THE STATE OF CRITICISM
405
Derrida's constant argument, against Foucault and Lacan as vigor–
ously as against Plato, Rousseau, Hegel, and Husserl, is that when
they think themselves free of their heritage they are most deplorably
immersed in it. Structuralism is only an unacknowledged form of
idealism, precisely because of its notion of the sign. This notion,
Derrida says in the
Grammatology,
"remains within the heritage of
that logocentrism which is also a phonocentrism: absolute proximity
of voice and being, of voice and the meaning of being, of voice and
the ideali ty of meaning."
Much the same argument is directed against Saussure's position
by Sebastiano Timpanaro, though for an entirely different cause.
In
his book
On Materialism
(1970), Timpanaro rehearses many of the
standard charges against structuralism, notably that it is incapable of
dealing with history because it deals with language only as a closed
system; it cannot recognize the relations between human activities and
their material conditions. But Timpanaro goes on to attack Levi–
Strauss, Lacan, Foucault, and especially Saussure, for the "tenden–
tially Platonist-idealist features" in their thought. His general argu–
ment is that structuralists are terrified of admitting into their context
the slightest trace of naturalism.
In
Saussure, this means that his
concept of the signified represents "a flight from the
things
denoted,"
lest they lead him back
to
a materialist or even a realist philosophy.
Timpanaro's critique is far more elaborate and searching than my
account of it suggests, but its main force is thrown against the idealist
or Platonist element in structuralism. And indeed if he were writing
now rather than ten years ago he would go even further in his attack:
the tendency to free the signifier from every trace of loyalty to the
signified is far more extreme in Barthes and Derrida than it was in
Saussure, Foucault, or Levi-Strauss. I am surprised that the decon–
structive irony so readily turned against the concepts of Western
metaphysics is withheld from the notion that the absorption of reality
in language is complete. It is this element in structuralism which
makes it flimsy even when it sounds LOugh: many of its procedures
seem authoritative until, on second perusal, they seem merely inge–
nious. But this is to anticipate, or to offer a tendentious note where
it is not required.
The main thrust of the attack upon structuralism has involved
the word "structure" itself: increasingly, it appears to be a nuisance, a
constriction.
It
is surely significant, for instance, that Barthes in his
later books gave it up, and turned toward a willfully hedonist idiom
of play and pleasure. I cannot hope to say anything worthwhile about
