Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play"                                    

Outline of the argument:  a typical, and multiple, 
deconstruction of the texts of Levi-Strauss. 

Some key oppositions at work here, with the logocentrically privileged term on the left:

                  INTELLIGIBLE / visible
                       REALITY / illusion
                         TRUTH / myth
                        NATURE / culture
                    PHILOSOPHY / poetry
                    "SCIENCES" / "human"

These are related to other binaries used elsewhere in Derrida's work: 
 
                          MALE / female
                        SPOKEN / written
                       PRESENT / absent
                     CERTAINTY / ambiguity
                      IDENTITY / difference
                   
[1119-1120]     The specific binary opposition under scrutiny:  
             
                        NATURE / culture 

             L-S discovers that the Incest Prohibition 
             undermines his opposition, and (as asserted by Freud) 
             actually precedes and makes possible the 
             opposition.  L-S's procedure shows how "language 
             bears the necessity of its own critique."


            
[1120]        BUT -- The terms NATURE / CULTURE are useful, says 
             L-S, as methodological tools, tools of analysis, if 
             they are not hypostasized.  Hence one can 
             distinguish between
             
                         TRUTH / METHOD.


[1121]       L-S explains his procedure with the metaphor of the 
             BRICOLEUR, the methodological opportunist, the 
             artist, creator of myths, as opposed to the 
             ENGINEER, the builder of planned, coherent, 
             rational systems.  Hence, 
                                             
                      ENGINEER / BRICOLEUR
             
                      EPISTEME / MYTHOPOESIS.


             BUT -- "engineering" (creation ex nihilo, wholly 
             planned, no accidents) is an impossibility -- a 
             theological notion.  Hence the ENGINEER is a myth 
             created by the BRICOLEUR.  The epistemic, non-
             mythopoetic does not exist.  L-S's anthropology is 
             high-order myth, a myth of myths.
             
             
DANGER!  SEMANTIC FREEFALL!  WHO'S RIGHT IF EVERYBODY'S WRONG?!  


[1123]       L-S is worried; he wants to anchor his meanings, his 
             system, to TRUTH.  He wants a ground, a check to 
             the proliferation of metaphorical, mythic 
             meanings.  As a scientist, he wants to touch base 
             with Nature.  Even though Structuralism is the 
             critique of Empiricism, he resorts to empirical 
             arguments to support his structuralist views.  Thus 
             he reinscribes the old opposition, this time as: 

                    EMPIRICISM / STRUCTURALISM.
             
             Yet L-S still treats Structuralism as sufficient 
             unto itself, not needing any help from empirical 
             evidence.


[1123-24]    Derrida sees this move as a classic 
             SUPPLEMENTATION.  What is being supplemented?  The 
             lack of a center, of a ground, in the structuralist 
             sign system.  The centerless system is open to the 
             operation of FREEPLAY (uncertainty, ambiguity, 
             substitution, irony, irrationality, indeterminacy).  
             The attempt to supplement this lack generates the 
             excess of meaning that falls subject to FREEPLAY.

             This situation creates anxiety or tension in L-S's 
             arguments.  Two kinds of tension are evident:
             
[1125]       Tension # 1 --
             
                       HISTORY / FREEPLAY.

             Structure, characterized by FREEPLAY, always 
             announces itself as a rupture from the historical, 
             from the empirical, physical world (NATURE).  The 
             "reduction" of the "transcendental signified" 
             (i.e., the rejection of metaphysics) is felt as a 
             violent event, a break with the deepest tradition. 

             Tension # 2 -- 

                      PRESENCE / FREEPLAY.

             L-S betrays a certain nostalgia for PRESENCE:  he 
             is drawn in his studies to PRIMITIVE societies as 
             somehow especially exemplary.  PRIMITIVE = ARCHE, 
             the ultimate source, the origin or basis of truth.  
             This is as much as to say:

                     STRUCTURE / FREEPLAY,

             i.e., the structure itself ought to be outside the 
             game, outside FREEPLAY, hence metaphysical . . .  
             a trap waiting for the structuralist thinker.