ABSTRACT
Deconstruction is said to be both a “structuralist gesture” and an “antistructuralist gesture” to the extent that it “assumed a certain need for the structuralist problematic” while proceeding to unsettle its premises. Dehiscing the emic gesture was not an explicit part of the project of difference, as anthropology, along with its named differences, served to open the closure of ‘Western’ metaphysics in Derrida’s work. Thus, difference differs, defers, detours. It is an endless process that points to the impossibility of attaining the totality in which full meaning can be established. In “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Derrida develops the concept of the pharmakon, one of the possible substitutes in the chain of supplementation that includes difference, deconstruction, hymen, gramma, entame. In Roy Wagner’s text, as discussed, such an attempt at cohesion—and the necessary rupture that comes with it—seem to occur whenever the emic gesture, the gesture through which difference is circumscribed as alterity, seeks to provide argumentative unity to the text.
