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LEO BERSANI
ciation (the person, the author, the individual history and psychol–
ogy) has been eliminated. The central issue continually being raised
at the Johns Hopkins symposium is that of a profound change in our
traditional notion of the subject "behind" the various types of human
discourse. A major "event," as Jacques Derrida says at the beginning
of his remarkable paper, has recently occurred in the history of the
notion of structure. The latter "has always been neutralized or re–
duced, and this by a process of giving it a center or referring it to a
point
of presence, a fixed origin." The center has been that "which
governs the structure, while escaping structurality." What Derrida
calls a "decentering" involves the repudiation of all those principles
or fundamentals in Western thought which have been conceived
of as the constant, governing source or origin of all structural per–
mutations:
"eidos, arc he, telos, energia, ousia
(essence, existence, sub–
stance, subject),
aletheia,
transcendentality, consciousness, or con–
science, God, man, and so forth."
In psychological thought, for example, the structuralists would
argue that there is no self to which an individual's beha\"!or may al–
ways be
referred.
There is no governing "I" which "speaks" in all
my words or gestures; instead, there is in my language what Derrida
would call a "freeplay" of "an infinite number of sign-substitutions."
At the extreme, it could be said (and it has been said): "1 am
spoken" rather than "1 speak." And if no human subject
originates
discourse, then everything is discourse, and "man," as a notion which
has always centered human expression, is dead. In Michel Foucault's
striking formula at the end of
Les Mots et les choses,
" ...
l'homme
est en train de perir
it
mesure que brille plus fort
it
notre horizon
l'etre du langage." The consequence of "decentering" for literature
would be, In Barthes' terms, "to establish a new status in writing for
the agent of writing. The meaning of the goal of this effort is to
substitute the instance of discourse for the instance of reality (or of
the referent), which has been, and still is, a mythical 'alibi ' dominat–
ing the idea of literature. The field of the writer is nothing but writ–
ing itself" - and not those realistic referents called truth and self
which determined an aesthetic of imitation and made verisimilitude
the basis of critical evaluations.
This position is not as new as the structuralists frequently sug–
gest it is. In a general way, the structuralist point about the relation
