Yasir Mutlib Abdulla

Phd candidate

Literary theory

13 Nov. 2020

Derrida’s Decentering of the Structure

In the essence of poststructuralist argument about the structure is the notion of decentering. For
Derrida the long discussed as well as agreed upon principle of structuralism of the centering
elements of the structure gave way to a more complicated view that “there was no center…that
the center had no natural locus” (Newton 1997). Derrida calls this “logocentrism”. He also
believes that meaning is hard to be found because it is located in the process of decentering
conceptualization, i.e., the substitution of one center by the next. Diachronically God could be
replaced by other centers, like man, abstraction, the individual and so on. In fact Derrida
critiques Levi Strauss’s binary opposition. Strauss’s interest is how meaning can be obtained via
the process of binary opposition. The meaning for him does not rely only on one at the expense
of the other but rather on both of them as entities.

In “Of Grammatology” Derrida also opposes Rousseau’s concept of another binary opposition
between writing and reading. Traditionally speech has been privileged over writing, “as the
opposition of presence to absence” (McDonald 2016). Derrida, according to McDonald, believes
that “if spoken language is what fundamentally constitutes all language, then the implication or
necessary consequence of privileging spoken language is that the written word becomes
secondary and derivative” (83). Privileging spoken over written is termed as phonocentric.

This process is a process of opposition between interior realm of thought and exterior rendering
or representation or writing. Thus speech is closer to grasping the meaning than writing. This
leads to the concept of sign and signification. The key element here is the opposition between
presence and absence; the difference between the signified and the signifier; the image and the
concept and the sign.
Derrida also argues against Strauss’s debate on the opposition between the concepts of nature
and culture. Strauss argues about the essence of what is natural, which is not man-made, and
what is cultural, which is society dependent. This is also related in a sense to the concept of
signified and signifier.

Derrida tries to concentrate on his theorizing about the decentering of the structure and
signification which makes his work somehow hard to grasp.

Works cited

McDonald, Cristie V. "Jacques Derrida's Reading of Rousseau." The Eigteenth Century, 2016:
83.

Newton, K.M. Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: A Reader. New York: macmillian, 1997