Derrida SSP

Derrida "Structure, Sign and Play"

first was delivered during conference at Johns Hopkins, 1966

Coronation or de-Coronation?

- 1966 - a conference in John Hopkins University devoted to Levi Strauss ("coronation")

- Derrida is criticizing Levi Strauss simultaneously "standing on his shoulders" by delivering his Deconstruction ("de-coronation")

Derrida as a ‘fashionable’ thinker

Deconstruction

History of Metaphysics

- is a history of successive appeals to a center

- such examples: essence, existence, substance, subject, aletheia, transcendentality, consciousness, or conscience, God, man AND ...

- a Media star

- a Father of Deconstruction

- an alumnus of the elite École Normale Supérieure

- was influenced by Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger

- had an Arbitrary Stile of Writing as an opposition to structuralism

"Event"?

- the Crisis of STRUCTURALIST BEING:

something new emerges from between 2 things

(as a difference withing a field,

but not a single cause as an effect)

- Deconstruction as a problematic critique of

genesis in structuralism

- Deconstruction as a critique of an idea of

everything what has a center

- Deconstruction as an "evasive dance", where can't

be found any distinct position, any idea that can be

understood or governed by "transcendental signifier"

... Language

- displaced the previous transcendental signifier (a Man)

- in the absence of origin (center) everything became discourse

- language is "no other" than speech is something perpetual in speech

Textuality

Extreme Reactions

Deconstruction denies any existence outside the text = there is nothing but text

Our knowledge is textual, so our life, our spontaneous existence mediated by our textual knowledge

CAN WE KNOW WHAT THINGS ARE?

UNDECIDABILITY is impossibility within Deconstruction to form grounded opinion about something

Positive Reaction

Negative Reaction

Deconstruction opens a void

to which fanaticism

and tyranny can rich

Undecidability is a perpetually sleepless vigilant observer, who examines all opinions to withstand and resist those most encouragable and agreeable opinions of ALL

Deconstruction and the Sign

Structuralism

Structuralism as a Jar:

something ARBITRARY, ORGANIZING everything WITHOUT PARTICIPATING

in it

- central signified (the original or transcendental signified) is never absolutely present outside the system of differences

- the absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the interplay of signification ad infinitum

- one signifier leads to another:

I think signifier and it triggers by association to another signifier ---- it doesn't exist in a systemic space but in unfolding time

- SELF-REPLICATING CHAIN/ STREAM OF SIGNIFICATIONS

Center in Structuralism

"Event"

Function of the Center

"event" = "rupture" = "redoubling"

- something which cannot be changed, where substitution of its elements is impossible

- something which is always outside the structure

- orient, balance and organize the structure

- provide and limit "freeplay" of a structure