Derrida writes, “when one no longer has the force to under-
stand force from within itself. That is, to create. This is why
literary criticism is structuralist in every age, in its essence and
destiny” ( 4 – 5 ).
Derrida here develops the opposition he had sketched so
fluently in “Genesis and Structure,” his early essay on Husserl
(also reprinted in Writing and Difference). In “Genesis and
Structure,” as noted earlier, Derrida set Husserl’s interest in
the force of origins against his attention to the structures of
thinking and perceiving. These two sides of Husserl cannot
be harmonized, Derrida suggested. In “Force and Significa-
tion,” origin—here interpreted as the creative force that makes
meaning—wins out over structure, in definitive fashion. (Sim-
ilarly, in Freud, traumatic origin persists; and in Lévinas, the
unmistakable moment of the face-to-face.)
Derrida’s opening note of Olympian coldness in “Force
and Signification,” his claim of superiority to structuralism,
raises an obvious question. If he does not resemble the weak
structuralist critics who attend to form alone, how does he
distinguish himself from them? Derrida derides the “dimin-
ished ardor” of the structuralists, their “cries of technical inge-
nuity or mathematical subtlety” ( 5 ). So what does he have to
offer instead? The structuralists’ arguments are an empty city,
a mere “skeleton,” Derrida asserts. He himself brings life,
under the name of force. How will he prove his strength, his
alliance with creative power? Derrida here assumes for himself
the prophetic address he associates with Freud in “Freud and
the Scene of Writing” and with Nietzsche in “Structure, Sign
and Play.”
For his advantage over structuralism, Derrida relies on
Maurice Blanchot: the spare, ascetic writer of essays and récits
(that is, fictions) who raised the image of the void to spiritual
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