sors: Sartre and company, the Communist intellectuals of
the rue d’Ulm.) In a climactic passage, Derrida champions
“the Nietzschean critique of metaphysics, the critique of the
concepts of Being and truth, for which were substituted the
concepts of play, interpretation, and sign (sign without present
truth); the Freudian critique of self-presence, that is, the cri-
tique of consciousness, of the subject, of self-identity and of
self-proximity or of self-possession; and, more radically, the
Heideggerian destruction of metaphysics, of onto-theology, of
the determination of Being as presence” ( 280 ).
By 1966 , Lacan had already conjoined Heidegger and
Freud in this manner; and Heidegger had elevated Nietzsche to
preeminent status, as the crucial philosopher of the modern
age (though capable of being corrected by Heidegger himself ).
But Derrida adds something characteristic of his own ap-
proach as he announces what was already becoming a familiar
litany of cutting-edge thinkers. He insists that all three of these
figures, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, depend on the con-
cepts that they undermine. We may try to dismantle the edi-
fice of metaphysics, but metaphysics itself remains standing.
We can shake the self-congratulatory pride of reason, but not
ruin it.
Derrida’s emphasis in “Structure, Sign and Play” must be
viewed in light of the sixties, when calls for revolution and the
overturning of established order abounded. Derrida, citing
great thinkers, insists on an alternative to hidebound ideas of
reason, self-certainty, and logic. What he offers is the free play
of language, unmoored from the center, the logos. But this al-
ternative, unlike the revolutionists’ agenda, relies on the famil-
iar concepts, even as it bristles against them. The logos from
which one has been liberated is still there, persisting as long as
Western thought itself remains.
98 Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology