Derrida and
Deconstruction based on the essay "Structure,Sign, and Play in the
Discourse of Human Sciences"
Jacques Derrida is a French
philosopher, was born on July 15, 1930 in Algiers of Algeria, the then French
colony. He is famously known as the father of Deconstruction. He has
published more than 40 books on various topics such as anthropology, sociology,
semiotics, jurisprudence, literary theory and so on. Some of them „Of
Grammatology‟ is very famous one that discusses the theory of deconstruction
and its various aspects. Derrida died in Paris on October 8,2004.
According
to the critics Deconstruction is to take an idea, an institution or a set of
values and to understand its mechanism by removing cement that constitutes it.
Deconstruction aims at liberating language from the traditional concept of text
along with the ways of dealing with it. Deconstruction implies that the writer
himself un-builds whatever he builds.
The
final task of Deconstruction is not surpassing all opposition because it is
assume they are structurally necessary to produce sense. They need to be analyzed
and criticized in all their manifestation. The function of both logical and
ecological opposition must be studied in all discourse to provide meaning and
values are produced in a nihilistic position.
According
to Paul De Man, a member of Yale school it is possible within text, to frame a
question or undo assertion made in the text, by means of elements which
are in the text, which frequently would be precisely structures that play off
the rhetorical against grammatical elements. According to David B Allison, the
translator of Derrida – Deconstruction signifies a project of critical thought
whose task is to locate and take apart those concepts which serve4s as the
rules for a period of thought commanding the unfolding of an entire epoch of
metaphysics.
‘Deconstruction as a way of uncovering the questions behind the
answer of a text or tradition”
-is according to
Paul Recoeur.
“Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of a Human
Science‟ was a lecture presented at a conference titled “The Language of
Criticism and the Science of Man” held at Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore, USA in 1966,which was published in 1967.
The
essay begins with the quote from Montaigne- “we need to interpret interpretation
more than to interpret things. The need for an interpretation implied a paradox
because the higher interpretation also needs to be interpreted by an even
higher interpretation and that also needs to be interpreted and so on.
Derrida discussed about the concept
of structure. The concept of structure is old as episteme, as the idea of
knowledge in western science and knowledge and its roots go into the soil of
ordinary language. The structurality of structure as always been offered a
fixed position or a presence which process gives it a centrality and limits
thereby the play of the structure. This old method works on the organizing and
orienting principles which holds together the system within which one can
conceive of the free play of the elements of structure.
Derrida
accuses structuralist discourse holding on to a „center‟, a privileged
term that anchors the structure not the play. He said the center is not the
center of the totality and yet, since the center does not belong to the
totality, the totality has its center elsewhere, so the center is not the
center. The concept of structured center is the condition of the episteme as
philosophy or the science which rejects the idea of play. This center is from ‘arche’
or ‘telas’ that means inside or outside. Whether the center is God, being
presence or man -its function is the same, one center after another.
He calls
the history of the concept of structure as „event‟. The event evolves changes
in structuralism, structure and the structurality of structure. He is concerned
that the word event is also loaded with meaning. This event is now identified
as rapture and redoubling. Here the question may be asked rapture of what?
Derrida at the end of the essay has given the answer that the appearance of a
new structure, of an original new system by a rapture with its past, its origin
and its cause.
In the
absence of the center an infinite number of sign-substitutions come into play.
Instead of structure of concept, philosophy there was only collection of signs.
The relation between sign and signified is very fluid and enables a free play
of the later. The concept of sign cannot be abandoned when the radical thinkers
like Freud, Nietzsche, and Heidegger worked with signs they were inheriting the
whole system, the whole metaphysics.
After
that he points out that Nietzsche is the critique of being and truth, Freud is
the critique of self-presence, consciousness, self-identity, Heidegger is the
critique of radical destruction of metaphysics. Here Derrida states that it is impossible
to destroy a concept without using it. As he said there is no sense in doing
without the concept of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics, sign must
signify something, once the signified is eliminated, the notion of signs must
be rejected. He said about reciprocal destruction that the destroyer allows destroying
each other reciprocally. Such as Heidegger considering Nietzsche as the last
metaphysics, the last Platonist, one could do for Heidegger the same and today
no exercise is available.
Derrida
tries to explore the relevance of this enquiry of human sciences and he chooses
ethnology. In fact one can assume that ethnology could have been born as a
science only at the moment when decentering had come about at the moment when
European culture and its consequences , the history of metaphysics and its
concepts has been dislocated, driven from its locus and forced to stop
considering itself as the culture of reference. In other word the rise of
ethnology presage the decentering or destabilizing of a historically dominant
discourse. Derrida calls it the problem of economy and strategy, which suggests
the borrowing from a heritage the resources for the destruction of that heritage
itself.
Then
Derrida gives the example of famous French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.
From his text Derrida discusses the opposition between nature and culture,
which is a very old opposition even before Plato. A whole historical chain
exists which opposes nature to law, to education, to art, to history and soon.
In his book „The Elementary Structure of Kinship‟ he discusses the matter, where
he tries tom differentiate the natural and cultural.
In
this manner truth and method is separated by Levi-Strauss. On the other hand he
brings the idea of bricolage, a discourse of method which affirms that it
utilizes those instruments which already exist and which had not been specially
conceived. So bricolage is cultural language itself that is being applied in
literary criticism. One does not devise terms, engineer of a language is amyth,
one inherits them from treasure. In his book The Savage Mind he describes
bricolage not only an intellectual activity but also a mytho poetical one. This
concern all languages that share the field of human sciences, it abandons all
the references to the center, to the privilege, to the origin.
Then he goes on to Strauss’ last book “The Raw and The Cooked”. He discusses
that -
1. The Bororo myth does not deserve the privileged
over others. Because there is nothing special that other lacks. This is
interesting not because it is typical but it is irregular position within the
group.
2. The myth lacks unity or absolute sources. It is
therefore advisable of going back to the sources, to the center, Strauss
named it mythomorphic.
Derrida gives answer that it is difficult to arrive at
the center by analyzing a myth. Because
1) The smaller segments obtained while analyzing them, have a
tendency to form certain shifting center.
2) Myths are secondary codes; the primary codes pertain
to language. According to him myth and musical work
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