인간과 인문학의 재점검:데리다의 「인문과학 담론에서의 구조, 기호, 그리고 변용」 정독

Abstract

At a conference held at Johns Hopkins University in 1966, Jacques Derrida delivered his paper “La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discourse des sciences humaines[Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences],” arguably the seminal earmark of Poststructuralism and Deconstruction. Because of the density and intricacy in its deliberation for the future direction of the human sciences, Derrida’s discussion calls for an explicative articulation in its reading and proper appraisal. Derrida's paper particularly focuses on the mapping of theoretical trajectories and situations that led up to his time. Rather than simply breaking away from the limitations of various theoretical endeavors, Derrida addresses the centered and incomplete structurality of Structuralism. Derrida’s engagement foregrounds the possibility of ‘event’ and genuine ‘freeplay’ even within the structure of Structuralism through the infinite associations and supplements of its various factors. His theoretical account, however, does not call for an unreserved elimination of Structuralism laid out by Claude Lévi-Strauss, nor was he acting as a resolute disciple of Nietzschean Hermeneutics. Between scylla and charybdis, Derrida proposes a methodology of “différance” to observe differences and associations between Lévi-Straussian Structuralism and Nietzschean radical Hermeneutics. An exemplary conceptual construct engendering events, Derrida observes, comes up in a self-contradictory idea as in ‘pharmakon’ acting as both remedy and poison. Later, Derrida proceeds to use the medical concept of ‘autoimmunity’ to describe how the self-defeating arrangement of socio-political structure could reveal both risks and opportunities. Derrida's final concern intensely revolves around the mission of the human sciences serving as a source of continual revision of the proper notion of human being. Today, as a distinguished theoretical attempt, Catherine Malabou's exposition of neuronal plasticity retrieves Derridean belief in the mission of the human sciences. Malabou’s extension of synaptic plasticity within the human brain toward the concept of human identity urges the human sciences to come up to a series events of re-marking and re-creating the idea and ideal of the human as of now.