Force and Signification’ (1963)

Jacques Derrida is concerned with literary aesthetics, with regard to a structuralist analysis of literary texts. He sees structuralist literary criticism both in terms of the history of metaphysics, and metaphysics in the literary, particularly Aristotle’s Poetics; the symbolist aesthetic which emerged in nineteenth-century literature that emphasises the aesthetics of the pure word and of pure form over representation in literature. Structuralism is concerned with language as the origin of history. Literature is a persistent concern of Derrida’s. Two papers in Writing and Difference deal with the dramatist Antonin Artaud: ‘La parole soufflee’ and ‘The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’. Various other papers are collected in the volume Acts of Literature , which is only a small sample of Derrida’s writing on literature. Structure becomes the object itself, the literary thing itself. It was always a means or relationship for reading or writing, for assembling significations, recognizing themes, ordering constants and correspondences.