The key ideas of Jacques Derrida in his essays 'Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences' and 'Différance'

Essay from the year 2019 in the subject Philosophy - Philosophy of the 20th century, Sultan Moulay Sliman University, language: English, abstract: This paper tends to deal mainly with Derrida's both essays of 'Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences' and 'Différance'. It tries to show some of his key ideas and his outstanding status in the postmodern school of thought in the light of his aforementioned essays. The first things that come to our minds when we hear the name of Jacques Derrida are Deconstruction, Différance, Post-structuralism, Post-modernism, Writing and Differance, Of Grammatology and so on. This illustrates that we are already familiar with Derrida. However, the majority of people complain about Derrida's complexity of his writings as well as the difficulty of translating his works. One of the most illustrative examples is the preface of Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak to Derrida's 'Of Grammatology' in which she states 'when the preface is being written by someone other than the author, the situation is yet further complicated. A pretense at writing before a text that one must have read before the preface can be written'. Spivak's statement is a real example of the inseparable relationship between reading and writing. Reading is breathing in whereas writing is breathing out. Alan Bass, a translator of Derrida, suggests that the difficulty to read Derrida is not a question of his style of writing but rather Derrida challenges the way we are used to read. Besides, Alan Bass compares the translator of Derrida to a psychoanalyst in the sense that the translator must understand the syntax and lexicon of the original text in order to transform it through his own language. This is quite analogous with the attempt of the psychoanalyst to translate the language of dreams into a latent language.