Decentring the Centre: Optimism and Constraint in Post-Structuralist Literary Theory

Abstract

This essay explores how Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault challenge the structuralist notion of a stable ‘centre’ that governs meaning. It examines how both Derrida and Foucault ‘decentre’ the structure of Western philosophy and discourse, as well as the literary text itself. In the essay ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ (1967), Derrida argues that the absence of a fixed centre liberates the play of meaning, allowing it to emerge through unstable relations between signs rather than from any stable origin. By contrast, in the essay ‘What Is an Author?’ (1969), Michel Foucault redefines the author not as the central source of meaning, but as an ‘author-function’ that continues to regulate and constrain discourse. Drawing upon these two texts, Finlay’s essay first examines how Derrida and Foucault conceptualise the centre differently before exploring the ways in which each theorist decentres it. It then considers the implications of the absence of an absolute centre for the play and interpretation of meaning. Ultimately, Finlay argues that although Derrida’s approach is more optimistic than Foucault’s, it fails to account for the subtle power dynamics that shape meaning and which Foucault exposes.