Humanities

Issam El Masmodi

The key ideas of Jacques Derrida in his

essays "Structure, Sign and Play in the
Discourse of the Human Sciences" and
"Différance"

Essay
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Issam El Masmodi

The key ideas of Jacques Derrida in his essays "Struc-

ture, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences" and "Différance"

GRIN Verlag
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Jacques Derrida: Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences; and Différance

By Issam El Masmodi

Outline:

1. Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 2
2. Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences ................................................. 2
2.1 Anti-Structuralism ......................................................................................................................... 2
2.2 Decentering the center ................................................................................................................... 3
3. Différance ........................................................................................................................................ 4
3.1 Against the definition of différance ............................................................................................... 4
3.2 Deconstruction............................................................................................................................... 5
4. Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................... 6
5. Work cited ....................................................................................................................................... 6
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 constitutive3. 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

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
the death of structuralism5. In the very beginning of his essay Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse
of the Human Sciences6, 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

5
Mikics, David. Who was Jacques Derrida: An Intellectual Biography? 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 Biography? 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
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 like12 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 différance15. 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

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 Biography. 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 Biography. 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
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. It is an approach to textual analysis to debunk its paradoxes, ambiguities
and tensions

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
4. Conclusion
Derrida received a huge amount of criticism for multiple reasons. First many critics accuse him of
using terms as “différance” on purpose to make his works complex while other critics think that Derrida
is nonsense for the reason that he is self-contradictory as well as for his misunderstanding for other
thinkers. However, Derrida remains one of the outstanding contemporary critics. His seminal books and
essays have a huge impact on post-structuralists and post-modernism as whole. As Hegel dialectics, the
philosophy of Derrida provides us with a thesis built on recent and previous thinkers and then an anti-
thesis directed to thinkers such as Lévi Strauss and Saussure. Ultimately, we come up with Derrida
complex synthesis. However, unlike Hegel, Derrida suggests that there is no absolute meaning.
Signification is like the traces of feet on a desert. One trace erases after the other by the wind. From
this, we can understand that Jack Derrida is not easy to read. His works are like what Frederick Engles
said about Hegel “the fellow demands time to be digested.” In order to conclude, it would be better to
say that Derrida is a signifier with no absolute signified.

5. Work cited

Allen, E.L. From Plato to Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Great Thoughts and Ideas of the Western
Mind. First Fawcett. 1962

Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. Tran. Stephen Heath. Fontana Press. 1997

Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. 1995

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Spivak, Gayatri. Preface. The John Hopkins University
press 1976

Derrida, Jacques. Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences. Writing and
Diffrenece. Trans. Bass, Alan. Routledge Classics. 1978

Derrida, Jacques. Margins of philosophy. Trans. Bass, Allan. The Harvester Press. 2003

Edgar, Andrew and Sedgwick, Peter. Cultural Theory: Key Thinkers. Routeldge. 2002.

Mikics, David. Who was Jacques Derrida: An Intellectual Biography. Yale University press. 2009.

Nicholas, Royle. Jacques Derrida. Routledge. 2003