half-witted commentary

Foucault rejects the label “structuralist” as a term thrust on him by “certain half-witted ‘commentators’” in France, and to my understanding Derrida also rejected the labels ‘structuralist’ and ‘post-structuralist.’ Perhaps I can’t get in through my tiny mind, but Foucault does indeed seem to use many of the “methods, concepts, [and] key terms that characterize structural analysis” (xiv). If I am not part of the “serious public” that Foucault hopes his English language readers can be, perhaps I am a non-serious parasite on his intentions. But seriously, I think that many of the concepts that both he and Derrida use to indicate structures or structuring structures overlap, and I’m not always sure how they are distinguished.

Foucault’s terms: “system”/“system of elements” (x, xx), “positive unconscious” (xi), “rules of discourse” (xiv), “order” (xx), “codes of culture” (xx), “episteme” (xxii)
Derrida’s terms: “ideology” (6), “logocentrism” (20)

Regardless of the distinctions between each of these concepts, they all contribute to a “theory of discursive practice” (Foucault xiv), which is a major project of (post-)structuralism. The question that Sinje brings up, of how the mapping or displacement of the rules of discourse that both of these texts engage in can open up new spaces, if not outside the order of things then between the categories of its taxonomies, is a persistent one within this discourse.