5.4 Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences

    In his famous essay, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ which was read at the John Hopkins International Colloquium on “The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” in October 1966, Derrida demonstrates how structuralism as represented by the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss which sets out as a criticism or rejection of science and metaphysics can be read as embodying precisely those aspects of science and metaphysics which it seeks to challenge. The essay concludes by saying, “There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of free play. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering, a truth or an origin which is free from free play 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 free play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism.” Thus, we have two diametrically opposite interpretations of structuralism, and we are unable to decide which the ‘right’ one is. This ‘aporia’ between two interpretations is due to the force of ‘difference’ intrinsic to the structure of language. The force of ‘differance’ makes language characteristically ‘centrifugal’, that is moving away from the center by ‘scattering’ of the philosophical system or by its ‘dissemination’ into multiple and conflicting interpretations. Characteristically, Derrida in this essay notes that ‘language bears within itself, the necessity of its own critique’.  The essay is considered as inauguration of ‘poststructuralism’ (going beyond structuralism) as a theoretical movement.