Derrida: Deconstruction and the Impossible

For this session, we'll be reading Jacques Derrida’s Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences and On Forgiveness. These texts confront and destabilize the structuralist project from within.

In Structure, Sign, and Play, Derrida critiques the notion of stable structures in thought. He targets the idea of a fixed “center” that organizes meaning, arguing that structuralism retains metaphysical assumptions even as it claims to overcome them. Derrida introduces the concept of “freeplay,” where meaning is never fully present but endlessly deferred through a chain of signs—this is the logic of différance. The essay marks a rupture: a movement from structure as a closed system to an open field without anchoring foundations.

On Forgiveness turns this destabilizing lens toward ethics. Derrida distinguishes between conditional and unconditional forgiveness. The former is mediated by justice, repentance, and social reconciliation; the latter is paradoxical, even impossible—it would mean forgiving the unforgivable. Yet this impossibility is the very condition of forgiveness. Derrida exposes how moral and political discourse on forgiveness is caught between pragmatics and absolute demands, revealing deep aporias in ethical thought.

Together, these works dismantle structuralist closure and reveal the instability of foundational concepts—structure, sign, presence, ethics—subverting any claim to final meaning or resolution

The texts can be found here and here