Fun Words to Know in Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play"

(Keyed to the Adams anthology.)

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structuralist / structuralism:  Mid-20th-century movement in the 
social sciences and humanities based on the ideas of 19th 
century linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.  Essential notion:  
language (i.e., any system of signs) creates meaning by means of 
the differences between the signs themselves (which are 
completely arbitrary), rather than by referring to a fixed 
object or reality. 

quotation marks:  Derrida's customary practice in framing an 
argument is to use terms belonging to the system or argument he 
is attacking.  The terms are used provisionally, strategically, 
as here, "in quotation marks."  Elsewhere he speaks of putting 
terms "under erasure," which means the same thing.

episteme:  Greek term for certain, definite knowledge.

Western science and Western philosophy:  Derrida is thinking 
first and foremost of Plato and Aristotle.

freeplay:  The opposite of fixed relationships, fixed meaning, 
fixed reference.  The term is rooted most conspicuously in Kant 
and Schelling, and is influenced by Nietzschean and Freudian 
notions of freedom, play, and fantasy.
       
arche:  Greek, "origin" (cf. archaeology)

telos:  Greek, "goal, end, purpose" 

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eidos:  Greek, "form" 

energeia:  Greek, "activity, action" (cf. energy)

aletheia:  Greek, "truth"

(All of these, along with the other words in the list, represent 
versions of "being as presence.")

Metaphysics:  Branch of philosophy concerned with the ultimate 
conditions of being and truth.  When Derrida uses it, he has 
Plato's philosophy formost in mind.   

signification:  What a sign (e.g., a word) does.  According to 
Saussure, a sign has two parts:  a signifier (the word itself, a 
sound) and a signified (the meaning referred to). 

transcendental signified:  The thing a sign ultimately refers 
to, understood as a form or truth in the Platonic sense. 

onto-theology:  Disrespectful synonym for metaphysics, implying 
that metaphysics is nothing but fancily-dressed religious dogma.

Claude Levi-Strauss:  20th cent. French cultural anthropologist; 
one of the first and most influential structuralists, known 
primarily for his studies of myth and primitive thought.
     
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deconstruction:  A philosophic practice and / or a strategy of 
reading.  I won't attempt to define this here, but note that is 
it is not destruction simply, but an ironic, joint practice of 
construction and destruction.  The word implies a loving, 
painstaking disassembly and simultaneous reassembly, the goal 
being to see "how it works." 

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supplement:  Derrida's term for an element which must be added 
to a supposedly complete conceptual system in order to remedy a 
lack which the system denies.  One of his key terms, along with 
the following two:

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trace:  An almost indefinable notion having to do with the non-
presence of meaning within signs.  Since signs signify by virtue 
of difference from other signs, they always contain a trace or 
mark or influence or residue from those other signs.  Trace 
replaces "meaning" for Derrida; it is a meaning that is always 
elsewhere, never fully present or fully graspable.  

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differance:  In French, a misspelling of difference and an 
elaborate philosophical joke based on the verb differer, which 
means both "to differ" and "to defer."  Derrida is basically 
adding another layer of meaning to the Structuralist notion of 
difference, highlighting the endlessness of free play, the 
perpetual deferral of full, final, stable meaning.