Decentering Sinas: Poststructuralism and Sinology

Abstract

Abstract:In Of Grammatology Jacques Derrida describes the "necessary decentering" that took place in Western philosophy following "the becoming-legible of non-Western scripts," when the European intellectual tradition was forced to confront its civilizational others. Derrida positions himself as contributing to this decentering, displacing the value-laden binary opposition central to structuralism. But as Derrida explained, the "first decentering limits itself" by "recenter[ing] itself upon" what he calls "the 'Chinese' prejudice: all the philosophical projects of a universal script and of a universal language [which] encouraged seeing in the recently discovered Chinese script a model of the philosophical language thus removed from history." How has the approach to Chinese language and literature of that decentering known as poststructuralism limited itself or recentered itself, and how has sinology responded to the influence of poststructuralism? Insofar as the Chinese term for the Sinae (China) at the root of sinology is itself "middle" or "central" (中), how susceptible to decentering can sinology be? This article begins with a survey of poststructuralist writings about China by renowned post-structuralists, alongside responses to their work by sinologists and comparatists, arguing that poststructuralist writings tend to recenter themselves on a binary opposition between China and the West. The author then addresses the influence of poststructuralism on Chinese literary studies, to argue that the most successful poststructural decentering occurs in sinology when sinologists disseminate their decentering through a dissipated poststructuralism.