Sailing by the Stars: Constellations in the Space of Thought

In a footnote to his early essay “Force and Signification” from 1963, Jacques Derrida considered the contemporary vogue for the notion of “structure” in the following terms. “In order to assess the deep necessity that underlies the undeniable phenomenon of fashion, one must proceed initially by the ‘negative path,’—the choice of the word is initially a—structural, of course—ensemble of exclusions. To know why one says ‘structure’ is to know why one ceases to say eidos, ‘essence,’ ‘form,’ Gestalt, ‘collection,’ ‘composition,’ ‘complex,’ ‘construction,’ ‘correlation,’ ‘totality,’ ‘idea,’ ‘organism,’ ‘state,’ ‘system,’ etc. One must understand why each of these words revealed itself to be insufficient, but also why the concept of structure continued to borrow certain implicit meanings from them and allows itself to be inhabited by them.”1