The term deconstruction refers to approaches to understanding the relationship between
text and
meaning
Meaning most commonly refers to:
* Meaning (linguistics), meaning which is communicated through the use of language
* Meaning (philosophy), definition, elements, and types of meaning discussed in philosophy
* Meaning (non-linguistic), a general te ...
. It was introduced by the philosopher
Jacques Derrida, who defined it as a turn away from
Platonism
Platonism is the philosophy of Plato and philosophical systems closely derived from it, though contemporary platonists do not necessarily accept all of the doctrines of Plato. Platonism had a profound effect on Western thought. Platonism at ...
's ideas of "true"
forms and
essences which take precedence over appearances, instead considering the constantly changing complex function of language, making static and idealist ideas of it inadequate. Deconstruction instead places emphasis on the mere appearance of language in both speech and writing, or suggests at least that essence as it is called is to be found in its appearance, while it itself is "undecidable", and everyday experiences cannot be empirically evaluated to find the actuality of language.
Deconstruction argues that language, especially in idealist concepts such as truth and justice, is irreducibly complex, unstable and difficult to determine, making fluid and comprehensive ideas of language more adequate in deconstructive criticism. Since the 1980s, these proposals of language's fluidity instead of being ideally static and discernible have inspired a range of studies in the
humanities
Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture. In the Renaissance, the term contrasted with divinity and referred to what is now called classics, the main area of secular study in universities at th ...
, including the disciplines of
law,
anthropology
Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of be ...
,
historiography
Historiography is the study of the methods of historians in developing history as an academic discipline, and by extension is any body of historical work on a particular subject. The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians hav ...
,
linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Lingu ...
,
sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and society's effect on language. It can overlap with the sociology of ...
,
psychoanalysis
PsychoanalysisFrom Greek: + . is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques"What is psychoanalysis? Of course, one is supposed to answer that it is many things — a theory, a research method, a therapy, a body of knowledge. In what might b ...
,
LGBT studies, and
feminism
Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes. Feminism incorporates the position that society prioritizes the male po ...
. Deconstruction also inspired
deconstructivism
Deconstructivism is a movement of postmodern architecture which appeared in the 1980s. It gives the impression of the fragmentation of the constructed building, commonly characterised by an absence of obvious harmony, continuity, or symmetry. ...
in
architecture
Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing buildings ...
and remains important within
art,
music
Music is generally defined as the The arts, art of arranging sound to create some combination of Musical form, form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise Musical expression, expressive content. Exact definition of music, definitions of mu ...
, and
literary criticism.
Overview
Jacques Derrida's 1967 book ''
Of Grammatology'' introduced the majority of ideas influential within deconstruction.
Derrida published a number of other works directly relevant to the concept of deconstruction, such as ''
Différance'', ''
Speech and Phenomena'', and ''
Writing and Difference''.
According to Derrida, and taking inspiration from the work of
Ferdinand de Saussure,
language as a system of signs and words only has meaning because of the contrast between these signs.
As
Richard Rorty contends, "words have meaning only because of contrast-effects with other words...no word can acquire meaning in the way in which philosophers from
Aristotle
Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical Greece, Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatet ...
to
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, ar ...
have hoped it might—by being the unmediated expression of something non-linguistic (e.g., an emotion, a sensed observation, a physical object, an idea, a
Platonic Form)".
As a consequence, meaning is never present, but rather is deferred to other signs. Derrida refers to this—in his view, mistaken—belief there is a self-sufficient, non-deferred meaning as
metaphysics of presence. A concept, then, must be understood in the context of its opposite: for example, the word "being" does not have meaning without contrast with the word "nothing".
Further, Derrida contends that "in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a
vis-a-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other (
axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand":
signified over
signifier; intelligible over sensible; speech over writing; activity over passivity, etc. The first task of deconstruction is, according to Derrida, to find and overturn these oppositions inside text(s); but the final objective of deconstruction is not to surpass all oppositions, because it is assumed they are structurally necessary to produce sense- the oppositions simply cannot be suspended once and for all, as the hierarchy of dual oppositions always reestablishes itself (because it is necessary to meaning). Deconstruction, Derrida says, only points to the necessity of an unending analysis that can make explicit the decisions and hierarchies intrinsic to all texts.
Derrida further argues that it is not enough to expose and deconstruct the way oppositions work and then stop there in a nihilistic or cynical position, "thereby preventing any means of intervening in the field effectively".
To be effective, deconstruction needs to create new terms, not to synthesize the concepts in opposition, but to mark their difference and eternal interplay. This explains why Derrida always proposes new terms in his deconstruction, not as a free play but from the necessity of analysis. Derrida called these undecidables—that is, unities of simulacrum—"false" verbal properties (nominal or semantic) that can no longer be included within philosophical (binary) opposition. Instead, they inhabit philosophical oppositions—resisting and organizing them—without ever constituting a third term or leaving room for a solution in the form of a
Hegelian dialectic (e.g.,
différance,
archi-writing
"Arche-writing" (french: archi-écriture) is a term used by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his attempt to re-orient the relationship between speech and writing.
Derrida argued that as far back as Plato, speech had been always given priori ...
,
pharmakon
In critical theory, pharmakon is a concept introduced by Jacques Derrida. It is derived from the Greek source term φάρμακον (''phármakon''), a word that can mean either remedy, poison, or scapegoat.
In his essay "Plato's Pharmacy", Der ...
, supplement, hymen, gram, spacing).
Influences
Derrida's theories on deconstruction were themselves influenced by the work of linguists such as Ferdinand de Saussure (whose writings on
semiotics
Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the systematic study of sign processes (semiosis) and meaning making. Semiosis is any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something, ...
also became a cornerstone of
structuralism in the mid-20th century) and literary theorists such as
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes (; ; 12 November 1915 – 26 March 1980) was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popul ...
(whose works were an investigation of the logical ends of structuralist thought). Derrida's views on deconstruction stood in opposition to the theories of structuralists such as
psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan, and anthropologist
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss (, ; 28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theories of structuralism and structural anthropology. He held the chair of Social Anthro ...
. However, Derrida resisted attempts to label his work as "
post-structuralist".
Influence of Nietzsche
Derrida's motivation for developing deconstructive criticism, suggesting the fluidity of language over static forms, was largely inspired by
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (; or ; 15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, prose poet, cultural critic, philologist, and composer whose work has exerted a profound influence on contemporary philosophy. He began his c ...
's philosophy, beginning with his interpretation of
Orpheus
Orpheus (; Ancient Greek: Ὀρφεύς, classical pronunciation: ; french: Orphée) is a Thracians, Thracian bard, legendary musician and prophet in ancient Greek religion. He was also a renowned Ancient Greek poetry, poet and, according to ...
. In ''Daybreak'', Nietzsche announces that "All things that live long are gradually so saturated with reason that their origin in unreason thereby becomes improbable. Does not almost every precise history of an origination impress our feelings as paradoxical and wantonly offensive? Does the good historian not, at bottom, constantly contradict?".
Nietzsche's point in ''Daybreak'' is that standing at the end of modern history, modern thinkers know too much to continue to be deceived by an illusory grasp of satisfactorily complete reason. Mere proposals of heightened reasoning, logic, philosophizing and science are no longer solely sufficient as the royal roads to truth. Nietzsche disregards Platonism to revisualize the history of the West as the self-perpetuating history of a series of political moves, that is, a manifestation of the
will to power, that at bottom have no greater or lesser claim to truth in any noumenal (absolute) sense. By calling our attention to the fact that he has assumed the role of Orpheus, the man underground, in dialectical opposition to Plato, Nietzsche hopes to sensitize us to the political and cultural context, and the political influences that impact authorship.
Where Nietzsche did not achieve deconstruction, as Derrida sees it, is that he missed the opportunity to further explore the will to power as more than a manifestation of the sociopolitically effective operation of writing that Plato characterized, stepping beyond Nietzsche's penultimate revaluation of all Western values, to the ultimate, which is the emphasis on "the role of writing in the production of knowledge".
Influence of Saussure
Derrida approaches all texts as constructed around elemental oppositions which all
discourse
Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of communication. Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with work spanning fields such as sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and discourse analysis. ...
has to articulate if it intends to make any sense whatsoever. This is so because identity is viewed in
non-essentialist
Often synonymous to anti-foundationalism, non-essentialism in philosophy is the non-belief in an essence (from Latin ''esse'') of any given thing, idea, or metaphysical entity (e.g. God). Non-essentialism might also be defined cataphatically (i ...
terms as a construct, and because constructs only produce meaning through the interplay of
difference inside a "system of distinct signs". This approach to text is influenced by the
semiology of
Ferdinand de Saussure.
Saussure is considered one of the fathers of
structuralism when he explained that terms get their meaning in reciprocal determination with other terms inside language:
In language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it. ..A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass thought engenders a system of values.
Saussure explicitly suggested that linguistics was only a branch of a more general semiology, a science of signs in general, human codes being only one part. Nevertheless, in the end, as Derrida pointed out, Saussure made linguistics "the regulatory model", and "for essential, and essentially metaphysical, reasons had to privilege speech, and everything that links the sign to phone".
Derrida will prefer to follow the more "fruitful paths (formalization)" of a general semiotics without falling into what he considered "a hierarchizing teleology" privileging linguistics, and to speak of "mark" rather than of language, not as something restricted to mankind, but as prelinguistic, as the pure possibility of language, working everywhere there is a relation to something else.
Deconstruction according to Derrida
Etymology
Derrida's original use of the word "deconstruction" was a translation of ''
Destruktion'', a concept from the work of
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger (; ; 26 September 188926 May 1976) was a German philosopher who is best known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. He is among the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th centu ...
that Derrida sought to apply to textual reading. Heidegger's term referred to a process of exploring the categories and concepts that tradition has imposed on a word, and the history behind them.
Basic philosophical concerns
Derrida's concerns flow from a consideration of several issues:
# A desire to contribute to the re-evaluation of all Western values, a re-evaluation built on the 18th-century
Kantian critique of pure reason, and carried forward to the 19th century, in its more radical implications, by
Kierkegaard and
Nietzsche.
# An assertion that texts outlive their authors, and become part of a set of cultural habits equal to, if not surpassing, the importance of authorial intent.
# A re-valuation of certain classic western dialectics: poetry vs. philosophy, reason vs. revelation, structure vs. creativity,
episteme
In philosophy, episteme (; french: épistémè) is a term that refers to a principle system of understanding (i.e., knowledge), such as scientific knowledge or practical knowledge. The term comes from the Ancient Greek verbs, Ancient Greek verb ...
vs.
techne, etc.
To this end, Derrida follows a long line of modern philosophers, who look backwards to Plato and his influence on the Western metaphysical tradition.
Like Nietzsche, Derrida suspects Plato of dissimulation in the service of a political project, namely the education, through critical reflections, of a class of citizens more strategically positioned to influence the polis. However, like Nietzsche, Derrida is not satisfied merely with such a political interpretation of Plato, because of the particular dilemma modern humans find themselves in. His Platonic reflections are inseparably part of his critique of
modernity
Modernity, a topic in the humanities and social sciences, is both a historical period (the modern era) and the ensemble of particular socio-cultural norms, attitudes and practices that arose in the wake of the Renaissancein the "Age of Reas ...
, hence the attempt to be something beyond the modern, because of this Nietzschean sense that the modern has lost its way and become mired in
nihilism.
Différance
Différance is the observation that the meanings of words come from their
synchrony with other words within the language and their
diachrony between contemporary and historical definitions of a word. Understanding language, according to Derrida, requires an understanding of both viewpoints of linguistic analysis. The focus on diachrony has led to accusations against Derrida of engaging in the
etymological fallacy.
There is one statement by Derrida—in an essay on
Rousseau in ''
Of Grammatology''—which has been of great interest to his opponents.
It is the assertion that "there is no outside-text" (''il n'y a pas de hors-texte''),
which is often mistranslated as "there is nothing outside of the text". The mistranslation is often used to suggest Derrida believes that nothing exists but words.
Michel Foucault
Paul-Michel Foucault (, ; ; 15 October 192625 June 1984) was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and ho ...
, for instance, famously misattributed to Derrida the very different phrase "Il n'y a rien en dehors du texte" for this purpose. According to Derrida, his statement simply refers to the unavoidability of context that is at the heart of différance.
For example, the word "house" derives its meaning more as a function of how it differs from "shed", "mansion", "hotel", "building", etc. (Form of Content, that
Louis Hjelmslev
Louis Trolle Hjelmslev (; 3 October 189930 May 1965) was a Danish linguist whose ideas formed the basis of the Copenhagen School of linguistics. Born into an academic family (his father was the mathematician Johannes Hjelmslev), Hjelmslev studie ...
distinguished from Form of Expression) than how the word "house" may be tied to a certain image of a traditional house (i.e., the relationship between
signified and signifier), with each term being established in reciprocal determination with the other terms than by an ostensive description or definition: when can we talk about a "house" or a "mansion" or a "shed"? The same can be said about verbs, in all the languages in the world: when should we stop saying "walk" and start saying "run"? The same happens, of course, with adjectives: when must we stop saying "yellow" and start saying "orange", or exchange "past" for "present"? Not only are the topological differences between the words relevant here, but the differentials between what is signified is also covered by différance.
Thus, complete meaning is always "differential" and ''postponed'' in language; there is never a moment when meaning is complete and total. A simple example would consist of looking up a given word in a dictionary, then proceeding to look up the words found in that word's definition, etc., also comparing with older dictionaries. Such a process would never end.
Metaphysics of presence
Derrida describes the task of deconstruction as the identification of metaphysics of presence, or ''
logocentrism'' in western philosophy. Metaphysics of presence is the desire for immediate access to meaning, the privileging of presence over absence. This means that there is an assumed bias in certain binary oppositions where one side is placed in a position over another, such as good over bad, speech over the written word, male over female. Derrida writes,
To Derrida, the central bias of logocentrism was the now being placed as more important than the future or past. This argument is largely based on the earlier work of Heidegger, who, in ''
Being and Time
''Being and Time'' (german: Sein und Zeit) is the 1927 '' magnum opus'' of German philosopher Martin Heidegger and a key document of existentialism. ''Being and Time'' had a notable impact on subsequent philosophy, literary theory and many other ...
'', claimed that the theoretical attitude of pure presence is parasitical upon a more
originary involvement with the world in concepts such as
ready-to-hand and
being-with.
Deconstruction and dialectics
In the deconstruction procedure, one of the main concerns of Derrida is to not collapse into Hegel's dialectic, where these oppositions would be reduced to contradictions in a dialectic that has the purpose of resolving it into a synthesis.
The presence of Hegelian dialectics was enormous in the intellectual life of France during the second half of the 20th century, with the influence of
Kojève and
Hyppolite, but also with the impact of dialectics based on contradiction developed by
Marxists, and including the
existentialism
Existentialism ( ) is a form of philosophical inquiry that explores the problem of human existence and centers on human thinking, feeling, and acting. Existentialist thinkers frequently explore issues related to the meaning
Meaning most comm ...
of
Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (, ; ; 21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism (and phenomenology), a French playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and liter ...
, etc. This explains Derrida's concern to always distinguish his procedure from Hegel's,
since Hegelianism believes binary oppositions would produce a synthesis, while Derrida saw binary oppositions as incapable of collapsing into a synthesis free from the original contradiction.
Difficulty of definition
There have been problems defining deconstruction. Derrida claimed that all of his essays were attempts to define what deconstruction is,
and that deconstruction is necessarily complicated and difficult to explain since it actively criticises the very language needed to explain it.
Derrida's "negative" descriptions
Derrida has been more forthcoming with negative (
apophatic Apophatic may refer to:
* Apophasis, a rhetoric device whereby the speaker raises something by denying it
* Apophatic theology
Apophatic theology, also known as negative theology, is a form of theology, theological thinking and religious pract ...
) than with positive descriptions of deconstruction. When asked by
Toshihiko Izutsu some preliminary considerations on how to translate "deconstruction" in Japanese, in order to at least prevent using a Japanese term contrary to deconstruction's actual meaning, Derrida began his response by saying that such a question amounts to "what deconstruction is not, or rather ''ought'' not to be".
Derrida states that deconstruction is not an analysis, a critique, or a method
in the traditional sense that philosophy understands these terms. In these negative descriptions of deconstruction, Derrida is seeking to "multiply the cautionary indicators and put aside all the traditional philosophical concepts".
This does not mean that deconstruction has absolutely nothing in common with an analysis, a critique, or a method, because while Derrida distances deconstruction from these terms, he reaffirms "the necessity of returning to them, at least under erasure".
Derrida's necessity of returning to a term
under erasure means that even though these terms are problematic we must use them until they can be effectively reformulated or replaced. The relevance of the tradition of negative theology to Derrida's preference for negative descriptions of deconstruction is the notion that a positive description of deconstruction would over-determine the idea of deconstruction and would close off the openness that Derrida wishes to preserve for deconstruction. If Derrida were to positively define deconstruction—as, for example, a critique—then this would make the concept of critique immune to itself being deconstructed. Some new philosophy beyond deconstruction would then be required in order to encompass the notion of critique.
Not a method
Derrida states that "Deconstruction is not a method, and cannot be transformed into one".
This is because deconstruction is not a mechanical operation. Derrida warns against considering deconstruction as a mechanical operation, when he states that "It is true that in certain circles (university or cultural, especially in the United States) the technical and methodological "metaphor" that seems necessarily attached to the very word 'deconstruction' has been able to seduce or lead astray".
Commentator Richard Beardsworth explains that:
Derrida is careful to avoid this term ethodbecause it carries connotations of a procedural form of judgement. A thinker with a method has already decided ''how'' to proceed, is unable to give him or herself up to the matter of thought in hand, is a functionary of the criteria which structure his or her conceptual gestures. For Derrida ..this is irresponsibility itself. Thus, to talk of a method in relation to deconstruction, especially regarding its ethico-political implications, would appear to go directly against the current of Derrida's philosophical adventure.
Beardsworth here explains that it would be irresponsible to undertake a deconstruction with a complete set of rules that need only be applied as a method to the object of deconstruction, because this understanding would reduce deconstruction to a thesis of the reader that the text is then made to fit. This would be an irresponsible act of reading, because it becomes a prejudicial procedure that only finds what it sets out to find.
Not a critique
Derrida states that deconstruction is not a
critique
Critique is a method of disciplined, systematic study of a written or oral discourse. Although critique is commonly understood as fault finding and negative judgment, Rodolphe Gasché (2007''The honor of thinking: critique, theory, philosophy' ...
in the
Kantian sense.
This is because
Kant defines the term critique as the opposite of
dogmatism. For Derrida, it is not possible to escape the dogmatic baggage of the language we use in order to perform a pure critique in the Kantian sense. Language is dogmatic because it is inescapably
metaphysical. Derrida argues that language is inescapably metaphysical because it is made up of
signifiers that only refer to that which transcends them—the signified. In addition, Derrida asks rhetorically "Is not the idea of knowledge and of the acquisition of knowledge in itself metaphysical?"
By this, Derrida means that all claims to know something necessarily involve an assertion of the metaphysical type that something ''is'' the case somewhere. For Derrida the concept of neutrality is suspect and dogmatism is therefore involved in everything to a certain degree. Deconstruction can challenge a particular dogmatism and hence de-sediment dogmatism in general, but it cannot escape all dogmatism all at once.
Not an analysis
Derrida states that deconstruction is not an
analysis
Analysis ( : analyses) is the process of breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts in order to gain a better understanding of it. The technique has been applied in the study of mathematics and logic since before Aristotle (3 ...
in the traditional sense.
This is because the possibility of analysis is predicated on the possibility of breaking up the text being analysed into elemental component parts. Derrida argues that there are no self-sufficient units of meaning in a text, because individual words or sentences in a text can only be properly understood in terms of how they fit into the larger structure of the text and language itself. For more on Derrida's theory of meaning see the article on
différance.
Not post-structuralist
Derrida states that his use of the word deconstruction first took place in a context in which "
structuralism was dominant" and deconstruction's meaning is within this context. Derrida states that deconstruction is an "antistructuralist gesture" because "
ructures were to be undone, decomposed, desedimented". At the same time, deconstruction is also a "structuralist gesture" because it is concerned with the structure of texts. So, deconstruction involves "a certain attention to structures"
and tries to "understand how an 'ensemble' was constituted".
As both a structuralist and an antistructuralist gesture, deconstruction is tied up with what Derrida calls the "structural problematic".
The structural problematic for Derrida is the tension between genesis, that which is "in the essential mode of creation or movement", and structure: "systems, or complexes, or static configurations".
An example of genesis would be the
sensory
Sensory may refer to:
Biology
* Sensory ecology, how organisms obtain information about their environment
* Sensory neuron, nerve cell responsible for transmitting information about external stimuli
* Sensory perception, the process of acquiri ...
idea
In common usage and in philosophy, ideas are the results of thought. Also in philosophy, ideas can also be mental representational images of some object. Many philosophers have considered ideas to be a fundamental ontological category of be ...
s from which knowledge is then derived in the
empirical epistemology
Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics.
Episte ...
. An example of structure would be a
binary opposition
A binary opposition (also binary system) is a pair of related terms or concepts that are opposite in meaning. Binary opposition is the system of language and/or thought by which two theoretical opposites are strictly defined and set off against one ...
such as
good and evil where the meaning of each element is established, at least partly, through its relationship to the other element.
It is for this reason that Derrida distances his use of the term deconstruction from
post-structuralism
Post-structuralism is a term for philosophical and literary forms of theory that both build upon and reject ideas established by structuralism, the intellectual project that preceded it. Though post-structuralists all present different critiques ...
, a term that would suggest that philosophy could simply go beyond structuralism. Derrida states that "the motif of deconstruction has been associated with 'post-structuralism, but that this term was "a word unknown in France until its 'return' from the United States".
In his deconstruction of
Edmund Husserl
, thesis1_title = Beiträge zur Variationsrechnung (Contributions to the Calculus of Variations)
, thesis1_url = https://fedora.phaidra.univie.ac.at/fedora/get/o:58535/bdef:Book/view
, thesis1_year = 1883
, thesis2_title ...
, Derrida actually argues the contamination of pure origins by the structures of language and temporality.
Manfred Frank has even referred to Derrida's work as "neostructuralism", identifying a "distaste for the metaphysical concepts of domination and system".
Alternative definitions
The popularity of the term deconstruction, combined with the technical difficulty of Derrida's primary material on deconstruction and his reluctance to elaborate his understanding of the term, has meant that many secondary sources have attempted to give a more straightforward explanation than Derrida himself ever attempted. Secondary definitions are therefore an interpretation of deconstruction by the person offering them rather than a summary of Derrida's actual position.
*
Paul de Man was a member of the
Yale School and a prominent practitioner of deconstruction as he understood it. His definition of deconstruction is that, "
's possible, within text, to frame a question or undo assertions made in the text, by means of elements which are in the text, which frequently would be precisely structures that play off the rhetorical against grammatical elements."
*
Richard Rorty was a prominent interpreter of Derrida's philosophy. His definition of deconstruction is that, "the term 'deconstruction' refers in the first instance to the way in which the 'accidental' features of a text can be seen as betraying, subverting, its purportedly 'essential' message."
* According to
John D. Caputo
John David Caputo (born October 26, 1940) is an American philosopher who is the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion Emeritus at Syracuse University and the David R. Cook Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Villanova University. Caputo is a ma ...
, the very meaning and mission of deconstruction is:
"to show that things-texts, institutions, traditions, societies, beliefs, and practices of whatever size and sort you need - do not have definable meanings and determinable missions, that they are always more than any mission would impose, that they exceed the boundaries they currently occupy"
*
Niall Lucy points to the impossibility of defining the term at all, stating:
"While in a sense it ''is'' impossibly difficult to define, the impossibility has less to do with the adoption of a position or the assertion of a choice on deconstruction's part than with the impossibility of every 'is' as such. Deconstruction begins, as it were, from a refusal of the authority or determining power of every 'is', or simply from a refusal of authority in general. While such refusal may indeed count as a position, it is not the case that deconstruction holds this as a sort of 'preference' ".
* David B. Allison, an early translator of Derrida, states in the introduction to his translation of ''Speech and Phenomena'':
econstructionsignifies a project of critical thought whose task is to locate and 'take apart' those concepts which serve as the axioms or rules for a period of thought, those concepts which command the unfolding of an entire epoch of metaphysics. 'Deconstruction' is somewhat less negative than the Heideggerian or Nietzschean terms 'destruction' or 'reversal'; it suggests that certain foundational concepts of metaphysics will never be entirely eliminated...There is no simple 'overcoming' of metaphysics or the language of metaphysics.
*
Paul Ricœur defines deconstruction as a way of uncovering the questions behind the answers of a text or tradition.
A survey of the
secondary literature reveals a wide range of heterogeneous arguments. Particularly problematic are the attempts to give neat introductions to deconstruction by people trained in literary criticism who sometimes have little or no expertise in the relevant areas of philosophy in which Derrida is working. These secondary works (e.g. ''Deconstruction for Beginners'' and ''Deconstructions: A User's Guide'') have attempted to explain deconstruction while being academically criticized for being too far removed from the original texts and Derrida's actual position.
Application
Derrida's observations have greatly influenced literary criticism and post-structuralism.
Literary criticism
Derrida's method consisted of demonstrating all the forms and varieties of the originary complexity of
semiotics
Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the systematic study of sign processes (semiosis) and meaning making. Semiosis is any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something, ...
, and their multiple consequences in many fields. His way of achieving this was by conducting thorough, careful, sensitive, and yet transformational readings of philosophical and literary texts, with an ear to what in those texts runs counter to their apparent systematicity (structural unity) or intended sense (authorial genesis). By demonstrating the
aporias and ellipses of thought, Derrida hoped to show the infinitely subtle ways that this originary complexity, which by definition cannot ever be completely known, works its structuring and destructuring effects.
Deconstruction denotes the
pursuing of the meaning of a text to the point of exposing the supposed contradictions and internal oppositions upon which it is founded—supposedly showing that those foundations are irreducibly complex, unstable, or impossible. It is an approach that may be deployed in philosophy, in
literary analysis, and even in the analysis of scientific writings. Deconstruction generally tries to demonstrate that any text is not a discrete whole but contains several irreconcilable and contradictory meanings; that any text therefore has more than one interpretation; that the text itself links these interpretations inextricably; that the incompatibility of these interpretations is irreducible; and thus that an interpretative reading cannot go beyond a certain point. Derrida refers to this point as an "aporia" in the text; thus, deconstructive reading is termed "aporetic". He insists that meaning is made possible by the relations of a word to other words within the network of structures that language is.
Derrida initially resisted granting to his approach the overarching name "deconstruction", on the grounds that it was a precise technical term that could not be used to characterize his work generally. Nevertheless, he eventually accepted that the term had come into common use to refer to his textual approach, and Derrida himself increasingly began to use the term in this more general way.
Derrida's deconstruction strategy is also used by
postmodernists to locate meaning in a text rather than discover meaning due to the position that it has multiple readings. There is a focus on the deconstruction that denotes the tearing apart of a text to find arbitrary hierarchies and presuppositions for the purpose of tracing contradictions that shadow a text's coherence.
Here, the meaning of a text does not reside with the author or the author's intentions because it is dependent on the interaction between reader and text.
Even the process of
translation
Translation is the communication of the Meaning (linguistic), meaning of a #Source and target languages, source-language text by means of an Dynamic and formal equivalence, equivalent #Source and target languages, target-language text. The ...
is also seen as transformative since it "modifies the original even as it modifies the translating language".
Critique of structuralism
Derrida's lecture at
Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hemisphere. It consiste ...
, "
Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences", often appears in collections as a manifesto against structuralism. Derrida's essay was one of the earliest to propose some theoretical limitations to structuralism, and to attempt to theorize on terms that were clearly no longer structuralist. Structuralism viewed language as a number of signs, composed of a signified (the meaning) and a signifier (the word itself). Derrida proposed that signs always referred to other signs, existing only in relation to each other, and there was therefore no ultimate foundation or centre. This is the basis of
différance.
Development after Derrida
The Yale School
Between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, many thinkers were influenced by deconstruction, including
Paul de Man,
Geoffrey Hartman, and
J. Hillis Miller. This group came to be known as the
Yale school and was especially influential in
literary criticism. Derrida and Hillis Miller were subsequently affiliated with the
University of California, Irvine.
Miller has described deconstruction this way: "Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Its apparently solid ground is no rock, but thin air."
Critical legal studies movement
Arguing that law and politics cannot be separated, the founders of the "Critical Legal Studies Movement" found it necessary to criticize the absence of the recognition of this inseparability at the level of theory. To demonstrate the
indeterminacy of
legal doctrine, these scholars often adopt a method, such as
structuralism in
linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Lingu ...
, or deconstruction in
Continental philosophy, to make explicit the deep structure of categories and tensions at work in legal texts and talk. The aim was to deconstruct the tensions and procedures by which they are constructed, expressed, and deployed.
For example,
Duncan Kennedy, in explicit reference to semiotics and deconstruction procedures, maintains that various legal doctrines are constructed around the binary pairs of opposed concepts, each of which has a claim upon intuitive and formal forms of reasoning that must be made explicit in their meaning and relative value, and criticized. Self and other, private and public, subjective and objective, freedom and control are examples of such pairs demonstrating the influence of opposing concepts on the development of legal doctrines throughout history.
''Deconstructing History''
Deconstructive readings of history and sources have changed the entire discipline of history. In ''Deconstructing History'',
Alun Munslow examines history in what he argues is a postmodern age. He provides an introduction to the debates and issues of postmodernist history. He also surveys the latest research into the relationship between the past, history, and historical practice, as well as articulating his own theoretical challenges.
''The Inoperative Community''
Jean-Luc Nancy argues, in his 1982 book ''The Inoperative Community'', for an understanding of community and society that is undeconstructable because it is prior to conceptualisation. Nancy's work is an important development of deconstruction because it takes the challenge of deconstruction seriously and attempts to develop an understanding of political terms that is undeconstructable and therefore suitable for a philosophy after Derrida.
''The Ethics of Deconstruction''
Simon Critchley argues, in his 1992 book ''The Ethics of Deconstruction'', that Derrida's deconstruction is an intrinsically ethical practice. Critchley argues that deconstruction involves an openness to the
Other that makes it ethical in the
Levinasian
Emmanuel Levinas (; ; 12 January 1906 – 25 December 1995) was a French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry who is known for his work within Jewish philosophy, existentialism, and phenomenology, focusing on the relationship of ethics to ...
understanding of the term.
''Derrida and the Political''
Jacques Derrida has had a great influence on contemporary
political theory
Political philosophy or political theory is the philosophical study of government, addressing questions about the nature, scope, and legitimacy of public agents and institutions and the relationships between them. Its topics include politics, l ...
and political philosophy. Derrida's thinking has inspired
Slavoj Zizek
Slavoj may refer to:
*Karel Slavoj Amerling (1807–1884), Czech teacher, writer, and philosopher
*Slavoj Černý (born 1937), Czech former cyclist
*Slavoj Žižek (born 1949), Slovenian philosopher
See also
*Záboj and Slavoj, outdoor sculpture ...
,
Richard Rorty,
Ernesto Laclau,
Judith Butler
Judith Pamela Butler (born February 24, 1956) is an American philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave feminism, queer theory, and literary theory. In 1993, Butle ...
and many more contemporary theorists who have developed a deconstructive approach to
politics
Politics (from , ) is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The branch of social science that stud ...
. Because deconstruction examines the internal logic of any given text or discourse it has helped many authors to analyse the contradictions inherent in all schools of thought; and, as such, it has proved revolutionary in political analysis, particularly ideology critiques.
Richard Beardsworth, developing from Critchley's ''Ethics of Deconstruction'', argues, in his 1996 ''Derrida and the Political'', that deconstruction is an intrinsically political practice. He further argues that the future of deconstruction faces a perhaps undecidable choice between a
theological
Theology is the systematic study of the nature of the divine and, more broadly, of religious belief. It is taught as an academic discipline, typically in universities and seminaries. It occupies itself with the unique content of analyzing th ...
approach and a technological approach, represented first of all by the work of
Bernard Stiegler.
Criticisms
Derrida was involved in a number of high-profile disagreements with prominent philosophers, including
Michel Foucault
Paul-Michel Foucault (, ; ; 15 October 192625 June 1984) was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and ho ...
,
John Searle,
Willard Van Orman Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine (; known to his friends as "Van"; June 25, 1908 – December 25, 2000) was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century ...
,
Peter Kreeft, and
Jürgen Habermas. Most of the criticism of deconstruction were first articulated by these philosophers then repeated elsewhere.
John Searle
In the early 1970s, Searle had a brief exchange with
Jacques Derrida regarding
speech-act theory. The exchange was characterized by a degree of mutual hostility between the philosophers, each of whom accused the other of having misunderstood his basic points.
Searle was particularly hostile to Derrida's deconstructionist framework and much later refused to let his response to Derrida be printed along with Derrida's papers in the 1988 collection ''
Limited Inc''. Searle did not consider Derrida's approach to be legitimate philosophy, or even intelligible writing, and argued that he did not want to legitimize the deconstructionist point of view by paying any attention to it. Consequently, some critics have considered the exchange to be a series of elaborate misunderstandings rather than a debate, while others
have seen either Derrida or Searle gaining the upper hand. The level of hostility can be seen from Searle's statement that "It would be a mistake to regard Derrida's discussion of
Austin as a confrontation between two prominent philosophical traditions", to which Derrida replied that that sentence was "the only sentence of the 'reply' to which I can subscribe". Commentators have frequently interpreted the exchange as a prominent example of a confrontation between
analytic and
continental philosophies.
The debate began in 1972, when, in his paper "Signature Event Context", Derrida analyzed J. L. Austin's theory of the
illocutionary act The concept of illocutionary acts was introduced into linguistics by the philosopher J. L. Austin in his investigation of the various aspects of speech acts. In his framework, ''locution'' is what was said and meant, ''illocution'' is what was don ...
. While sympathetic to Austin's departure from a purely denotational account of language to one that includes "force", Derrida was sceptical of the framework of normativity employed by Austin. Derrida argued that Austin had missed the fact that any speech event is framed by a "structure of absence" (the words that are left unsaid due to contextual constraints) and by "iterability" (the constraints on what can be said, imposed by what has been said in the past). Derrida argued that the focus on
intentionality in speech-act theory was misguided because intentionality is restricted to that which is already established as a possible intention. He also took issue with the way Austin had excluded the study of fiction, non-serious, or "parasitic" speech, wondering whether this exclusion was because Austin had considered these speech genres as governed by different structures of meaning, or hadn't considered them due to a lack of interest. In his brief reply to Derrida, "Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida", Searle argued that Derrida's critique was unwarranted because it assumed that Austin's theory attempted to give a full account of language and meaning when its aim was much narrower. Searle considered the omission of parasitic discourse forms to be justified by the narrow scope of Austin's inquiry. Searle agreed with Derrida's proposal that intentionality presupposes iterability, but did not apply the same concept of intentionality used by Derrida, being unable or unwilling to engage with the continental conceptual apparatus.
This, in turn, caused Derrida to criticize Searle for not being sufficiently familiar with
phenomenological
Phenomenology may refer to:
Art
* Phenomenology (architecture), based on the experience of building materials and their sensory properties
Philosophy
* Phenomenology (philosophy), a branch of philosophy which studies subjective experiences and a ...
perspectives on intentionality.
[Marian Hobson. 1998. Jacques Derrida: opening lines. Psychology Press. pp. 95-97] Some critics
have suggested that Searle, by being so grounded in the analytical tradition that he was unable to engage with Derrida's continental phenomenological tradition, was at fault for the unsuccessful nature of the exchange, however Searle also argued that Derrida's disagreement with Austin turned on Derrida's having misunderstood Austin's
type–token distinction and having failed to understand Austin's concept of failure in relation to
performativity.
Derrida, in his response to Searle ( in ''Limited Inc''), ridiculed Searle's positions. Claiming that a clear sender of Searle's message could not be established, Derrida suggested that Searle had formed with Austin a ''société à responsabilité limitée'' (a "
limited liability company
A limited liability company (LLC for short) is the United States of America, US-specific form of a private limited company. It is a business structure that can combine the Flow-through entity, pass-through taxation of a partnership or sole p ...
") due to the ways in which the ambiguities of authorship within Searle's reply circumvented the very speech act of his reply. Searle did not reply. Later in 1988, Derrida tried to review his position and his critiques of Austin and Searle, reiterating that he found the constant appeal to "normality" in the analytical tradition to be problematic.
In 1995, Searle gave a brief reply to Derrida in ''The Construction of Social Reality''. He called Derrida's conclusion "preposterous" and stated that "Derrida, as far as I can tell, does not have an argument. He simply declares that there is nothing outside of texts..." Searle's reference here is not to anything forwarded in the debate, but to a mistranslation of the phrase "''il n'y a pas dehors du texte''," ("There is no outside-text") which appears in Derrida's ''
Of Grammatology''.
Jürgen Habermas
In ''
The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity
''The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures'' (german: Der Philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen) is a 1985 book by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, in which the author reconstructs and deals in depth with a numbe ...
'',
Jürgen Habermas criticized what he considered Derrida's opposition to
rational discourse
Communicative rationality or communicative reason (german: kommunikative Rationalität) is a theory or set of theories which describes human rationality as a necessary outcome of successful communication. This theory, borne from the over inflation ...
.
Further, in an essay on religion and religious language, Habermas criticized Derrida's emphasis on
etymology
Etymology () The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) – p. 633 "Etymology /ˌɛtɪˈmɒlədʒi/ the study of the class in words and the way their meanings have changed throughout time". is the study of the history of the form of words ...
and
philology
Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics (with especially strong ties to etymology). Philology is also defined as ...
(see ''
Etymological fallacy'').
Walter A. Davis
The American philosopher
Walter A. Davis, in ''Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx and Freud'', argues that both deconstruction and structuralism are prematurely arrested moments of a dialectical movement that issues from Hegelian "unhappy consciousness".
In popular media
Popular criticism of deconstruction intensified following the
Sokal affair
The Sokal affair, also called the Sokal hoax, was a demonstrative scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to ''Social Text'', an acade ...
, which many people took as an indicator of the quality of deconstruction as a whole, despite the absence of Derrida from Sokal's follow-up book ''
Impostures Intellectuelles''.
Chip Morningstar holds a view critical of deconstruction, believing it to be "epistemologically challenged". He claims the humanities are subject to isolation and genetic drift due to their unaccountability to the world outside academia. During the Second International Conference on Cyberspace (
Santa Cruz, California, 1991), he reportedly
heckled deconstructionists off the stage. He subsequently presented his views in the article "How to Deconstruct Almost Anything", where he stated, "Contrary to the report given in the 'Hype List' column of issue #1 of Wired ('Po-Mo Gets Tek-No', page 87), we did not shout down the
postmodernists. We made fun of them."
Colloquial layman appropriation
"the analytic examination of something (such as a theory) often in order to reveal its inadequacy" https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/deconstruction
See also
*
Hermeneutics
Hermeneutics () is the theory and methodology of interpretation, especially the interpretation of Biblical hermeneutics, biblical texts, wisdom literature, and Philosophy, philosophical texts. Hermeneutics is more than interpretative principles ...
*
List of deconstructionists
*
Post-structuralism
Post-structuralism is a term for philosophical and literary forms of theory that both build upon and reject ideas established by structuralism, the intellectual project that preceded it. Though post-structuralists all present different critiques ...
*
Postmodernism
*
Radical hermeneutics
*
Reconstructivism
References
Further reading
*Derrida, Jacques. ''Positions''. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.
*Derrida
980
Year 980 ( CMLXXX) was a leap year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar.
Events
By place Europe
* Peace is concluded between Emperor Otto II (the Red) and King Lothair III (or Lothair IV) a ...
''The time of a thesis: punctuations'', first published in: Derrida
990
Year 990 ( CMXC) was a common year starting on Wednesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar.
Events
By place
Europe
* Al-Mansur, ''de facto'' ruler of Al-Andalus, conquers the Castle of Montemor-o-Velho (mode ...
''
Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2'', pp. 113–128.
*Breckman, Warren. "Times of Theory: On Writing the History of French Theory," ''Journal of the History of Ideas'', vol. 71, no. 3 (July 2010), 339–361
online.
*
Culler, Jonathan. ''On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism'', Cornell University Press, 1982. .
*
Eagleton, Terry
Terence Francis Eagleton (born 22 February 1943) is an English literary theorist, critic, and public intellectual. He is currently Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University.
Eagleton has published over forty books ...
. ''
Literary Theory: An Introduction'', University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
*Ellis, John M. ''Against Deconstruction'', Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989. .
*
Johnson, Barbara. ''The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading''. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981.
*Montefiore, Alan (ed., 1983), ''Philosophy in France Today'' Cambridge: Cambridge UP, pp. 34–50
*
Reynolds, Simon. ''Rip It Up and Start Again'', New York: Penguin, 2006, pp. 316. .
(Source for the information about Green Gartside, Scritti Politti, and deconstructionism.)
*Stocker, Barry. ''Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Derrida on Deconstruction'', Routledge, 2006.
*Wortham, Simon Morgan. ''The Derrida Dictionary'', Continuum, 2010.
External links
*
*
* Video o
Jacques Derrida beginning a definition of Deconstruction"Deconstruction" in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy*
ttps://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/155306/deconstruction "Deconstruction" in Encyclopædia Britannica""Deconstruction" in "Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy""German Law Journal special number about Derrida and Deconstruction" "Deconstruction: Some Assumptions"by John Lye
by José Ángel García Landa (Deconstruction found under: Authors & Schools - Critics & Schools - Poststructuralism - On Deconstruction)
Ten ways of thinking about deconstruction by
Willy Maley
Archive of the international conference "Deconstructing Mimesis - Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe"about the work of Lacoue-Labarthe and his mimetic version of deconstruction, held at the
Sorbonne in January 2006
Jacques Derrida: The Perchance of a Coming of the Otherwoman. The Deconstruction of Phallogocentrism from Duel to Duo by Carole Dely, English translation by Wilson Baldridge, at ''Sens Public''
Ellen Lupton on deconstruction in Graphic Designby Adolfo Vasquez Rocca
Derrida: Deconstrucción, différance y diseminación; una historia de parásitos, huellas y espectros Academia.Edu
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