi-
Strauss’ more radical structuralism have with empiricism. Empiricism, the notion
that knowledge derives primarily from experience, has acted as the foundation of
much modern philosophy and science since the Enlightenment. Derrida states that
any discourse that considers itself “scientific” encounters problems and impasses
that rest ultimately on empiricism: for example, if we amass a great deal of data
from experience, how do we make generalizations on the basis of these data, how
do we establish unity and totalityamong observed phenomena? Derrida accepts that
“structuralism justifiably claims tobe the critique of empiricism”: he may be
thinking, for example, of structuralism’scentral claim that language and other
social institutions are not somehow created cumulatively by aggregated
experiences, but rather, that it is the structure of these institutions that enables
individual experiences (such as individual acts of language) in the first place.

Equally, however, Derrida seems to think that Lévi-Strauss’ research is in one

sense empirical in character, since it always awaits completion or invalidation by
new information. To illustrate this, Derrida quotes a passage from Lévi-Strauss
asserting that the grammar of both myths and language can be worked out on the
basis of a relatively small amount of empirical detail, since it is in fact this
grammar or bodyof rules that enables the production of the empirical instances of
myth or language andnot vice versa. Lévi-Strauss adds that fresh data can certainly
be used to modify suchgrammatical laws. Derrida sees these comments as
implying that atotalized, finished, system of grammar is useless and perhaps
impossible. He points out that there are two ways in which the limitations of
totalization can be viewed: one is the conventional or classical understanding that
no totalizing system can hope to comprehend the infinite richness of empirical
detail. The other perspective hasrecourse to the notion of free play: language in its
very nature is a field of free play, with no center (or origin) which could arrest and
freeze the play of substitution between various terms.

Derrida calls this movement of play a “movement of supplementarity”. Whatever

sign takes on the function of the center in the latter’s absence, whatever
signreplaces the center, occurs as a surplus or supplement. In other words, if there
is nocenter, there is no transcendental signified; this signified is replaced by a
signifier whose function, as elaborated by Lévi-Strauss, is not to signify anything
in particular but simply to oppose the absence of signification that threatens the
system without itscenter. Given the kind of decentered discourse that Lévi-Strauss
aims at, states Derrida, the concept of play is important in his work, where it exists
in tensionwith two concepts, that of history and that of presence.

In conclusion, Derrida states that there are “two interpretations of interpretation,

ofstructure, of sign, of play.” The one dreams of arriving at a truth or origin
which“escapes play and the order of the sign . . . The other, which is no longer
turned towardthe origin, affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and
humanism,” man being hewho has “dreamed of full presence, the reassuring
foundation, the origin and the endof play.” These two interpretations, he thinks, are
“absolutely irreconcilable,” and ourcurrent task is to chart both the common
ground and the différance of their irreducible difference, in the interests of the “as
yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself.”