50.Eng. tr. (op. cit.), p. 89.
51.Ibid., pp. 17, 39.
52.Martin Heidegger, „Der Spruch des Anaximander,“ Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main, 1950) :
296-343.
53.
Origine de la géometrie, op. cit., p. 171.
54.Cartesianische Meditationen, p. 6º; Cartesian Meditations, p. 20. It is a common error to
equate the phenomenological reduction, “putting out of play,” and the sous rature, “putting
under erasure,” (see, e.g., Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical
Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism [Princeton, 1972], p. 216). The distinction
is simple: The gesture of bracketing implies “not this but that,” preserving a bipolarity as well
as a hierarchy of empirical impurity and phenomenological purity; the gesture of sous rature
implies “both this and that” as well as “neither this nor that” undoing the opposition and the
hierarchy between the legible and the erased.
55.Roland Barthes, Essais critiques (Paris, 1964), p. 216; Critical Essays, tr. Richard
((321))
Howard (Evanston, 1972), p. 216. For the purposes of this brief discussion of “Structuralism,”
I focus somewhat on Roland Barthes because, in Jonathan Culler’s words, structuralism may
be taken to be “the name of a particular intellectual movement centered around the work of a
few major figures, among whom the chief, in the field of literary studies, is Roland Barthes”
(Structuralist Poetics [London, 1975] ), p. 3.
56.See, for example, Russian Formalist Criticism, tr. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis
(Lincoln, 1965), and Krystyna Pomorska, Russian Formalist Theory and Its Poetic Ambiance
(The Hague, 1968) .
57.Vladimir Propp, Mor f ologia Skazki, second edition (Moscow, 1949) ; translated by
Laurence Scott as Morphology of the Folktale (Indiana, 1958) .
58.Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (Paris, 1931), p. 99; A Course in
General Linguistics, tr. Wade Baskin (New York, 1959), p. 67.
59.Claude Lévi-Strauss, « Introduction, » in Sociologie et anthropologie by Marcel Mauss
(Paris, 1950), p. 49; quoted in ED 424.
60. Claude Lévi-Strauss, L’Anthropologie structurale (Paris, 1958), pp. 39–41; Structural
Anthropology, tr. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grunfest Schoepf, Anchor Books edition (New
York, 1967), pp. 31, 32.
61.In
“Les Chats de Charles Baudelaire,” L’Homme II (1962), pp. 5–21 (translated as
“Charles Baudelaire’s ‘Les Chats’,” by F. M. de George; The Structuralists from Marx to
Lévi-Strauss, eds. Richard T. and Fernande M. de George [Garden City, 1972], pp. 125-46),
Lévi-Strauss and Jakobson have worked together on a literary text. The piece itself is perhaps
not as impressive as the more general fruit of this conjunction.
62.Barthes, Essais critiques, p, 214; Critical Essays, pp. 214-15.
63.Ibid., p. 215.
64.Barthes, Essais critiques, p. 21o; Critical Essays, p. 209.
65.Cours; Course, p. 118.
66.Barthes, Essais critiques, p, 213; Critical Essays, p. 213.
67.In an otherwise interesting discussion, « La structure, le sujet, la trace » (« La philosophie
entre l’avant et l’après du structuralisme, » Qu’est-ce-que le Structuralisme?, eds. Oswald
Ducrot, Tzvetan Todorov, Dan Sperber, Moustafa Safouan, François Wahl [Paris, 1968], pp.
390–441), it is typically this question of the sous rature that François Wahl must treat very
lightly as a precaution almost automatically taken for granted within all responsible
structuralist practice. The discussion is, in general, not unsympathetic to Derrida. In the long
run, however, it is not touched by Derrida, whose version of structuralism is put “in its place”
as a “contamination of the properly structural ges-ture by the ontological, psychological, and
transcendental determinations of phenomenology” (p. 419). Derrida’s reactions to
formulations such as these would be a variation on his response to Elisabeth Roudinesco.
68.Barthes, Essais critiques, p. 218; Critical Essays, p. 219.
69.Ibid., p. 218. In Révolution du langage poétique (Paris, 1974), Julia Kristeva attempts to
neutralize signification and go beyond it into a study of the flexible and contingent
positioning of subject and object that we come to call “signification.” In “Sémiotique et
symbolique,” the opening section, she would appropriate into structural-ism “the functioning
of writing, of the trace, and the grammè that Jacques Derrida has introduced in his critique of
phenomenology” (p. 40). When she writes “my concern is therefore not the operating and
producing consciousness, but rather the producible consciousness” (p. 35 n.), we might think
wé hear an echo of Derrida’s “there is no constituting subjectivity” (VP 94, SP 85 n.). But
Derrida’s next sentence is: “The very concept of constitution itself must be deconstructed.”
And Kristeva, as is evident from the quotation above, does not deconstruct or undo the
concept of “production,” but rather works within it to say of consciousness—not producing
but producible. Aware of the importance of the ground of precomprehended questions, she
proposes the thought of the chora (a Platonic term), designating “a non-expressive totality
constituted by . . . drives [pulsions] and their stases into a motility as full of movement as it is
regulated” (p. 23). The thought of the chora, a play of the movement and rest of forces, “. . . a
delaying as well as one of the possible realizations of the death instinct” (p. 27 n.), “not a
transcendental signifier but that which opens signification” (p. 46), does indeed seem