398
PARTISAN REVIEW
not trained to assimilate such strong meat.
If
we are to take Jacques
Derrida into our minds, we must start by receiving Plato, Rousseau,
Hegel , Husser!, and Heidegger, since most of Derrida's work is an
aggressive critique of those men. I don't think we can take those
debates for granted, or skip over them in our zest for Derrida's
observations on Freud, Mallarme, Genet, Levinas, and Bataille.
I shall mention another consideration before coming to my duty.
Much of what I propose to say will arise from my notion of
structuralism and my still more fervent attention to certain critiques
of structuralism which have been offered in recent years, often by
critics who are lapsed or revisionist structuralists. But I want to say,
what is obvious but still worth saying, that many of the most
formidable critics writing today have not concerned themselves,
officially, either with structuralism or the arguments against it. It
would be invidious to name names, but you can all think of critics
who are going about their important work without bothering to
concern themselves with such matters. There are many universities in
which the study of literature proceeds with little or no anxiety about
current questions in structuralism or
its
revisionist manifestations. I
would hope that such institutions have examined the questions raised
by structuralists and have come to the conclusion that the questions
are trivial , or in any event expendable. I trust that they have not
reached this conclusion by a combination of intuition and revulsion.
The easy answer to these remarks is that a plural society accommo–
dates many different concerns. I welcome the answer and use it
against those who try to turn criticism into terrorism by insisting that
criticism must deal with one question, or one set of questions, and
with that alone.
I shall make a few comments about the assumptions of struc–
turalism, without worrying much about the degree to which its ideal
theory is embodied in any particular critic. Everyone agrees that
structuralism proceeded by applying a linguistic model to anthropol–
ogy, in the first instance, and thereafter to the human sciences,
literature, and other things. The basic principle arises from Saussure's
distinction between
langue
and
parole;
between language as a system
of signs and the particular acts of speech which are performed within
the system. Saussure thought of speech as chiefly an oral rather than a
written event, and he emphasized the arbitrariness of the signifier as
sounds. In language, he said, there are only differences; and he meant.
to begin with, differences of sounds. The differences are retained
within the system: no difference escapes from the system, so language
