There's a wikipedia page for this article, a lecture given at Johns Hopkins University on 21 October 1966. Here is the summary on Wikipedia:
"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. Discussing the anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Derrida argues that we are all bricoleurs, creative thinkers who must use the tools we find around us.
Indeed bricolage is a wonderful word.
The essay starts out with the quote: We need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret things. (Montaigne).
It's about playing with the history of philosophy but also with Structuralism and Heidegger, who are Derrida's two great sources in this essay. He wants to show the axioms, the center, the structure cannot hold, indeed confounds itself.
"one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure". I'm not sure if that's true. My first thought is free jazz, though I suspect there is some hidden structures in free jazz.
"the condition of the episteme as philosophy or science—is contradictorily coherent." I mean Godel's theorem proved that, I suppose, published in 1931.
"coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire"
"on the basis of 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 at stake in the game from the outset."
The above quote could almost describe Derrida, who provokes anxiety in his dense prose, but his anxiety comes from a different place, feeling uncentered. In the Fry lecture about this essay, he likens Derrida to a crab scuttling around an argument, sideways, avoiding being pinned down.
This feels like a zinger I hope to come to understand: "This is why one perhaps could say that the movement of any archaeology, like that of any eschatology, is an accomplice of this reduction of the structurality of structure and always attempts to conceive of structure on the basis of a full presence which is beyond play."
I could study this sentence quite a bit:
"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 come more quickly to my principal theme—is the determination of Being as presence in all senses of this word. It could be shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated an invariable presence—eidos, arche¯, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject) aletheia, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth."
eidos redirects to the theory of forms and I think are ideas.
arche means first principles, the elements.
telos is final cause, from Aristotle.
energeia is potentiality and actuality, again from Aristotle.
ousia is primary existences, part of Aristotle's Categories.
alatheia is truth or disclosure. I once knew the child of a philosophy professor named Alatheia.
In the end it's like doing ancient philosophy scales to list those.
By pointing out other centers, ancient centers, you're essentially saying there is no one agreed upon center.
These scales are various proposed metaphysical centers. Man is the last one. "and so forth"
I want to know more about what he means by the rupture at the event. The event, a rupture, is the emergence of language. God's absence from the world, is the structure of the world. Language doesn't do that. It makes no sense to say it stands outside. It's a critique of structuralism. This is why it's an event. Language is the event.
"...a central presence which has never been itself, has always already been exiled from itself into its own substitute."
Woof.
What is language? It's not Saussurean. Deconstruction calls into question the distinction between thought and language. Sound over script, sound/image. Why should we think of language as speech? Writing is no different than voice. Voice is inscribed on the ear. (From Fry)
There are no stable binaries in Derrida.
"... nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions come into play."
"metaphysics of presence" seems interesting to me.
"as soon as one seeks to demonstrate in this way that there is no transcendental or privileged signified and that the domain or play of signification henceforth has no limit, one must reject even the concept and word “sign” itself—which is precisely what cannot be done."
I have realized I want to see if I can get to some level of comfort reading Derrida, so that I perhaps can later approach Nagarjuna.
Links:
Fry's lecture is a source in the above.
David Loy writes "The Dharma of Deconstruction." (Archive).
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