READING THE TEXT that it also produces. This text is not there, neither solid nor servile. It remains to be read. When it is read it becomes part of a restricted economy. Derrida affirms that which cannot be reduced to knowledge: writing. Study Question What does Derrida’s focus on laughter and play do to the idea of ‘serious’ thought or of the ‘weakness’ or ‘strength’ of an argument? ‘STRUCTURE, SIGN AND PLAY IN THE DISCOURSE OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES’ The title of this most anthologized essay of Derrida’s is notice- ably more academic than any other in the collection. ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ identifies and analyses certain elements and forces at work in the language of a group of academic disciplines and began public life as a conference paper delivered at a conference on ‘Critical Languages and the Sciences of Man’ at Baltimore on the Eastern seaboard of the United States in October 1966. The human sciences are of course defined by their object, humanity, and would include psychology, sociology, ethnology, political science, economics, philosophy and linguistics. On the French scene, Michel Foucault had recently chosen The Order of Things: The Archaeology of the Human Sciences, for the title of his latest book (1966). Although the contemporary thinker Derrida engages with directly in ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ is the ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose work is also discussed at length in Of Grammatology, Derrida’s implicit questioning of Foucault’s inventive historicism in ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’ continues here. The engagement is signalled by the presence of the terms ‘discourse,’ ‘event’ and ‘episteme’ on the first page of ‘Structure, Sign and Play’. As a historian of concepts, Foucault’s notion of what an event might be is inevitably very different from Derrida’s, and the opening of ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ begins by marking an interest in the event. ‘Perhaps,’ Derrida begins, keeping determination at bay from the outset: Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an “event” if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of 141 DERRIDA’S WRITING AND DIFFERENCE structural – or structuralist – thought to reduce or suspect. Let us speak of an ‘event’, nevertheless. (351) Derrida is speaking cautiously but clearly against the ownership of the word ‘event’ by structural thinkers and also against a cer- tain reduction of the event that would take place by a mode of thought set on accounting for events, determining their place within what ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’ called ‘the totality of beings and determined meanings’ or within what ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ calls ‘presence’ or ‘total form’ (352). An event, then, does not take place within the continuity of pres- ence. We are not yet told what the content of the event Derrida is thinking of is, but that its outward form is that of a ‘rupture and redoubling’ (351). It would seem that it appears to be at the same time a breakthrough and the repetition of or reflection upon something that is already the case. Episte¯ me¯ I have spent some moments on the context of Derrida’s essay, national and international, but as always in his work, the context is ancient and still to be determined. He uses a Greek term strongly associated with Foucault, episte¯me¯, (literally, ‘knowledge’ or ‘science’) to indicate that the concept and the word ‘structure’ are by no means recent inventions and that they are rooted not in any particular academic or philosophical discourse but in ordinary language. Foucault used the notion of episte¯me¯ to elab- orate a historical theory of the conditions of what may be recog- nized as knowledge. There is, according to Foucault ‘an historical a priori’ on the basis of which ideas appear, sciences are esta- blished, experience reflected in philosophies and rationalities formed.100 The account of the human sciences in The Order of Things works with a notion of ‘modern episteme’ that starts at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In an interview in 1977, Foucault described The Order of Things as an attempt to write the history of modern episte¯me¯, defined as the strategic apparatus which permits of separating out from among all the statements which are possible those that will be acceptable within, I won’t say a scientific theory, but a field of 142 READING THE TEXT scientificity, and which it is possible to say are true or false. The episte¯me¯ is the ‘apparatus’ which makes possible the separation, not of the true from the false, but of what may from what may not be characterized as scientific.101 Derrida’s notion of episte¯me¯ in ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ describes something ‘as old as Western science and Western philosophy’ and rather than being approached in terms of historical periods is a metaphorical displacement of the depths of ordinary language. A discourse such as philosophy gains rigour, the power to arti- culate distinctions and wield knowledge, at the expense of what a note to ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’ calls ‘the original and essential equivocality of the signifier . in the language of everyday life’ (390n.3). That everyday shifting of the signifier is crucial to Derrida’s thinking. As a writer he never really leaves what ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ calls ‘the soil [sol] of ordinary language’ (351/409). The essay closes with an invitation to think the ‘common ground [sol]’ and the différance that generate con- flicting possibilities of interpretation (370/428). Derrida also wants to think history on the basis of a conception of the event that is not historically determined. To return to the opening of the essay, Derrida argues that since the beginning of Western philosophy, the force of ‘struc- turality of structure’ has been neutralized or reduced by being oriented in relation to a fixed point or centre that limits its play. Centre and totality structurally complement each other. (For example, the eighteenth-century German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder formulated the philosophical quest for knowl- edge as the search for an immobile centre: ‘We wander over the Earth in a labyrinth of human fancies: the question is; where is the central point of the labyrinth, to which all our wanderings may be traced, as refracted rays to the Sun?’)102 Derrida says it has been ‘forbidden [interdite]’ (351/410) for there to be substitu- tion of elements at the centre. Derrida emphasizes this as a dis- cursive intervention, a prohibition rather than an impossibility, and links the prohibition to desire and to anxiety. Classically, the centre holds a structure together by being exempt from the play that it makes possible. If structurality implies the possibility of substituting elements in the structure, then the centre is both 143 DERRIDA’S WRITING AND DIFFERENCE ‘within the structure’ as its principle of coherence, ‘and outside it’ as the one element that is not permitted to remain open to the possibilities of substitution (352). Derrida detects desire behind this contradictory coherence. Its fixity actually expresses a force. Derrida’s logic suggests that we perhaps have never under- stood play and that the history of meaning is a series of failures to understand it. ‘The concept of centred structure is in fact the concept of a play based on a fundamental ground, a play consti- tuted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which itself is beyond the reach of play.’ The purpose of the certitude is to master the anxiety provoked by being alive, being already in the text: ‘for anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of being implicated in the game, of being caught in the game, of being as it were at stake in the game from the outset.’ The metaphor of archaeology that Foucault used in his book on madness, in The Order of Things, subtitled An Archaeo- logy of the Human Sciences, and will continue to deploy in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) presupposes the presence of the structure to be investigated and that all repetitions, substitutions, transformations, and permutations are always taken from a history of meaning – that is, in a word, a history – whose origin may always be reawakened or whose end may be anticipated in the form of presence. This is why one perhaps could say that the movement of any archae- ology, like that of any eschatology, is an accomplice of this reduction of the structurality of structure and always attempts to conceive of the structurality of structure on the basis of a full presence that is beyond play. (353) Such changes as have occurred are only a series of substitutions of centre for centre going under different names. Derrida lists some of the Greek and French terms for the determination of being as presence: ‘eidos, arche¯, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject), ale¯theia, transcendentality, consciousness, God, Man and so forth’.103 The bound energy has, perhaps, begun to be released from these terms belonging to philosophical dis- course and the history of metaphysics. A certain deregulation has begun to be possible. 144 READING THE TEXT The Event? But what is this event Derrida has been talking about? What has made it possible? He sounds as if he might be making a calcu- lated guess when he says that it ‘presumably would have come about when the structure of structurality had to begin to be thought’ (353). According to the logic of what he is saying about a disruption befalling regulated play, things may be reaching a point where it is no longer inevitable to talk about structure on the basis of presence and its many pseudonyms.