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Contemporary Cultural Theory

anti-Freudian ‘rhizomatics’ of Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) and Félix
Guattari (1930–92).

Derrida and deconstruction
Derrida is perhaps the post-structuralist thinker par excellence, a
more profound thinker than Barthes with no properly struc-
turalist past, a philosopher rather than a critic, to use a
distinction of which neither approved. Insofar as the developing
discourse of post-structuralism was concerned, the key theoret-
ical option during the late 1970s and 1980s was that between
Derrida and Foucault. Derrida’s three major works, Writing and
Difference, Speech and Phenomena and Of Grammatology, all first
published in 1967, thus marked the founding moment of French
post-structuralism. His much-quoted essay, ‘Structure, Sign, and
Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ (Derrida, 1970), had
been written for an international symposium that was planned
to introduce French structuralism into American intellectual life,
held at Johns Hopkins University in 1966. Ironically, it would
achieve quite the opposite: a radical calling into question of all
that structuralism had argued. Subsequently included in Writing
and Difference, this essay clearly anticipated many of the charac-
teristic themes and preoccupations of what would later become
post-structuralism. It turned the logic of structuralism against
itself, insisting that the ‘structurality of structure’ had been
repressed in structuralism, in ways that limit precisely ‘the play
of the structure’ itself (Derrida, 1978, p. 278). Taking as his text
Saussure’s distinction between signifier and signified and Lévi-
Strauss’ between nature and culture, Derrida showed how both
undermine their own presuppositions, so that ‘what appears most
fascinating...is the stated abandonment of all reference to a
center, to a subject, to a privileged reference, to an origin’ (p. 286).
The alternative to structuralism is thus not a return to humanism,
but an affirmation of play itself and so a new interpretation of
interpretation: ‘the affirmation of a world of signs without fault,
without truth, and without origin’ (p. 292). This is what Derrida
would come to designate as ‘deconstruction’.
Derrida rejected what he termed the ‘logocentric’ notion of

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