Freeplay (French: jeu libre) is a literary concept from Jacques Derrida's 1966 essay, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences".
In his essay, Derrida speaks of a philosophical "event" that has occurred to the historic foundation of structure.
[U]p 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.
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.
The presence of an element is always a signifying and substitutive reference inscribed in a system of differences and the movement of a chain.