This paper tends to deal mainly with Derrida’s both essays of "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" and "Différance". It tries to show some of his key ideas and his outstanding status in the postmodern school of thought in the light of his aforementioned essays.
The first things that come to our minds when we hear the name of Jacques Derrida are Deconstruction, Différance, Post-structuralism, Post-modernism, Writing and Differance, Of Grammatology and so on. This illustrates that we are already familiar with Derrida. However, the majority of people complain about Derrida’s complexity of his writings as well as the difficulty of translating his works. One of the most illustrative examples is the preface of Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak to Derrida‘s "Of Grammatology" in which she states "when the preface is being written by someone other than the author, the situation is yet further complicated. A pretense at writing before a text that one must have read before the preface can be written".
Spivak’s statement is a real example of the inseparable relationship between reading and writing. Reading is breathing in whereas writing is breathing out. Alan Bass, a translator of Derrida, suggests that the difficulty to read Derrida is not a question of his style of writing but rather Derrida challenges the way we are used to read. Besides, Alan Bass compares the translator of Derrida to a psychoanalyst in the sense that the translator must understand the syntax and lexicon of the original text in order to transform it through his own language. This is quite analogous with the attempt of the psychoanalyst to translate the language of dreams into a latent language.
Outline:
1. Introduction
2. Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences
2.1 Anti-Structuralism
2.2 Decentering the center
3. Différance
3.1 Against the definition of différance
3.2 Deconstruction
4. Conclusion
5. Work cited
1. Introduction
The first things that come to our minds when we hear the name of Jacques Derrida are Deconstruction, Différance, Post-structuralism, Post-modernism, Writing and Differance, Of Grammatology and so on. This illustrates that we are already familiar with Derrida. However, the majority of people complain about Derrida’s complexity of his writings as well as the difficulty of translating his works. One of the most illustrative examples is the preface of Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak to Derrida‘s Of Grammaolgy in which she states “when the preface is being written by someone other than the author, the situation is yet further complicated. A pretense at writing before a text that one must have read before the preface can be written”[1]. Spivak’s statement is a real example of the inseparable relationship between reading and writing. Reading is breathing in whereas writing is breathing out. Alan Bass, a translator of Derrida, suggests that the difficulty to read Derrida is not a question of his style of writing but rather Derrida challenges the way we are used to read. Besides, Alan Bass compares the translator of Derrida to a psychoanalyst in the sense that the translator must understand the syntax and lexicon of the original text in order to transform it through his own language. This is quite analogous with the attempt of the psychoanalyst to translate the language of dreams into a latent language.[2] At any rate, this paper tends to deal mainly with Derrida’s both essays of Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences; and Différance. It also tries to show some of his key ideas and his outstanding status in the postmodern school of thought in the light of his aforementioned essays.
2. Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences
2.1 Anti-Structuralism
The Swiss linguist, Ferdinard de Saussure made the study of semiology and linguistcs in particular an independent field of study. He set up the main foundations of linguistics in the sense that language is meant to be seen as a set of structures in form signs, which are made up of a signifier and a signified. The signifier is what language refers to and the signified is the mental image of that thing. Moreover, the relationship between the two must be arbitrary, relational and constitutive[3]. In this way, For Saussure, meaning does not have an essence. It is always outside things.
The ideas of De Saussure influenced the Belgian anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, who applied structuralism to the study of different aspects of culture including kinship, myth and art. Based on the theory of Marcel Mauss of the reciprocity of gifts, Claude Lévi Strauss explains that society avoids incest taboo by marriage, a system of exchanging women in terms of structures.[4] Strauss’s The Elementary Structures of Kinship better illustrates the manifestation of these structures in various cultures.
Derrida’s essay Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences was first delivered as his talk at the Hopkins conference in Baltimore along with Barthes, Lacan, Goldmann, De man and others. He was given the honor to be the last speaker. Ironically, Derrida takes the advantage to declare the death of structuralism[5]. In the very beginning of his essay Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences[6], Derrida refers to the antiquity of the term structure, which is as old as the Western science and philosophy or what he calls episteme. Moreover, Derrida states, “the history of Metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of metaphors and metonymies.” in order to indicate that the concept of structure has gone throughout various set of structures. The only difference is its changing name “essence, existence, substance, subject, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man”. Here Derrida interrogates “the question of Empiricism and its possible relation to an outside of philosophy”[7] Derrida seems to praise structuralism at first when he says that it is a kind of critique of empiricism. However, soon, he denounces its limitations and shortcomings by saying that “structure is neutralized and reduced by the process of giving it a center or of referring it to a point of presence, a fixed point”. In addition to that, Derrida harshly criticizes Lévi-Strauss binaries of nature (universal) and culture (norms). He claims that these binaries encounter a scandal when it comes to incest prohibition.
2.2 Decentering the center
Derrida argues that the center limits the play of the structure. In the process of signification, sign for Derrida has been always “understood and determined”. Therefore, there are two ways of erasing the difference between the signifier and the signified. First by reducing the signifier to itself and submit sign to thought. The second is to interrogate the system in which this reduction functions, the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible. In his notion of shaking the center, Derrida is highly indebted to “Nietzchean critique of metaphysics, Freud critique of consciousness and Heidegger destruction of metaphysics”.
Derrida was highly influenced by Nietzsche’s “affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin … this affirmation determines the noncenter otherwise than the loss of the center”[8]. And it is “the eternal recurrence, something which come round and round and what is happening now and has happened many times already and will happen many times again”[9] is what makes Nietzsche says yes to life and therefore the will to live as well the will to power.
Nietzsche’s denouncement of the death of God in his The Joyful Wisdom is very significant for post-modernism as a whole. Through the tongue of a madman Nietzsche declares: “God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!” the death of God here means that “the human life has no longer an eternal background … the supernatural has gone because there was no longer any place for it … what stares us in the face is–just nothing! Nihilism menaces us.”[10] Starting from the ideas of Nietzsche, Derrida came up with the idea that “there never has been any center. Everthing is mythos. Nothing is logos”[11] Nietzsche has also a huge impact on other post-structuralists including Foucault and Barthes and it is no coincidence that the death of the author-god like[12] in Barthes’s The Death of the Author is quite analogous with the Death of God in Nietzsche’s The Joyful Wisdom. Thus, the ideas of Derrida, Barthes and Nietzsche, who claims that “there are no facts only interpretations”[13] will make us enter into a decentered universe where there are no absolute and fixed points but only a free play of meaning.
3. Différance
3.1 Against the definition of différance
One of the main distinctions between structuralism and post-structuralism is that the origins of structuralism are deeply rooted in linguists, a discipline through which we can reach reliable truths. Whereas post-structuralism inherits the skeptic habit of philosophy.[14] Therefore, Derrida associates skepticism with his neologism of différance[15]. In his essay Différance, which appears on his book, Margins of Philosophy, Derrida states that Différance is neither a word nor a concept. It has neither existence nor essence. Moreover, the “a” in différance is written and read. However, it cannot be apprehended in speech. Thus, this “a” is not heard and it remains silent as a tomb. Différance is polysemic. In a footnote to his translation of Derrida’s Margin of Philosophy, Alan Bass compares différance to Hegel’s Aufhebung. In the process of dialectics, Aufhebung negates and lifts up concepts to a higher sphere in which they are conserved.[16] As with Hegel’s Aufhebung, the translation of a word with double meaning is difficult. Therefore, both concepts are usually left untranslated.
Différance is an allusive essay. It refers to multiple thinkers including Hegel, Saussure, Hesserl, Levinas, Deleuze, Freud and Lacan. Nevertheless, the neologism of Différance is based mainly on the works of Nietzsche and Lévinas especially at the level of signification where “différance brings the two notions of differing and deferring together … repeatability and otherness”[17]. Both notions of repetition and otherness come from Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence and Lévinas’s idea of the responsibility of the other.
According to Derrida, différance and anti-trace are the same. “the concept of trace is incompatible with the concept of retention, of the becoming-past of what has been present. One cannot think the trace–and therefore, différance–on the basis of the present or the presence of the presence … since the trace is not a presence but the simulacrum of a presence.”[18] Sign dislocates itself and therefore it has no site.
In her preface to Derrida’s Of Grammatology, Spivak argues, “Derrida does not reject Heidegger’s master word Being, which Heidegger usually crosses out but his French word trace carries it with the implication of track, footprints and imprint. Therefore, it cannot be a master word. Moreover, she suggests that the structure of the sign is determined by the trace or track of that other, which is forever absent. This other is of course never to be found in its full being as consulting the dictionary”[19] That is, one synonym leads you to another.
3.2 Deconstruction
First of all, we should bear in mind, that post-structuralism is an attitude of mind rather than a method of criticism. Post-structuralism along with other schools of criticism are not methods since none of them provides us with a systematic procedure in the process of analyzing cultural products. Instead, they only gives us orientations about a particular issue.[20] At any rate, the application of Derrida’s ideas on a particular text came to be known as deconstruction.
The name of Derrida is always accompanied with the term deconstruction. Unfortunately, Derrida himself cannot stand the term as he puts it “deconstruction is a word I have never liked and whose fortune has disagreeably surprised me”. Besides, the contemporary critic, Martin McQuillan, states, “Deconstruction is not an “ism”. There is no such thing as ‘deconstructionism’[21] this statements show Derrida’s discontent with the misunderstanding of deconstruction as a method to the extent that there were schools under the name of deconstruction.
The Marxist critic, Terry Eagleton, refers to the term of deconstruction as reading against the grain or reading the text against itself in order to know the text and uncover its unconscious as if it never known itself whereas Barbara Johnson suggests that deconstruction is not synonymous with ‘destruction’. It is in fact much closer to the original meaning of the word analysis, which etymologically means ‘to undo’.[22] From these definitions, it becomes clear that deconstruction is about reading texts. It is not a method.
The discussion of Derrida’s key concept of deconstruction usually involves the American literary critic Paul De Man. His book, Allegories of Reading exemplifies a deconstructive reading of figures like Nietzsche, Proust and Rousseau.[23] However, De Man does not view deconstruction as a method to extract meanings from texts.
[...]
[1] Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Spivak, Gayatri. The John Hopkins University press. 1976. P:x
[2] Derrida Jacques. Writing and Diffrenece. Trans. Bass, Alan. Routledge Classics. 2001. P: xv/xvii
[3] Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. 1995. P: 39/41
[4] Edgar, Andrew and Sedgwick, Peter. Cultural Theory: Key Thinkers. Routeldge. 2002. P: 141
[5] Mikics, David. Who was Jacques Derrida: An Intellectual Biograph y? Yale University press. 2009. P: 94/93
[6] Derrida, Jacques. Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences. Writing and Diffrenece. Trans. Bass, Alan. Routledge Classics
[7] Mikics, David. Who was Jacques Derrida: An Intellectual Biograph y? Yale University press. 2009. P: 63
[8] Derrida, Jacques. Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences. Writing and Diffrenece. Trans. Bass, Alan. Routledge Classics. 1978. P:369
[9] Allen, E.L. From Plato to Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Great Thoughts and Ideas of the Western Mind. First Fawcett. 1962.P: 173
[10] Allen, E.L. From Plato to Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Great Thoughts and Ideas of the Western Mind. First Fawcett. 1962.P:174/175
[11] Mikics, David. Who was Jacques Derrida: An Intellectual Biograph y. Yale University press. 2009. P:101
[12] Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. Tran. Stephen Heath. Fontana Press. 1997
[13] Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. 1995. P:66
[14] Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. 1995. P:62
[15] Mikics, David. Who was Jacques Derrida: An Intellectual Biograph y. Yale University press. 2009. P:2
[16] Derrida, Jacques. Margins of philosophy. Trans. Bass, Allan. The Harvester Press. 2003. P:
[17] Nicholas, Royle. Jacques Derrida. Routledge. 2003
[18] Derrida, Jacques. Margins of philosophy. Trans. Bass, Allan. The Harvester Press. 2003. P:13/21/24
[19] Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Spivak, Gayatri. The John Hopkins University press. 1976. P:xvii
[20] Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: an introduction to literary and cultural theory. 1995. P:68
[21] Nicholas, Royle. Jacques Derrida. Routledge. 2003. P:23
[22] Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: an introduction to literary and cultural theory. 1995. P:68
[23] Edgar, Andrew and Sedgwick, Peter. Cultural Theory: Key Thinkers. Routeldge. 2002. P: 44
- Quote paper
- Issam El Masmodi (Author), 2019, The key ideas of Jacques Derrida in his essays "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" and "Différance", Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/510094