‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’

Abstract

Jacques Derrida deals with structure in knowledge as exemplified in the structuralist anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss. Structure is both necessary and illusory. Structuralism as a movement takes the analysis of the linguistic sign as the model of structure. The structure must have a centre which both opens up and closes play, and which is different from structure. Structuralism both questions the metaphysics of the structure and reinforces it. The structuralist approach rests on structural linguistics focused on the system of signs. Levi-Strauss discourse on the myth reflects on itself and criticizes itself. And this moment is evidently of concern to all the languages which share the field of the human sciences. Play is the disruption of presence. The presence of an element is always a signifying and substitutive reference inscribed in a system of differences and the movement of a chain.

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