Transformation at my shoulder. (Image my own)
Reading Derrida’s ‘Structure Sign and Play’ is hard work. But then I didn’t expect it to be easy. I’m looking for something in his writing that I don’t even know if it’s there. I will push into some other peoples writing on him but I also wanted to look at his work firsthand.
There are some interesting phrases and I’m not sure that I properly grasp what he is investigating however I find it’s slow burn with him, that fragments gradually become more apparent and useful as I mulch over them.
Some key points/quotes for now:
The impossibility of the centre of a structure being inside the structure. (Paraphrase)
“The centre had no natural locus” Derrida ‘Structure sign and Play’ p2
“We have no language - no syntax and no lexicon - which is alien to this history; we cannot utter a single destructive proposition which has not already slipped the from, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest” Derrida ‘Structure sign and Play’ p2
Evasion of the binary. Ideas and articles occupying more than one position at the same time.
“without the risk of erasing difference [altogether] in the self identity of a signified reducing into itself it’s signifier, or, what amounts to the same thing, simply expelling it outside itself”
“had been dislocated, driven from it’s locus, and forced to stop considering itself as the culture of reference.” Derrida ‘Structure sign and Play’ p3
“language bears within itself the necessity of it’s own critique” Derrida ‘Structure sign and Play’ p5
“The superabundance of the signifier, it’s supplementary character, is thus the result of a finitude, that is to say, the result of a lack which must be supplemented.” Derrida ‘Structure sign and Play’ p11
There is something about when reduction occurs, that it cannot but help be generative. Distillation seems impossible because that the act of it, creates the new. Similar to the decomposition of a body. The reduction is infinitely more generative. Death as a creative force.