ABSTRACT
Derrida's critique of logocentrism and phonologism in the previous chapter provides further grounds for a re-evaluation of the use of the terms 'opposition' and 'binary opposition' in the discourse of science. The use of these terms is by no means trivial, for they are the kind of words which have a special controlling power in the discourse, especially at levels which are unconscious or unrecognized. Most people do not, of course, believe in the oppressive and violent functions that simple words may serve - quite apart from any controls exerted by linguistic structure - unless, of course, they happen to belong to those very groups or subgroups against whom the linguistic violence of words is most obviously directed: racial and ethnic minorities, women, children (on the experience of the 'educated black', see Fanon, 1952). To "animal categories and verbal abuse" (Leach), we need therefore to add the categories of things, objects, commodities, and any number of various forms of paranoid projection used by the dominant to define the subordinate, whether the subordinate recognize the function of these terms or not (cf. Chapter XVII).
