Page 97 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

STRUCTURALISM

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reading body, “my body of bliss”, is somehow a very different matter.
The text of jouissance, in effect the modernist text, is thus the incomplete
text, just as the body is less erotic when completely naked than “where
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the garment gapes”. It should be obvious that this is Barthes at play.
But it is play in a double sense, both as eroticism and also as
indeterminacy, as that play of meanings which will fascinate, not
only Barthes himself, but also Derrida.
Derrida’s 1966 paper, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse
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of the Human Sciences”, very clearly anticipates many of the
characteristic themes and preoccupations of the later Barthes. Derrida
himself is the post-structuralist thinker par excellence, with no properly
structuralist past, a more profound thinker than Barthes, a philosopher
rather than a critic, to borrow a distinction of which neither approved.
Insofar as the developing discourse of post-structuralism has been
concerned, the key theoretical option emerged increasingly, during
the late 1970s and the 1980s, as that between Foucault and Derrida,
rather than between Foucault and Barthes. Derrida’s three major works,
Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomena and Of Grammatology,
all first published in 1967, thus mark the founding moment of French
post-structuralism.
Derrida rejects the “logocentric” notion of language as “voice”,
that is, as the expression of intentional human meaning, and insists
that its true nature is more clearly revealed in writing than in speech.
Just as for Saussure langue is more permanent and durable than parole,
so for Derrida writing outlives and outlasts its supposed authors. But
Derrida takes the argument a stage further. Where Saussure had
privileged sign over referent, Derrida privileges signifier over signified,
so much so, in fact, that writing consists, not of signs, but of signifiers
alone. Thus for Derrida, the meaning of meaning is an indefinite
referral of signifier to signifier “which gives signified meaning no
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respite…so that it always signifies again”. Linguistic meaning thereby
entails an “infinite equivocality”. Derrida inherits also the Saussurean
notion of language as founded on difference, but coins the neologism,
différance, to stress the double meaning of the French verb, différer,
as both to differ and to defer or delay. Thus difference is also deferral,
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for the moment at least, of other, alternative meanings. That
characteristically Derridean device, the pun, is deployed precisely so
as to enable a remorseless worrying away at the other possible meanings
of words.

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