Jacques Derrida:
“Structure,
Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1970)
Perhaps
something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be
called an “event,” if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is
precisely the function of structural—or structurality—thought to reduce or to
suspect. But let me use the term “event” anyway, employing it with caution and
as if in quotation marks. In this sense, this event will have the exterior form
of a rupture and a redoubling.
It would be easy
enough to show that the concept of structure and even the word “structure”
itself are as old as the epistémé—that is to say, as old as western
science and western philosophy—and that their roots thrust deep into the soil
of ordinary language, into whose deepest recesses the epistémé plunges
to gather them together once more, making them part of itself in a metaphorical
displacement. Nevertheless, up until the event which I wish to mark out and
define, structure-or rather the structurality of structure—although it has
always been involved, has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a
process of giving it a center or referring it to a point of presence, a fixed
origin. The function of this center was not only to orient; balance, and
organize the structure—one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure—but
above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would
limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure. No doubt that by
orienting and organizing the coherence of the system, the center of a structure
permits the freeplay of its elements inside the total form. And even today the
notion of a structure lacking any center represents the unthinkable itself.
Nevertheless,
the center also closes off the freeplay it opens up and makes possible. Qua center,
it is the point at which the substitution of contents, elements, or terms is no
longer possible. At the center, the permutation or the transformation of
elements (which may of course be structures enclosed within a structure) is
forbidden. At least this permutation has always remained interdicted2 (I
use this word deliberately). Thus it has always been thought that the center,
which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure
which governs the structure, while escaping structurality. This is why
classical thought concerning structure could say that the center is,
paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. The center is
at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the
totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center
elsewhere. The center is not the center. The concept of centered
structure—although it represents coherence itself, the condition of the epistémé
as philosophy or science—is contradictorily coherent. And, as always,
coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire. The concept of
centered structure is in fact the concept of a freeplay based on a fundamental
ground, a freeplay which is constituted upon a fundamental immobility and a
reassuring certitude, which is itself beyond the reach of the freeplay. With
this certitude anxiety can be mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result of
a certain mode of being implicated in the game, of being caught by the game, of
being as it were from the very beginning at stake in the game.3 From
the basis of what we therefore call the center (and which, because it can be
either inside or outside, is as readily called the origin as the end, as
readily arché as telos), the repetitions, the substitutions, the
transformations, and the permutations are always taken from a history of
meaning [sens]—that is, a history, period—whose origin may always be
revealed or whose end may always be anticipated in the form of presence. This
is why one could perhaps say that the movement of any archeology, like that of
any eschatology, is an accomplice of this reduction of the structurality of
structure and always attempts to conceive of structure from the basis of a full
presence which is out of play.
If this is so,
the whole history of the concept of structure, before the rupture I spoke of, must
be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center, as a linked
chain of determinations of the center. Successively, and in a regulated
fashion, the center receives different forms or names. The history of
metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors
and metonymies. Its matrix—if you will pardon me for demonstrating so little
and for being so elliptical in order to bring me more quickly to my principal
theme—is the determination of being as presence in all the senses of this word.
It would be possible to show that all the names related to fundamentals, to
principles, or to the center have always designated the constant of a presence—eidos,
arché, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject) aletheia,
transcendentality, consciousness, or conscience, God, man, and so forth. The
event I called a rupture, the disruption I alluded to at the beginning of this
paper, would presumably have come about when the structurality of structure had
to begin to be thought, that is to say, repeated, and this is why I said that
this disruption was repetition in all of the senses of this word. From then on
it became necessary to think the law which governed, as it were, the desire for
the center in the constitution of structure and the process of signification prescribing
its displacements and its substitutions for this law of the central presence—but
a central presence which was never itself, which has always already been
transported outside itself in its surrogate. The surrogate does not substitute
itself for anything which has somehow pre-existed it. From then on it was
probably necessary to begin to think that there was no center, that the center
would not be thought in the form of a being-present, that the center had no
natural locus, that it was not a fixed locus 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
we can agree on this word—that is to say, when everything became a system where
the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never
absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the
transcendental signified extends the domain and the interplay of signification ad
infinitum.
Where and how
does this decentering, this notion of the structurality of structure, occur? It
would be somewhat naive to refer to an event, a doctrine, or an author in order
to designate this occurrence. It is no doubt part of the totality of an era,
our own, but still it has already begun to proclaim itself and begun to work.
Nevertheless, if I wished to give some sort of indication by choosing one or
two “names,” and by recalling those authors in whose discourses this occurrence
has most nearly maintained its most radical formulation, I would probably cite
the Nietzschean critique of metaphysics, the critique of the concepts of being
and truth, for which were substituted the concepts of play, interpretation, and
sign (sign without truth present); the Freudian critique or self-presence, that
is, the critique of consciousness, subject, of self- identity and of
self-proximity or self-possession; and, more radically, the Heideggerean
destruction of metaphysics, of onto-theology, of the determination of being as
presence. But all these destructive discourses and all their analogues are
trapped in a sort of circle. This circle is unique. It describes the form of
the relationship between the history of metaphysics and the destruction of the
history of metaphysics. There is no sense in doing without the concepts
of metaphysics in order to attack metaphysics. We have no language—no syntax
and no lexicon—which is alien to this history; we cannot utter a single
destructive proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the logic,
and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest. To pick
out one example from many: the metaphysics of presence is attacked with the
help of the concept of the sign. But from the moment anyone wishes this
to show, as I suggested a moment ago, that there is no transcendental or
privileged signified and that the domain or the interplay of signification has,
henceforth, no limit, he ought to extend his refusal to the concept and to the word
sign itself-which is precisely what cannot be done. For the signification
“sign” has always been comprehended and determined, in its sense, as sign-of,
signifier referring to a signified, signifier different from its signified. If
one erases the radical difference between signifier and signified, it is the
word signifier itself which ought to be abandoned as a metaphysical concept. When
Lévi-Strauss says in the preface to “The Raw and the Cooked”4 that
he has “sought to transcend the opposition between the sensible and the
intelligible by placing [himself] from the very beginning at the level of
signs,” the necessity, the force, and the legitimacy of his act cannot make us
forget that the concept of the sign cannot in itself surpass or bypass this
opposition between the sensible and the intelligible. The concept of the sign
is determined by this opposition: through and throughout the totality of its
history and by its system. But we cannot do without the concept of the sign, we
cannot give up this metaphysical complicity without also giving up the critique
we are directing against this complicity, without the risk of erasing difference
[altogether] in the self- identity of a signified reducing into itself its
signifier, or, what amounts to the same thing, simply expelling it outside
itself. For there are two heterogenous ways of erasing the difference between
the signifier and the signified: one, the classic way, consists in reducing or
deriving the signifier, that is to say, ultimately in submitting the
sign to thought; the other, the one we are using here against the first one,
consists in putting into question the system in which the preceding reduction
functioned: first and foremost, the opposition between the sensible and the
intelligible. The paradox is that the metaphysical reduction of the sign needed
the opposition it was reducing. The opposition is part of the system, along
with the reduction. And what I am saying here about the sign can be extended to
all the concepts and all the sentences of metaphysics, in particular to the
discourse on “structure.” But there are many ways of being caught in this
circle. They are all more or less naive, more or less empirical, more or less
systematic, more or less close to the formulation or even to the formalization
of this circle. It is these differences which explain the multiplicity of
destructive discourses and the disagreement between those who make them. It was
within concepts inherited from metaphysics that Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger
worked, for example. Since these concepts are not elements or atoms and since
they are taken from a syntax and a system, every particular borrowing drags
along with it the whole of metaphysics. This is what allows these destroyers to
destroy each other reciprocally- for example, Heidegger considering Nietzs che,
with as much lucidity and rigor as bad faith and misconstruction, as the last
metaphysician, the last “Platonist.” One could do the same for Heidegger
himself, for Freud, or for a number of others. And today no exercise is more
widespread.
What is the
relevance of this formal schema when we turn to what are called the “human sciences”?
One of them perhaps occupies a privileged place—ethnology. One can in fact
assume that ethnology could have been born as a science only at the moment when
a de-centering had come about: at the moment when European culture—and, in
consequence, the history of metaphysics and of its concepts—had been dislocated,
driven from its locus, and forced to stop considering itself as the culture of
reference. This moment is not first and foremost a moment of philosophical or
scientific discourse, it is also a moment which is political, economic,
technical, and so forth. One can say in total assurance that there is nothing
fortuitous about the fact that the critique of ethnocentrism—the very condition
of ethnology—should be systematically and historically contemporaneous with the
destruction of the history of metaphysics. Both belong to a single and same
era.
Ethnology—like
any science—comes about within the element of discourse. And it is primarily a
European science employing traditional concepts, however much of it may
struggle against them. Consequently, whether he wants to or not-and this does
not depend on a decision on his part-the ethnologist accepts into his discourse
the premises of ethnocentrism at the very moment when he is employed in
denouncing them. This necessity is irreducible; it is not a historical
contingency. We ought to consider very carefully all its implications. But if
nobody can escape this necessity, and if no one is therefore responsible for
giving in to it, however little, this does not mean that all the ways of giving
in to it are of an equal pertinence. The quality and the fecundity of a
discourse are perhaps measured by the critical rigor with which this relationship
to the history of metaphysics and to inherited concepts is thought. Here it is
a question of a critical relationship to the language of the human sciences and
a question of a critical responsibility of the discourse. It is a question of
putting expressly and systematically the problem of the status of a discourse
which borrows from a heritage the resources necessary for the deconstruction of
that heritage itself. A problem of economy and strategy.
If I now go on
to employ an examination of the texts of [the anthropologist Claude]
Lévi-Strauss as an example, it is not only because of the privilege accorded to
ethnology among the human sciences, nor yet because the thought of Lévi-Strauss
weighs heavily on the contemporary theoretical situation. It is above all
because a certain choice has made itself evident in the work of Lévi-Strauss
and because a certain doctrine has been elaborated there, and precisely in a
more or less explicit manner, in relation to this critique of language and to
this critical language in the human sciences.
In order to
follow this movement in the text of Lévi-Strauss, let me choose as one guiding
thread among others the opposition between nature and culture. In spite of all
its rejuvenations and its disguises, this opposition is congenital to
philosophy. It is even older than Plato. It is at least as old as the Sophists.
Since the statement of the opposition—physis/nomos, physis/techné—it
has been passed on to us by a whole historical chain which opposes “nature” to
the law, to education, to art, to technics—and also to liberty, to the
arbitrary, to history, to society, to the mind, and so on. From the beginnings
of his quest and from his first book, The Elementary Structures of Kinship,5 Lévi-Strauss
has felt at one and the same time the necessity of utilizing this opposition and
the impossibility of making it acceptable. In the Elementary Structures,
he begins from this axiom or definition: that belongs to nature which is
universal and spontaneous, not depending on any particular culture or on any
determinate norm. That belongs to culture, on the other hand, which depends on
a system of norms regulating society and is therefore capable of varying from one
social structure to another. These two definitions are of the traditional type.
But, in the very first pages of the Elementary Structures, Lévi-Strauss,
who has begun to give these concepts an acceptable standing, encounters what he
calls a scandal, that is to say, something which no longer tolerates the
nature/culture opposition he has accepted and which seems to require at one and
the same time the predicates of nature and those of culture. This scandal
is the incestprohibition. The incest prohibition is universal; in this
sense one could call it natural. But it is also a prohibition, a system of
norms and interdicts; in this sense one could call it cultural. Let us assume
therefore that everything universal in man derives from the order of nature and
is characterized by spontaneity, that everything which is subject to a norm
belongs to culture and presents the attributes of the relative and the particular.
We then find ourselves confronted by a fact, or rather an ensemble of facts,
which, in the light of the preceding definitions, is not far from appearing as a
scandal: the prohibition of incest presents without the least equivocation, and
indissolubly linked together, the two characteristics in which we recognized
the contradictory attributes of two exclusive orders. The prohibition of incest
constitutes a rule, but a rule, alone of all the social rules, which possesses
at the same time a universal character (9).
Obviously there
is no scandal except in the interior of a system of concepts sanctioning the difference
between nature and culture. In beginning his work with the factum of the
incestprohibition, Lévi-Strauss thus puts himself in a position entailing that
this difference, which has always been assumed to be self-evident, becomes
obliterated or disputed. For, from the moment that the incest prohibition can
no longer be conceived within the nature/culture opposition, it can no longer
be said that it is a scandalous fact, a nucleus of opacity within a network of
transparent significations. The incest-prohibition is no longer scandal one
meets with or comes up against in the domain of traditional concepts; it is
something which escapes these concepts and certainly precedes them—probably as
the condition of their possibility. It could perhaps be said that the whole of
philosophical conceptualization, systematically relating itself to the
nature/culture opposition, is designed to leave in the domain of the
unthinkable the very thing that makes this conceptualization possible: the
origin of the prohibition of incest.
I have dealt too
cursorily with this example, only one among so many others, but the example
nevertheless reveals that language bears within itself the necessity of its own
critique. This critique may be undertaken along two “tracks, in two “manners.”
Once the limit of nature/culture opposition makes itself felt, one might want
to question systematically and rigorously the history of these concepts. This
is a first action. Such a systematic and historic questioning would be neither
a philological nor a philosophical action in the classic sense of these words.
Concerning oneself with the founding concepts of the whole history of
philosophy, de-constituting them, is not to undertake the task of the
philologist or of the classic historian of philosophy. In spite of appearances,
it is probably the most daring way of making the beginnings of a step outside
of philosophy. The step “outside philosophy” is much more difficult to conceive
than is generally imagined by those who think they made it long ago with
cavalier ease, and who are in general swallowed up in metaphysics by the whole
body of the discourse that they claim to have disengaged from it.
In order to
avoid the possibly sterilizing effect of the first way, the other choice—which
I feel corresponds more nearly to the way chosen by Lé vi-Strauss—consists in
conserving in the field of empirical discovery all these old concepts, while at
the same time exposing here and there their limits, treating them as tools
which can still be of use. No longer is any truth-value attributed to them;
there is a readiness to abandon them if necessary if other instruments should appear
more useful. In the meantime, their relative efficacy is exploited, and they
are employed to destroy the old machinery to which they belong and of which
they themselves are pieces. Thus it is that the language of the human scie nces
criticizes itself. Lévi-Strauss thinks that in this way he can separate
method from truth, the instruments of the method and the objective
significations aimed at by it. One could almost say that this is the primary
affirmation of Lévi-Strauss; in any event, the first words of the Elementary
Structures are: “One begins to understand that the distinction between
state of nature and state of society (we would be more apt to say today: state of
nature and state of culture), while lacking any acceptable historical
signification, presents a value which fully justifies its use by modern
sociology: its value as a methodological instrument.”
Lévi-Strauss
will always remain faithful to this double intention: to preserve as an instrument
that whose truth-value he criticizes.
On the one hand, he will continue in effect to contest the value of the
nature/culture opposition. More than thirteen years after the Elementary
Structures, The Savage Minds6
faithfully echoes the text I have just
quoted: “The opposition between nature and culture which I have previously
insisted on seems today to offer value which is above all methodological.” And this
methodological value is not affected by its “ontological” non- value (as could
be said, if this notion were not suspect here): “It would not be enough to have
absorbed particular humanities into a genera humanity; this first enterprise
prepares the way for others ... which belong to the natural and exact sciences:
to reintegrate culture into nature, and finally, to reintegrate life into the
totality of its physiochemical conditions” (327).
On the other
hand, still in The Savage Mind, he
presents as what he calls bricolage7 which might be
called the discourse of this method. The bricoleur, says Lévi-Strauss,
is someone who uses “the means at hand,” that is, the instruments he finds at
his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been
especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to be used
and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to
change them whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of them at once, even
if their form and their origin are heterogenous—and so forth. There is
therefore a critique of language in the form of bricolage, and it has
even been possible to say that bricolage is the critical language
itself. I am thinking in particular of the article by G. Genette, “Structuralisme
et Critique litteraire,” published in homage to Lévi-Strauss in a special
issue of L’Arc (no. 26, 1965), where it is stated that the analysis of bricolage
could “be applied almost word for word” to criticism, and especially to
“literary criticism.”8
If one calls bricolage the necessity
of borrowing one's concepts from the text of a heritage which is more or less
coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur.
The engineer, whom Lévi-Strauss opposes to the bricoleur, should be the
one to construct the totality of his language, syntax, and lexicon. In this
sense the engineer is a myth. A subject who would supposedly be the absolute
origin of his own discourse and would supposedly construct it “out of nothing,”
“out of whole cloth,” would be the creator of the verbe, the verbe itself.
The notion of the engineer who had supposedly broken with all forms of bricolage
is therefore a theological idea; and since Lévi-Strauss tells us elsewhere
that bricolage is mythopoetic, the odds are that the engineer is a myth
produced by the bricoleur. From the moment that we cease to believe in
such an engineer and in a discourse breaking with the received historical
discourse, as soon as it is admitted that every finite discourse is bound by a certain
bricolage, and that the engineer and the scientist are also species of bricoleurs
then the very idea of bricolage is menaced and the difference in which
it took on its meaning decomposes.
This brings out
the second thread which might guide us in what is being unraveled here. Lévi-Strauss
describes bricolage not only as an intellectual activity but also as a mythopoetical
activity. One reads in The Savage Mind, “Like bricolage on the
technical level, mythical reflection can attain brilliant and unforeseen
results on the intellectual level. Reciprocally, the mythopoetical character of
bricolage has often been noted” (26). But the remarkable endeavor of
Lévi-Strauss is not simply to put forward, notably in the most recent of his
investigations, a structural science or knowledge of myths and of mythological activity.
His endeavor also appears—I would say almost from the first in the status which
he accords to his own discourse, on myths, to what he calls his “mythologicals”
It is here that his discourse on the myth reflects on itself and criticizes
itself. And this moment, this critical period, is evidently of concern to all
the languages which share the field of the human sciences. What does
Lévi-Strauss say of his “mythologicals”? It is here that we rediscover the
mythopoetical virtue (power) of bricolage. In effect, what appears most
fascinating in this critical search for a new status of the discourse is the
stated abandonment of all reference to a center, to a subject, to
a privileged reference, to an origin, or to an absolute arché.
The theme of this decentering could be followed throughout the “Overture” to
his last book, The Raw and the Cooked. I shall simply remark on a few
key points.
1)
From
the very start, Lévi-Strauss recognizes that the Bororo myth which he employs
in the book as the “reference- myth” does not merit this name and this
treatment. The name is specious and the use of the myth improper. This myth
deserves no more than any other its referential privilege:
In fact the Bororo myth which will from now on be designated by the name reference-myth
is, as I shall try to show, nothing other than a more or less forced transformation
of other myths originating either in the same society or in societies more-or
less far removed. It would therefore have been legitimate to choose as my point
of departure any representative of the group whatsoever. From this point of view,
the interest of the reference- myth does not depend on its typical character, but
rather on its irregular position in the midst of a group (10).
2)
There is no unity or absolute source of the
myth. The focus or the source of the myth are always shadows and virtualities
which are elusive, unactualizable, and nonexistent in the first place.
Everything begins with the structure, the configuration, the relationship. The
discourse on this acentric structure, the myth, that is, cannot itself have an
absolute subject or an absolute center. In order not to short change the form
and the movement of the myth, that violence which consists in centering a
language which is describing an acentric structure must be avoided. In this context,
therefore it is necessary to forego scientific or philosophical discourse, to
renounce the episteme which absolutely requires, which is the absolute
requirement that we go back to the source, to the center, to the founding
basis, to the principle, and so on. In opposition to epistemic discourse,
structural discourse on myths—mythological discourse—must itself be mythomorphic.
It must have the form of that of which it speaks. This is what Lévi-Strauss
says in The Raw and the Cooked, from which I would now like to quote a
long and remarkable passage:
In effect the study of myths poses a methodological problem by the fact that it
cannot conform to the Cartesian principle of dividing the difficulty into as
many parts as are necessary to resolve. There exists no veritable end or term
to mythical analysis, no secret unity which could be grasped at the end of the
work of decomposition. The themes duplicate themselves to infinity. When we
think we have disentangled them from each other and can hold them separate, it
is only to realize that they are joining together again, in response to the
attraction of unforeseen affinities. In consequence, the unity of the myth is
only tendential and projective; it never reflects a state or a moment of the
myth. An imaginary phenomenon implied by
the endeavor to interpret, its role is to give a synthetic form to the myth and
to impede its dissolution into the confusion of contraries. It could therefore
be said that the science or knowledge of myths is an anaclastic, taking
this ancient term in the widest sense authorized by its etymology, a science which
admits into its definition the study of the reflected rays along with that of the
broken ones. But, unlike philosophical reflection, which claims to go all the way
back to its source, the reflections in question here concern rays without any other
than a virtual focus. ... In wanting to imitate the spontaneous movement of mythical
thought, my enterprise, itself too brief and too long, has had to yield to its
demands and respect its rhythm. Thus is this book, on myths itself and in its own
way, a myth.
This statement
is repeated a little farther on (20): “Since myths themselves rest on
second-order codes (the first-order codes being those in which language
consists), this book thus offers the rough draft of a third-order code,
destined to insure the reciprocal possibility of translation of several myths.
This is why it would not be wrong to consider it a myth: the myth of mythology,
as it were.” It is by this absence of any real and fixed center of the mythical
or mythological discourse that the musical model chosen by Lévi-Strauss for the
composition of his book is apparently justified. The absence of a center is
here the absence of a subject and the absence of an author: “The myth and the
musical work thus appear as orchestra conductors whose listeners are the silent
performers. If it be asked where the real focus of the work is to be found, it
must be replied that its determination is impossible. Music and mythology bring
man face to face with virtual objects whose shadow alone is actual.... Myths
have no authors” (25). Thus it is at this point that ethnographic bricolage deliberately
assumes its mythopoetic function. But by the same token, this function makes
the philosophical or epistemological requirement of a center appear as
mythological, that is to say, as a historical illusion. Nevertheless, even if
one yields to the necessity of what Lévi-Strauss has done, one cannot ignore
its risks. If the mythological is mythomorphic, are all discourses on myths equivalent?
Shall we have to abandon any epistemological requirement which permits us to distinguish
between several qualities of discourse on the myth? A classic question, but inevitable.
We cannot reply-and I do not believe Lévi-Strauss replies to it-as long as the
problem of the relationships between the philosopheme or the theorem, on
the one hand, and the mytheme or the mythopoem(e), on the other, has no
t been expressly posed. This is no small problem. For lack of expressly posing
this problem, we condemn ourselves to transforming the claimed transgression of
philosophy into an unperceived fault in the interior of the philosophical
field. Empiricism would be the genus of which these faults would always be the
species. Transphilosophical concepts would be transformed into philosophical
naivetes. One could give many examples to demonstrate this risk: the concepts
of sign, history, truth, and so forth. What I want to emphasize is simply that
the passage beyond philosophy does not consist in turning the page of
philosophy (which usually comes down to philosophizing badly), but in
continuing to read philosophers in a certain way. The risk I am speaking
of is always assumed by Lévi-Strauss and it is the very price of his endeavor.
I have said that empiricism is the matrix of all the faults menacing a
discourse which continues, as with Lévi-Strauss in particular, to elect to be
scientific. If we wanted to pose the problem of empiricism and bricolage in
depth, we would probably end up very quickly with a number of propositions
absolutely contradictory in relation to the status of discourse in structural
ethnography. On the one hand, structuralism justly claims to be the critique of
empiricism. But at the same time there is not a single book or study by
Lévi-Strauss which does not offer itself as an empirical essay which can always
be completed or invalidated by new information. The structural schemata are
always proposed as hypotheses resulting from a finite quantity of information
and which are subjected to the proof of experience. Numerous texts could be
used to demonstrate this double postulation. Let us turn once again to the
“Overture” of The Raw and the Cooked, where it seems clear that if this
postulation is double, it is because it is a question here of a language on
language:
Critics who
might take me to task for not having begun by making an exhaustive inventory of
South American myths before analyzing them would be making a serious mistake
about the nature and the role of these documents. The totality of the myths of
a people is of the order of the discourse. Provided that this people does not
become physically or morally extinct, this totality is never closed. Such a criticism
would therefore be equivalent to reproaching a linguist with writing the grammar
of a language without having recorded the totality of the words which have been
uttered since that language came into existence and without knowing the verbal
exchanges which will take place as long as the language continues to exist.
Experience proves that an absurdly small number of sentences ... allows the linguist
to elaborate a grammar of the language he is studying. And even a partial grammar
or an outline of a grammar represents valuable acquisitions in the case of
unknown languages. Syntax does not wait until it has been possible to enumerate
a theoretically unlimited series of events before becoming manifest, because
syntax consists in the body of rules which presides over the generation of these
events. And it is precisely a syntax of South American mythology that I wanted
to outline. Should new texts appear to enrich the mythical discourse, then this
will provide an opportunity to check or modify the way in which certain grammatical
laws have been formulated, an opportunity to discard certain of them and an
opportunity to discover new ones. But in no instance can the requirement of a
total mythical discourse be raised as an objection. For we have just seen that such
a requirement has no meaning (15-16).
Totalization is
therefore defined at one time as useless, at another time as impossible.
This is no doubt the result of the fact that there are two ways of conceiving
the limit of totalization. And I assert once again that these two
determinations coexist implicitly in the discourses of Lévi-Strauss.
Totalization can be judged impossible in the classical style: one then refers
to the empirical endeavor of a subject or of a finite discourse in a vain and
breathless quest of an infinite richness which it can never master. There is
too much, more than one can say. But nontotalization can also be determined in
another way: not from the standpoint of the concept of finitude as assigning us
to an empirical view, but from the standpoint of the concept of freeplay.
If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infinity of a
field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because
the nature of the field—that is, language and a finite language—excludes
totalization. This field is in fact that of freeplay, that is to say, a
field of infinite substitutions in the closure of a finite ensemble. This field
permits these infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say,
because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical
hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a
center which arrests and founds the freeplay of substitutions. One could say rigorously
using that word whose scandalous 'signification is always obliterated in
French-that this movement of the freeplay, permitted by the lack, the absence
of a center or origin, is the movement of supplementarity. One cannot
determine the center, the sign which supplements9 it,
which takes its place in its absence—because this sign adds itself, occurs in
addition, over and above, comes as a supplement.”10 The
movement of signification adds something, which results in the fact that there
is always more, but this addition is a floating one because it comes to perform
a vicarious function, to supplement a lack on the part of the signified.
Although Lévi-Strauss in his use of the word “supplementary” never emphasizes
as I am doing here the two directions of meaning which are so strangely
compounded within it, it is not by chance that he uses this word twice in his
“Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss,”11 at the point
where he is speaking of the “superabundance of signifier, in relation to the
signifieds to which this superabundance can refer”:
In his endeavor
to understand the world, man therefore always has at his disposition a surplus
of signification (which he portions out amongst things according to the laws of
symbolic thought-which it is the task of ethnologists and linguists to study).
This distribution of a supplementary allowance [ration supplémentaire]—if
it is permissible to put it that way—is absolutely necessary in order that on
the whole the available signifier and the signified it aims at may remain in
the relationship of complementarity which is the very condition of the use of
symbolic thought (xlix).
(It could no
doubt be demonstrated that this ration supplémentaire of signification
is the origin of the ratio itself.) The word reappears a little farther
on, after Lévi-Strauss has mentioned “this floating signifier, which is the
servitude of all finite tho ught”: In other words—and taking as our guide
Mauss's precept that all social phenomena can be assimilated to language—we see
in mana, Wakau, oranda and other notions of the same type, the conscious
expression of a semantic function, whose role it is to permit symbolic thought
to operate in spite of the contradiction which is proper to it. In this way are
explained the apparently insoluble antinomies attached to this notion.... At
one and the same time force and action, quality and state, substantive and
verb; abstract and concrete, omnipresent and localized- mans is in effect all
these things. But it is not precisely because it is none of these things that mana
is a simple form, or more exactly, a symbol in the pure state, and
therefore capable of becoming charged with any sort of symbolic content
whatever? In the system of symbols constituted by all cosmologies, mana would
simply be a valeur symbolique zero, that is to say, a sign marking the necessity
of a symbolic content supplementary [my italics] to that with which the signified
is already loaded, but which can take on any value required, provided only that
this value still remains part of the available reserve and is not, as phonologists
put it, a group-term. Lévi-Strauss adds the note:
Linguists have already been led to formulate hypotheses of
this type. For example: “A zero phoneme is opposed to all the other phonemes in
French in that it entails no differential characters and no constant phonetic
value. On the contrary, the proper function of the zero phoneme is to be
opposed to phoneme absence.” (R. Jakobson and J. Lutz, “Notes on the French
Phonemic Pattern,” Word, vol. 5, no. 2 [August 1949], p. 155).
Similarly, if we schematize the conception I am proposing here, it could almost
be said that the function of notions like mana is to be opposed to the
absence of signification, without entailing by itself any particular signification
(1 and note). The superabundance of the signifier, its supplementary character,
is thus the result of a finitude, that is to say, the result of a lack which
must be supplemented. It can now be understood why the concept of
freeplay is important in Lévi-Strauss. His references to all sorts of games,
notably to roulette, are very frequent, especially in his Conversations,12 in
Race and History,13
and in The Savage Mind. This
reference to the game or freeplay is always caught up in a tension.
It is in tension
with history, first of all. This is a classical problem, objections to which are
now well worn or used up. I shall simply indicate what seems to me the
formality of the problem: by reducing history, Lévi-Strauss has treated as it
deserves a concept which has always been in complicity with a teleological and
eschatological metaphysics, in other words, paradoxically, in complicity with
that philosophy of presence to which it was believed history could be opposed.
The thematic of historicity, although it seems to be a somewhat late arrival in
philosophy, has always been required by the determination of being as presence.
With or without etymology, and in spite of the classic antagonism which opposes
these significations throughout all of classical thought, it could be shown
that the concept of episteme has always called forth that of historia,
if history is always the unity of a becoming, as tradition of truth or
development of science or knowledge oriented toward the appropriation of truth
in presence and self-presence, toward knowledge in consciousness-of-self.14 History
has always been conceived as the movement of a resumptio n of history, a
diversion between two presences. But if it is legitimate to suspect this
concept of history, there is a risk, if it is reduced without an express
statement of the problem I am indicating here, of falling back into an
anhistoricism of a classical type, that is to say, in a determinate moment of
the history of metaphysics. Such is the algebraic formality of the problem as I
see it. More concretely, in the work of Lévi-Strauss it must be recognized that
the respect for structurality, for the internal originality of the structure,
compels a neutralization of time and history. For example, the appearance of a
new structure, of an original system, always comes about-and this is the very
condition of its structural specificity-by a rupture with its past, its origin,
and its cause. One can therefore describe what is peculiar to the structural organization
only by not taking into account, in the very moment of this description, its
past conditions: by failing to pose the problem of the passage from one
structure to another, by putting history into parentheses. In this
“structuralist” moment, the concepts of chance and discontinuity are
indispensable. And Lévi-Strauss does in fact often appeal to them as he does, for
instance, for that structure of structures, language, of which he says in the
“Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss” that it “could only have been born
in one fell swoop”:
Whatever may
have been the moment and the circumstances of its appearance in the scale of
animal life, language could only have been born in one fell swoop. Things could not have set about signifying
progressively. Following a transformation the study of which is not the concern
of the social sciences, but rather of biology and psychology, a crossing over
came about from a stage where nothing had a meaning to another where everything
possessed it (xlvi).
This standpoint
does not prevent Lévi-Strauss from recognizing the slowness, the process of maturing,
the continuous toil of factual transformations, history (for examp le, in Race
and History). But, in accordance with an act which was also Rousseau's and
Husserl's, he must “brush aside all the facts” at the moment when he wishes to
recapture the specificity of a structure. Like Rousseau, he must always
conceive of the origin of a new structure on the model of catastrophe—an
overturning of nature in nature, a natural interruption of the natural sequence,
a brushing aside of nature.
Besides the
tension of freeplay with history, there is also tension of freeplay with presence.
Freeplay is the disruption of presence. The presence of an element is always a signifying
and substitutive reference inscribed in a system of differences and the
movement of a chain. Freeplay is always an interplay of absence and presence,
but if it is to be radically conceived, freeplay must be conceived of before
the alternative of presence and absence; being must be conceived of as presence
or absence beginning with the possibility of freeplay and not the other way
around. If Lévi-Strauss, better than any other, has brought to light the
freeplay of repetition and the repetition of freeplay, one no less perceives in
his work a sort of ethic of presence, an ethic of nostalgia for origins, an
ethic of archaic and natural innocence, of a purity of presence and
self-presence in speech15--an ethic, nostalgia, and even remorse which he often presents
as the motivation of the ethnological project when he moves toward archaic
societies— exemplary societies in his eyes. These texts are well known. As a
turning toward the presence, lost or impossible, of the absent origin, this
structuralist thematic of broken immediateness is thus the sad, negative,
nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauist facet of the thinking of freeplay of which the
Nietzschean affirmation—the joyous affirmation of the freeplay of the
world and without truth, without origin, offered to an active interpretation— would
be the other side. This affirmation then determines the non-center otherwise
than as loss of the center. And it plays the game without security. For
there is a sure freeplay: that which is limited to the substitution of given
and existing, present, pieces. In absolute chance,
affirmation also surrenders itself to genetic indetermination, to the seminal
adventure of the trace.16
There are thus two interpretations of
interpretation, of structure, of sign, of freeplay. The one seeks to decipher,
dreams of deciphering, a truth or an origin which is free from freeplay and from
the order of the sign, and lives like an exile the necessity of interpretation.
The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms freeplay and
tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name man being the name of that
being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of onto-theology—in other
words, through the history of all of his history—has dreamed of full presence,
the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of the game. The second
interpretation of interpretation, to which Nietzsche showed us the way, does
not seek in ethnography, as Lévi-Strauss wished, the “inspiration of a new
humanism” (again from the “Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss”). There
are more than enough indications today to suggest we might perceive that these two
interpretations of interpretation which are absolutely irreconcilable even if
we live them simultaneously and reconcile them in an obscure economy- together
share the field which we call, in such a problematic fashion, the human
sciences.
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.17 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.
NOTES
1 “La Structure, le signe et le jeu
dans le discours des sciences humaines.” The text which follows is a
translation of the revised version of M. Derrida's communication. The word
“jeu” is variously translated here as “play,” “interplay,” game,” and “stake,”
besides the normative translation “freeplay.” All footnotes to this article are
additions by the translator.
2 Interdite: “forbidden,” “disconcerted,”
“confounded,” “speechless.”
3 “. . . qui nalt toujours d'une
certaine maniere d'etre implique dans le jeu, d'etre pris au jeu, d'etre comme
etre d'entree de jeu dans le jeu.”
4 Le cru et le cuit (Paris: Plon, 1964).
5 Les structures elementaires de la
parente (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1949).
6 La pensee sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962).
7 A bricoleur is a jack-of-all-trades,
someone who potters about with odds-and-ends, who puts things together out of bits
and pieces.
8 Reprinted in: G. Genette, Figures (Paris:
Ed itions du Seuil, 1966), p. 145.
9 The point being that the word, both in
English and French, means “to supply a deficiency,” on the one hand, and “to
supply something additional,” on the other.
10 “. . . ce signe s'ajoute, vient en
sus, en supplement.”
11 “Introduction a l'oeuvre de Marcel
Mauss,” In: Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1950).
12 Presumably: G. Charbonnier, Entretiens
avec Claude Lévi-Strauss(Paris: Plon-Julliard, 1961).
13 Race and History (Paris: UNESCO Publications, 1958).
14 “. .. l'unite d'un devenir, comme
tradition de la verite dans la presence et la presence a soi, vers Is savoir
dans la conscience de soi.”
15 “. . . de la presence e soi dans la
parole.”
16 Tournee vers la presence, perdue ou
impossible, de l'origine absente, cette thematique structuraliste de l'immediatete
rompue est donc la face triste, negative, nostalgique, coupable, rousseauiste,
de la pense du jeu don’t l'affirmation nietzscheenne, l'affirmation joyeuse du
jeu du monde et de l'innocence du devenir, l'affirmation d'un monde de signes
sans faute, sans verite, sans origine, offert A une interpretation active,
serait l'sutre face. Cette affirmation determine alors le non-centre autrement
que comme perte du centre. Et elle joue sans securite. Car il y a un jeu stir:
celui qui se limite a la substitution de pieces donnees et existantes,
presenes. Dans le hasard absolu,l'affirmation se livre aussi a
l'indetermination genetique, a l'aventure seminale de Is trace.”
17 From differer, in the sense of
“to postpone,” “put off,” “defer.” Elsewhere Derrida uses the word as a synonym
for the German Aufschub: “postponement,” and relates it to the central Freudian
concepts of Verspa tung,Nachtraglichkeit, and to the “detours to death”
of Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Sigmund Freud (Standard Edition, ed.
James Strachey, vol. XIX, London, 1961), Chap. V
