Deconstruction is a term in contemporary philosophy, literary criticism, and the social sciences, denoting a process by which the texts and languages of Western philosophy (in particular) appear to shift and complicate in meaning when read in light of the assumptions and absences they reveal within themselves. Jacques Derrida coined the term in the 1960s, and proved more forthcoming with negative, rather than a pined-for positive, analyses of the school. Subjects relevant to deconstruction include the philosophy of meaning in Western thought, and the ways that meaning is constructed by Western writers, texts, and readers and understood by readers. Though Derrida himself denied deconstruction was a method or school of philosophy, or indeed anything outside of reading the text itself, the term has been used by others to describe Derrida's particular methods of textual criticism, which involved discovering, recognizing, and understanding the underlyingand unspoken and implicitassumptions, ideas, and frameworks that form the basis for thought and belief, for example, in complicating the ordinary division made between nature and culture. Derrida's deconstruction was drawn mainly from the work of Heidegger and his notion of destruktion but also from Levinas and his ideas upon the Other.
define it formally), or, as some call it, a "textual event" (a characterization implied by the Derrida quotation just given) and determining what authority to accord to a particular attempt at delimiting it. Many pages have been devoted to attempts to define deconstruction or to demonstrate why attempts at delimitation are misconceived. Most of these attempts (including those signed by critics who are considered deconstructionist) are difficult to read and resistant to summary. In contrast, there also exist many secondary texts which have attempted to explain deconstruction in a straightforward manner. However, these works (with titles such as Deconstruction for Beginners[1] and Deconstructions: A User's Guide[2]) have been criticized by some scholars for being too detached from the original texts and contradictory to the concept of deconstruction.[citation needed] Surveying the deconstructive texts and the secondary literature, one is confronted with a bafflingly heterogeneous range of arguments. These include claims that deconstruction can sort out the Western tradition in its entirety, by highlighting and discrediting unjustified privileges accorded to white males and other hegemonists. On the other hand, some critics claim that deconstruction is a dangerous form of nihilism that wishes the utter destruction of Western scientific and ethical values. As a rule, deconstruction is ridiculed by members of the political right of just about any stripe. Its reception on the left is far more varied, ranging from hostility to co-option:
While there is no doubting that principal figures associated with deconstruction in France have been "leftist" in their political positions, Heidegger's place in deconstruction complicates matters considerably, as do the politics of Paul de Man in early adulthood. Heidegger assumed the rectorship of the University of Freiburg from 1933-1934 as a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi Party), while de Man worked, during the German occupation of Belgium, as a writer for a collaborationist newspaper, Le Soir. From a racial-religious perspective, deconstruction has no clear sectarian identity. For example, Derrida's views on religion are anything but sectarian. As a Jew raised in a walled Jewish community in colonial Algeria, Derrida rejected what he regarded as the countersignature of anti-Semitism by Algerian Jewish institutions of the 1940s. He is almost certainly an atheist in terms of dogmatic theology, and has written about religion in terms of what was shared among the Abrahamic faiths. Due to the open nature of Derrida's engagement with religion, deconstruction-and-religion attracts attention from scholars across disciplines. Those writing sympathetically about deconstruction tend to use an "idiosyncratic" (sometimes in fact imitative) style with numerous neologisms, a bent toward playfulness and irony, and a massive amount of allusion across many corners of the Western canon. Critics assert that when one takes the time to deconstruct writings about deconstruction one discovers it was not worth the effort. Deconstructionism is ultimately and literally a meaningless philosophy. It is devoid of meaning and is, in fact, a direct attack on any possibility of meaning, because if the reader alone creates meaning there can be no truth; one persons meaning is equal to anothers so there is no possibility of reasoned discourse
Deconstruction is in fact much closer to the original meaning of the word 'analysis' itself, which etymologically means "to undo" a virtual synonym for "to de-construct." ... If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not the text, but the claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another. A deconstructive reading is a reading which analyzes the specificity of a text's critical difference from itself.
Some detractors claim deconstruction amounts to little more than nihilism or relativism. Its proponents deny this; It is not the abandonment of all meaning, but attempts to demonstrate that Western thought has not satisfied its quest for a "transcendental signifier" that will give meaning to all other signs. According to Derrida, "Deconstruction is not an enclosure in nothingness, but an openness to the other" (Derrida, 1984, p. 124), and an attempt "to discover the non-place or non-lieu which would be that 'other' of philosophy" (ibid. p. 112).
purportedly 'essential' message" (Rorty 1995). (The word accidental is usually interpreted here in the sense of incidental.) A more whimsical definition is by John D. Caputo, who defines deconstruction thus: "Whenever deconstruction finds a nutshell -- a secure axiom or a pithy maxim -- the very idea is to crack it open and disturb this tranquility. Indeed, that is a good rule of thumb in deconstruction. That is what deconstruction is all about, its very meaning and mission, if it has any. One might even say that cracking nutshells is what deconstruction is. In a nutshell. ...Have we not run up against a paradox and an aporia [something impassable]?...the paralysis and impossibility of an aporia is just what impels deconstruction, what rouses it out of bed in the morning..." (Caputo 1997, p.32) Many definitions portray deconstruction as a method, project, or school of thought. For example, the philosopher David B. Allison (an early translator of Derrida) stated:
[Deconstruction] signifies 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.
(Introduction by Allison, in Derrida, 1973, p. xxxii, n. 1.) Similarly, in the context of religious studies Paul Ricoeur (1983) defined deconstruction as a way of uncovering the questions behind the answers of a text or tradition (Klein 1995).
speech over writing presence over absence identity over difference fullness over emptiness meaning over meaninglessness mastery over submission life over death
Derrida argues in Of Grammatology (translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and published in English in 1976) that, in each such case, the first term is classically conceived as original, authentic, and superior, while the second is thought of as secondary, derivative, or even "parasitic." These binary oppositions, or "violent hierarchies", and others of their form, he argues, must be deconstructed. This deconstruction is effected in two ways (La Double Sance). He argues that these oppositions cannot be simply transcended; given the thousands of years of philosophical history behind them, it would be disingenuous to attempt to move directly to a domain of thought beyond these distinctions. So deconstruction attempts to compensate for these historical power imbalances, undertaking the difficult project of thinking through the philosophical implications of questioning and presenting complications to show the contingency of such divisions. The second "science" involves the emergence or eruption of a new conception. One can begin to conceive a conceptual terrain away from these oppositions: the next project of deconstruction would be to develop concepts which fall under neither one term of these oppositions nor the other. Much of the philosophical work of deconstruction has been devoted to developing such ideas and their implications, of which diffrance may be the prototype (as it denotes neither simple identity nor simple difference). Derrida spoke in an interview (first published in French in 1967) about such "concepts," which he called merely "marks" in order to distinguish them from proper philosophical concepts:
...[I]t has been necessary to analyze, to set to work, within the text of the history of philosophy, as well as within the so-called literary text,..., certain marks, shall we say,... that by analogy (I underline) I have called undecidables, that is, unities of simulacrum, "false" verbal properties (nominal or semantic) that can no longer be included within philosophical (binary) opposition, resisting and disorganizing it, without ever constituting a third term, without ever leaving room for a solution in the form of speculative dialectics.
(Positions, trans. Alan Bass, pp. 42-43) As can be seen in this discussion of its terms' undecidable, unresolvable complexity, deconstruction requires a high level of comfort with suspended, deferred decision; a deconstructive thinker must be willing to work with terms whose precise meaning has not
been, and perhaps cannot be, established. (This is often given as a major reason for the difficult writing style of deconstructive texts.) Critics of deconstruction find this unacceptable as philosophy; many feel that, by working in this manner with unspecified terms, deconstruction ignores the primary task of philosophy, which they say is the creation and elucidation of concepts. This deep criticism is a result of a fundamental difference of opinion about the nature of philosophy, and is unlikely to be resolved simply.
Undeconstructibility
Deconstruction exists in the interval between constructions and undeconstructibility. The primary exemplar of this relationship is the relationship between the law, deconstruction, and justice. Derrida summarizes the relationship by saying that justice is
the undeconstructible condition that makes deconstruction possible.[3] However, the justice referred to by Derrida is indeterminate and not a transcendent ideal. To quote Derrida, it is "a justice in itself, if such a thing exists, outside or beyond law".[4] The law is made up of necessary human constructions while justice is the undeconstructible call to make laws. The law belongs to the realm of the present, possible, and calculable while justice belongs to the realm of the absent, impossible, and incalculable. Deconstruction bridges the gap between the law and justice as the experience of applying the law in a just manner. Justice demands that a singular occurrence be responded to with a new, uniquely tailored application of the law. Thus, a deconstructive reading of the law is a leap from calculability towards incalculability. In deconstruction, justice takes on the structure of a promise that absence and impossibility can be made present and possible. Insofar as deconstruction is motivated by such a promise, it escapes the traditional presence/absence binary because a promise is neither present nor absent. Therefore, a deconstructive reading will never definitively achieve justice. Justice is always deferred. Derrida works out his idea of justice in Specters of Marx and in his essay "Force of Law" in Acts of Religion; he works out his idea of hospitality in Of Hospitality; Similarly for democracy see Rogues: Two Essays on Reason; friendship see The Politics of Friendship; the other see The Gift of Death; the future see Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money.
Diffrance
Main article: Diffrance Against the metaphysics of presence, deconstruction brings a (non)concept called diffrance. This French neologism is, on the deconstructive argument, properly neither a word nor a concept; it names the non-coincidence of meaning both synchronically (one French homonym means "differing") and diachronically (another French homonym means "deferring"). Because the resonance and conflict between these two French meanings is difficult to convey tersely in English, the word diffrance is usually left untranslated.
Trace
The idea of diffrance also brings with it the idea of trace. A trace is what a sign differs/defers from. It is the absent part of the sign's presence. In other words, through the
act of diffrance, a sign leaves behind a trace, which is whatever is left over after everything present has been accounted for. According to Derrida, "the trace itself does not exist" (Derrida, 1976, p. 167) because it is self-effacing. That is, "[i]n presenting itself, it becomes effaced" (Ibid., p. 125). Because all signifiers viewed as present in Western thought will necessarily contain traces of other (absent) signifiers, the signifier can be neither wholly present nor wholly absent.
criture
In deconstruction, the word criture (usually translated as writing in English) is appropriated to refer not just to systems of graphic communication, but to all systems inhabited by diffrance. A related term, called archi-criture, refers to the positive side of writing, or writing as an ultimate principle, rather than as a derivative of logos (speech). In other words, whereas the Western logos encompasses writing, it is equally valid to view archi-criture as encompassing the logos, and therefore speech can be thought of as a form of writing: writing on air waves, or on the memory of the listener or recording device, but there is no fundamental dominance at work. This, as described above, is an element of Derrida's criticisms against phallogocentrism in general.
Hymen
The word hymen comes from the Greek word for skin, membrane or the vaginal hymen. In deconstruction it is used to refer to the interplay between, the normally considered mutually exclusive terms of, inside and outside. The hymen is the membrane of intersection where it becomes impossible to distinguish whether the membrane is on the inside or the outside. And in the absence of the complete hymen, the distinction between inside and outside disappears. Thus, in a way, the hymen defies formal logic and is neither outside nor inside, and after penetration, is both inside and outside. Showing the problematics of a simple word like hymen questions what "is inside" and "is outside" mean, they cannot here be considered in the usual logic of mutual exclusion (sometimes called law of excluded middle). Thus we get a contrast to formal logic, and especially the ancient and revered principle of non-contradiction, which from Aristotle says "one cannot say of something that it is and that it is not in the same respect and at the same time." Yet, the hymen is inside and is not inside in the same respect and at the same time (ie, using a formal logic translation of "inside" to "not outside"). Much in history of science and philosophy depended on the sanctity of this law of noncontradiction, for example see, Logical Positivism, Analytic Philosophy.
] Pharmakon
The word pharmakon refers to the play between cure and poison. It derives from the ancient Greek word, used by Plato in Phaedrus and Phaedo, which had an undecidable meaning and could be translated to mean anything ranging from a drug, recipe, spell, medicine, or poison.
3. The third moment is the displacement of the terms of the opposition, often in the emergence of a neologism or new meaning. Take, for example, the nature/culture opposition. This binary opposition was prevalent in many discussions during the 20th century. However, consider something like incest. Incest is a taboo, a "cultural rule," that is found by anthropologists, universally. Being universal it is then also indistinguishable from what is called "natural." Incest disrupts the simplicity of this nature/culture division and shows that the opposition relies for its meaning upon something else. The emergence then of a neologism to highlight this "weakness" in the nature/culture division can be considered. In his book Of Grammatology, Derrida offers one example of deconstruction applied to a theory of Lvi-Strauss. Following many other Western thinkers, Lvi-Strauss distinguished between "savage" societies lacking writing and "civilized" societies that have writing. This distinction implies that human beings developed verbal communication (speech) before some human cultures developed writing, and that speech is thus conceptually as well as chronologically prior to writing (thus speech would be more authentic, closer to truth and meaning, and more immediate than writing). Although the development of writing is generally considered to be an advance, after an encounter with the Nambikwara Indians of Brazil, Lvi-Strauss suggested that societies without writing were also lacking violence and domination (in other words, savages are truly noble savages). He further argued that the primary function of writing is to facilitate slavery (or social inequality, exploitation, and domination in general). This claim has been rejected by most later historians and anthropologists as strictly incorrect. There is abundant historical evidence that many hunter-gatherer societies and later non-literate tribes had significant amounts of violence and warfare in their cultures, though it must be added that Derrida never denied that such societies were significantly violent. For that matter, hierarchical and highly unequal societies have flourished in the absence of writing. Derrida's interpretation begins with taking Lvi-Strauss's discussion of writing at its word: what is important in writing for Lvi-Strauss is not the use of markings on a piece of paper to communicate information, but rather their use in domination and violence. Derrida further observes that, based on Lvi-Strauss's own ethnography, the Nambikwara really do use language for domination and violence. Derrida thus concludes that writing, in fact, is prior to speech. That is, he reverses the opposition between speech and writing. Derrida was not making fun of Lvi-Strauss, nor did he mean to supersede, replace, or proclaim himself superior to Lvi-Strauss (a common theme of deconstruction is the desire to be critical without assuming a posture of superiority). He was using his deconstruction of Lvi-Strauss to question a common belief in Western culture, dating back at least to Plato: that speech is prior to, more authentic than, and closer to "true meaning" than writing.
Criticisms of deconstruction
Critics of deconstruction take issue with what they characterize as empty obscurantism and lack of seriousness in deconstructive writings. In addition, critics often equate deconstruction with nihilism or relativism and criticize deconstruction accordingly.
Anti-essentialist criticism
Neo-pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty has criticized Derrida's assertion that deconstruction is not a method, but something that is "already, all the time"[citation needed] occurring in texts. Anti-essentialists allege that Derrida's position is close to positing certain protocols, gestures, and structures which is intrinsic to all texts, and thus close to positing an "essential" privileged reading of a text. Rorty specifically criticizes deconstruction's tendency to "treat every text as 'about' the same old philosophical oppositions, space and time, sensible and intelligible, subject and object, being and becoming..."[5] According to Rorty, in making the tacit assumption that the traditional structures and metaphors in philosophy are always and already present within all cultural discourse, philosophy is re-elevated to a position at the center of culture, a notion which pragmatism seeks to eschew at all costs. This, Rorty says, is a "self-deceptive attempt to magnify the importance of an academic specialty."[6] In addition (and this is less a criticism of Derrida himself than of his followers in literary criticism), Rorty regards the de Manian attempts to privilege literary language over others, and to repeatedly prove the impossibility of reading[7] as another form of metaphysics, "another inversion of a traditional philosophical position..that nevertheless remains within the great range of alternatives specified by 'the discourse of philosophy."[8] In general, anti-essentialists may still accept the validity of deconstructive readings but view them as the result of subjective interaction with a text. Then each reading is one of many possible readings, rather than an excavation of something "within" the text. "The truth" of any single reading is not privileged in that case but open to critical analysis.
History of deconstruction
ring the period between the late 1960s and the early 1980s many thinkers influenced by deconstruction, including Derrida, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller, worked at Yale University. This group came to be known as the Yale school and was especially influential in literary criticism, as de Man, Miller, and Hartman were all primarily literary critics. Several of these theorists were subsequently affiliated with the University of California Irvine. (At a faculty meeting of the Department of English, Professor Martin Price, the chairman, while observing the surfeit of deconstructionists flooding the University with more hires in sight, asked his colleagues, "I can understand hiring a few deconstructionists here and there. But do we really need to corner the market?")
Precursors
Deconstruction has significant ties with much of Western philosophy; even considering only Derrida's work, there are existing deconstructive texts about the works of at least many dozens of important philosophers. However, deconstruction emerged from a clearly delineated philosophical context:
Derrida's earliest work, including the texts that introduced the term "deconstruction," dealt with the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl: Derrida's first publication was a book-length Introduction to Husserl's The Origin of Geometry, and Speech and Phenomena, an early work, dealt largely with phenomenology. A student and prior interpreter of Husserl's, Martin Heidegger, was one of the most significant influences on Derrida's thought: Derrida's Of Spirit deals directly with Heidegger, but Heidegger's influence on deconstruction is much broader than that one volume. The psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud is an important reference for much of deconstruction: The Post Card, important essays in Writing and Difference, Archive Fever, and many other deconstructive works deal primarily with Freud. The work of Friedrich Nietzsche is alleged to be a forerunner of deconstruction in form and substance, as Derrida writes in Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles. In Of Grammatology, Derrida makes clear that the work of Andr LeroiGourhan is important to the formulation of deconstruction and grammatology. Not only does Derrida refer the thought of gramm to Leroi-Gourhan's use of the concepts of "exteriorization" and "program," but he also makes use of LeroiGourhan's understanding of life and of human life to formulate his own concept of writing. Leroi-Gourhan, according to Derrida, makes it possible to think the history of life as the history of the gramm, and in this context Derrida states that lifein the sense of the great evolving movement of the inscription of difference in which the history of life consistsis "what I have called diffrance."[9] The structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure, and other forms of poststructuralism that evolved contemporaneously with deconstruction (such as the work of Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, etc.), were the immediate intellectual climate for the formation of deconstruction. In many cases, these authors were close friends, colleagues, or correspondents of Derrida's.
External links
A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism, and Philology by Jos ngel Garca Landa (Deconstruction subject not found) 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 How To Deconstruct Almost Anything - My Postmodern Adventure by Chip Morningstar; a cynical introduction to 'deconstruction' from the perspective of a software engineer. 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 A satirical look at deconstruction from The Onion. Ellen Lupton on deconstruction in Graphic Design Deconstruction of fashion; La moda en la posmodernidad by Adolfo Vasquez Rocca PhD
References
Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. ISBN 978-0-8014-1322-3. Derrida, Jacques, "Letter to A Japanese Friend," Derrida and Diffrance, ed. David Wood and Robert Bernasconi, Warwick: Parousia, 1985, p. 1. Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. ISBN 978-0-8018-5830-7 Derrida, Jacques, Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. ISBN 978-0-226-14331-6 Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs. Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973. ISBN 9780-8101-0590-4. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. ISBN 978-0-8166-1251-2 Ellis, John M. Against Deconstruction Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989. ISBN 9780-691-06754-4. Johnson, Barbara. The Critical Difference. 1981. Klein, Anne Carolyn. Meeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists, and the Art of the Self. Boston: Beacon, 1995. ISBN 978-0-8070-7306-3. John W McGinley, " 'The Written' as the Vocation of Conceiving Jewishly". ISBN 978-0-595-40488-9. Moynihan, Robert, Recent Imagining: Interviews with Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul DeMan, J. Hillis Miller. Shoe String, 1986. ISBN 978-0-20802120-5. Rorty, Richard, "From Formalism to Poststructuralism". The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 8. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.
Stiegler, Bernard, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Trans. Richard Beardsworth & George Collins. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. ISBN 0804730415 Stiegler, Bernard, "Derrida and Technology: Fidelity at the Limits of Deconstruction and the Prosthesis of Faith," in Tom Cohen (ed.), Jacques Derrida and the Humanities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ISBN 0521625653
Notes
1. ^ Powell, James and Lee, Joe, Deconstruction for Beginners (Writers & Readers Publishing, 2005) 2. ^ Royle, Nicholas, Deconstructions: A User's Guide (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) 3. ^ Derrida, Jacques Acts of Religion, p. 243. 4. ^ Derrida, Jacques "Force of Law" in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, 1992, ed. Cornell, et al. 5. ^ Rorty, Richard, "Deconstruction and Circumvention" Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 104. 6. ^ "Deconstruction and Circumvention", Essays on Heidegger and Others, p. 87. 7. ^ See De Man, Paul, Blindness and Insight, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983) 8. ^ Rorty, Richard, "Two Meaning of Logocentrism" Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 117. 9. ^ Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 845, and cf. subsection above, "Bernard Stiegler on deconstruction."