Well, Derrida, I have realized many things about you over the years but I never realized until now that you are Thomas Kuhn! The unique event at the centre is the thing that defines the eventless ontological steady state of the structure, makes the world comprehensible. The centre in this sense is also the beginning and the end—this is more Derridean. And but in addition to that which it excludes, there is that which it can be made to encompass—there is play in it, and when we recognize the centre as not transcendental but instead constructed, discursive, then the play in the structure becomes the place where everything interesting happens.

D calls out Nietzsche and Freud as the classic precursors of this classic idea; it is traditional (cf. e.g. Foucault) to also include Marx, but he was no radical decenterer, merely (and I love the man) a determinist and positivist who thought things had to change. (There’s a lot there—the Marxist Revolution is the classic Event as beginning and end, destroying and founding, and yet there is no kind of relativism in the way he treats it, contrary to the perspective that would find such a relativism inevitable—and this is what I find so troubling about latter-day Marxists in the being-and-event- mould like Badiou and Žižek, this dictatorial streak—and I used to value Marxism as myth and execrate it as economics but now I wonder if the reverse might help reclaim Karl himself and remove some contradictions. Why am I writing about Marx?).

(There is also Einstein, the decenterer of the physical universe, though I think he was horrified to have himself grouped with this crew; and of course many others.)

Anyway, Derrida also includes Heidegger, and makes the evergreen observation that as he regarded Nietzsche as “the last Platonist,” we could also do the same for him, and so on, and discourse in a sense is a destroying-each-other-mutually. But the point isn’t metaphysics here but instead the human sciences specifically. Derrida’s project is moving “beyond philosophy,” though of course he just ended up reinscribing the structure and forcing philosophers to choose between a rigid “logical positivism” and a “continentalism” that is more sophisticated—more “heuristic” and less “algorithmic” about its pieties, by which I mean to convey a difference between the same situation of guided but not determined variation with the focus placed on the variation, in the case of heuristic continentals, and the guidedness or patternization, in that of the Anglo-Americans. At some point we are always reducing something in order to understand and describe it, and the point is just—at what point. We don’t criticize the linguist for describing the grammar of a language based on only an infinitesimal fraction of the utterances in that language, as Derrida notes, but it is best to remain open to question of what is nevertheless lost, what play in the “floating signifier” occluded.

And so to the names above let me also add the linguist Whorf, who took the Boas–Sapir structure of Weltansichten and pushed it into conflicted relativistic territory (but who I think like Marx was ultimately a positivist icon-breaker, a truthseeker and no relativist). Ethnography, Derrida notes with great truth, is the beginning of a relativism that matters; Being is really always just Being, no matter how we may conceive of it, until it is infiltrated by (ways of) Seeing (words, cultures, &c., but always irreducibly, interpretation—and this is why determinism is always a little gross-feeling; it takes away the agency which is our birthright).

The first time I encountered this piece, thirteen years ago now(!), it seemed like a work of metaphysics itself, but—and this is heartening—it has subsided to what seems like a more proper state: a work of idiosyncratic, oblique, scholarlily lax but intellectually dazzling intellectual history with epistemological overtones and a gentle polemic against structuralism (that still gives all credit to the structuralists for identifying the same issues, for example Lévi-Strauss on the natural/cultural dual nature of the incest prohibition, contrary to Derrida’s reputation as a big self-promoter—this leads us on to the binary blah blah, which is fine and all but not the most interesting part of this essay as I revisit it). And really cogent, which is weird to write: have I learned so much that I can handle this stuff with ease, or just spent so long in a world where difference-deferral and the gradient nature of the ontological and the linguistic and the mythopoeic and the historic (my version of a definition of bricolage, which I think this essay bears out—by adding “scientific” at the end are we completing a circle back to “ontological”?) are basic assumptions that the emperor now seems clothed? Depends on your discourse, I guess, but this essay still seems magnificent to me. As Derrida observes regarding the ethics of Nietzsche, the embrace of the noncentre is not the loss of the centre: it is freedom to take the centre or leave it, every minute of every day. Freed from the requirement of decipherment, our contradictions “reconcile[d] in an obscure economy,” let us play. ( )