Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences
"Structure, Sign, and Play" identifies a tendency for philosophers to denounce each other for relying on problematic discourse, and argues that this reliance is to some degree inevitable because we can only write in the language we inherit.
Derrida wrote "Structure, Sign, and Play" to present at a conference titled "The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man" held at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore from 18–21 October 1966.
[1] The conference, organized by René Girard and Richard A. Macksey for the newly founded Humanities Center, and sponsored by the Ford Foundation, brought together a collection of notable French thinkers, including Paul de Man, Roland Barthes, Jean Hyppolite and Jacques Lacan.
)[7] "Structure, Sign, and Play" was first published in English in 1970, within a volume dedicated to the Johns Hopkins colloquium titled The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man.
[8] Macksey and Donato write in the preface to this volume that the goal of the conference was to clarify the field of structuralism and define some of its common problems across disciplines.
The essay begins by speculating, "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—structuralist—thought to reduce or suspect.
In the history of metaphysics specifically, this function is fulfilled by different terms (which Derrida says are always associated with presence): "eidos, archè, telos, energia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject) aletheia, transcendentality, consciousness, or conscience, God, man, and so forth.
"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.
Derrida quotes Lévi-Strauss's The Raw and the Cooked:[21] In effect the study of myths poses a mythological 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 it.
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 Derrida's words, "structural discourse on myths—mythological discourse—must itself be mythomorphic".
But Derrida criticizes Lévi-Strauss for an inability to explain historical changes—for describing structural transformation as the consequence of mysterious outside forces (paralleling the substitute "centers" that make up the history of metaphysics).
[25]Derrida concludes by reaffirming the existence of a transformation within structuralism, suggesting that it espouses this affirmative view of unlimited freeplay and presenting it as unpredictable yet inevitable.
[26] The 1966 colloquium, although intended to organize and strengthen the still-murky field of structuralism[27] became known through Derrida's lecture as a turning point and the beginning of the post-structuralist movement.
[32] The essay sowed the seeds of popularity for French post-structuralism at eastern universities in the United States, particularly Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and Yale.
[5][34] The colloquium also created a demand for the French intellectuals on American campuses, which led notably to Derrida's 1986 recruitment by University of California, Irvine.
[38] The New York Times argued in its obituary for Derrida that "Structure, Sign, and Play" offered professors of literature a philosophical movement they could legitimately consider their own.
