In “Structure, Sign, and Play,” Derrida lays the groundwork for conceptualizing structures as fundamentally, and necessarily, de-centered epistemes that depend on the disruption of presence (or centers) through freeplay in order to maintain their semblances of structurality. He develops this conjecture by highlighting the central contradiction of structuralism that posits the center to be both within, as a governing and organizing principle of coherency, and without, something separate and distinct from, the structure of totality. That is, “The center is not the center,” and the “whole history of the concept of structure […] must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center” (278-9). For Derrida, the absence of a transcendental signified, a center, “extends the domain and the interplay of signification infinitum,” transforming everything into discourse.
Once realized, freeplay, the center-substituting propensity underlying structure, creates a precarious interpretive situation that, on one hand, recognizes the relative utility of structure for analytic enterprises while, on the other hand, exposes and highlights the relativity of the structure and the impossibility of saying anything true within or through structure. This contradiction creates an epistemological crisis for the interpreter (as with Levi-Strauss) because it threatens to collapse positivist certitude into the immeasurable and untraceable signification of freeplay, in which all truth claims lose their bearings because they are inevitably reduced to empirical relativism.
Unresolved and irresolute, Derrida does not reconcile this irreducible contradiction of freeplay but offers instead two interpretive possibilities (for the moment), which he characterizes through the outlooks of Rousseau (“sad, negative, nostalgic, guilty) and Nietzsche (“joyous affirmation of the freeplay of the world and without truth, without origin, offered to an active interpretation”). He looks, too, towards an uncertain future, surveying the horizon with anxious anticipation for a presently inconceivable way of knowing, the “unnamable which is proclaiming itself.”
We might consider the interpretative possibilities and horizons of a discourse without a permanent center, an organizing principle, as a necessary theoretical step--a step among many steps, including those by Foucault--that enabled Hortense Spiller to analyze the marked body of the female slave as a site of discourse, a discourse that has the dispersal of the African-American body at its heart. Throughout the history of the transatlantic slave trade, these bodies underwent a discursive distortion that unravelled and reformed gender, subjectivity, and kinship (among other things) into new configurations. For example, Spillers argues that in the discursive processes that sensualized, reified, and made other the captive female body, the body (by way of the flesh) is rendered genderless as the sign of “female gender” is dispersed beyond recognition in the ship hold travelling across the Middle Passage to the New World. Even the system of kinship that connects mother, father, and child becomes so distorted that it “loses meaning since it can be invaded at any given and arbitrary moment by the property relations” of slavery and its discourse (Spillers 74).
Given these discursive distortions, Spiller’s project in her article is, therefore, to attempt to grapple with the “confusions of consanguinity” that were produced in the violence against the captive female body and to explain the “rule of gender” as a discourse and ordering principle (73). By understanding the rule of gender in the context of slave captivity, Spillers wants to uncover a gap and discontinuity “within current feminist discourse and within those discursive communities that investigate the entire problematics of culture” (78). Her entire project, therefore, hinges on tracking the substitution of the captive female body (as an unresolved puzzle) for the transcendental body (as a stable signified) at the center of feminist and cultural discourses in order to see what kinds of destabilizations occur. Since, according to Derrida, the center of any discourse--of any structure--is actually a function of sign substitutions in play, the center of those feminist and cultural discourses always already admit the substitution of the transcendental body for the body of the captive female slave. The signifier of the transcendental body signifies another signifier, the captive female slave, in its endless and infinite chain of signification. The presence of the female slave as a possible sign substitution thereby decomposes the differences posited in the feminist and cultural discourses and demands a new discourse.
If the captive female body is placed outside “traditional symbolics of female gender,” then it is our responsibility to make a place within the discourse for such a body, a body that isn’t reappropriated into the “ranks of gendered femaleness” but is reconstituted as a “female social subject” that reclaims the “monstrosity” to which it has been subjected (80). The body is often an organizing center in discourses on gender, family, kinship, and personhood; in certain discourses, it functions as a fixed sign that contains different levels of meaning and signification. However, if the body qua center is a site of center-substituting freeplay, then its capacity as a signifier is extended and its signification infinite. By disembedding the captive female body from “traditional” body discourse, Spillers attempts to foreground the traumatized captive female body as the locus of knowledge, creating an alternate mode of epistemological production.
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