the shaky foundations of post-structuralism (in excerpts)

"Here it is a question of a critical relationship to the language of
the human sciences and a question of a critical responsibility of the
discourse. It is a question of putting expressly and systematically
the problem of a discourse which borrows from a heritage the resources
necessary of that heritage itself. A problem of economy and strategy."

"One begins to understand that the distinction between state of nature
and state of society (we would be more apt to say today: state of
nature and state of culture), while lacking any acceptable historical
signification, presents a value which fully justifies its use by
modern sociology: its value as a methodological instrument."

"On the other hand, still in The Savage Mind, [Levi-Strauss] presents
as what he calls bricolage what might be called the discourse of this
method. The bricoleur, says Levi-Strauss, is someone who uses 'the
means at hand,' that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition
around him, those which are already there, which had not been
especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are
to be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them,
not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary, or to try
several of them at once, even if their form and their origin are
heterogeneous -- and so forth. There is therefore a critique of
language in the form of bricolage, and it has even been possible to
say that bricolage is the critical language itself."

"There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure,
of sign, of freeplay. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of
deciphering, a truth or an origin which is free from freeplay and from
the order of the sign, and lives like an exile the necessity of
interpretation. The other, which is no longer turned toward [or away
from] the origin, affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond man and
humanism, the name man being the name of that being who, throughout
the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology -- in other words,
through the history of all of his history -- has dreamed of full
presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of the
game."

"I do not believe that today there is any question of choosing [...]
we must first try to conceive of the common ground, and the difference
of this irreducible difference." -- Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and
Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences",
http://hydra.humanities.uci.edu/derrida/sign-play.html