1 - The passion of inscription (‘Force et signification’)

Summary

L'écriture, passion de l'origine, cela doit s'entendre aussi par la voie du génitif subjectif. C'est l'origine elle-même qui est passionnée, passive et passée d'être écrite. Ce qui veut dire inscrite.

(ED, p. 431)

(Writing, passion of the origin, must also be understood through the subjective genitive. It is the origin itself which is impassioned, passive, and past, in that it is written. Which means inscribed.)

(WD, pp. 295–6)

The first chapter of L'écriture et la différence, ‘Force et signification’, represents an early engagement on Derrida's part with French structuralism. While concentrating on the particular example of literary structuralism, many of the arguments of ‘Force et signification’ are applicable to structuralism in general, anticipating in certain respects the critique of Lévi- Strauss in the later ‘Le système, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines’. Derrida's evaluation of structuralist theory and methodology is made clear from the start of ‘Force et signification’: he considers its recent proliferation in the discourse of the human sciences to have produced a harmful reductionism, referring somewhat disparagingly to the ‘invasion structuraliste’ (ED, p. 9) (‘structuralist invasion’ (WD, p. 3)), or ‘cette passion structuraliste qui est à la fois une sorte de rage expérimental et un schématisme proliférant’ (ED, p. 14) (‘this structuralist passion, which is simultaneously a frenzy of experimentation and a proliferation of schematizations’ (WD, p. 6)).