Free play

Derrida: The concept of structure itself — I say in passing — is no longer satisfactory to describe that game. How to define a structure? Structure should be centered. But this center can be either thought, as it was classically, like a creator or being or a fixed and natural place; or also as a deficiency, let’s say; or something which makes possible “free play;” in the sense in which one speaks of the “jeu dans la machine,” of the “jeu des pieces,” and which receives — and this is what we call history — a series of determinations, of signifiers, which have no signifieds finally, which cannot become signifiers except as they begin from this deficiency. So, I think that what I have said can be understood as a criticism of structuralism, certainly.

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