Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
Deconstruction
Deconstruction (French: dconstruction) is a literary theory and philosophy of language derived principally from Jacques Derrida's 1967 work Of Grammatology.[1] The premise of deconstruction is that all of Western literature and philosophy implicitly relies on a metaphysics of presence, where intrinsic meaning is accessible by virtue of pure presence. Deconstruction denies the possibility of a pure presence and thus of essential or intrinsic meaning. Derrida terms the philosophical commitment to pure presence as a source of self-sufficient meaning logocentrism. Due to the impossibility of pure presence and consequently of intrinsic meaning, any given concept is constituted and comprehended linguistically and in terms of its oppositions, e.g. perception/reason, speech/writing, mind/body, interior/exterior, marginal/central, sensible/intelligible, intuition/signification, nature/culture. Further, Derrida contends that of these dichotomies one member is associated with presence and consequently more highly valued than the other which is associated with absence. Deconstruction reveals the metaphysics of presence in a text by identifying its conceptual binary oppositions and demonstrating the speciousness of their hierarchy by denying the possibility of comprehending the "superior" element of the hierarchy in the absence of its "inferior" counterpart. Denying an absolute and intrinsic meaning to either element of the hierarchy diffrance is revealed (rather than proposed as an alternative) according to Derrida. Diffrance is a Derridaean neologism that is the antithesis of logocentrism, it is a perpetual series of interactions between presence and absencewhere a concept is constituted, comprehended and identified in terms of what it is not and self-sufficient meaning is never arrived atand thus a relinquishment of the notions of intrinsic and stable meaning, absolute truth, unmediated access to "reality" and consequently of conceptual hierarchy. To situate deconstruction within philosophy in general, it is a critique of Idealism and a form of antifoundationalism. In terms of heritage, style and conceptual framework (namely phenomenological), deconstruction is within the Continentalas opposed to analyticaltradition of philosophy. Derrida's writings on deconstruction are most strongly associated with literary criticism. However, they have also been applied to music, visual arts, feminist theory and post-colonial theory, film theory, and Post-Marxist political philosophy. Derrida's theories on deconstruction were themselves influenced by the work of linguists such as Ferdinand de Saussure (whose writings on semiotics also became a cornerstone of structuralist theory in the mid-20th century) and literary theorists such as Roland Barthes (whose works were an investigation of the logical ends of structuralist thought). Derrida's views on deconstruction stood opposed to the theories of structuralists such as psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan, linguist Claude Lvi-Strauss, and political and social theorist Michel Foucault. However, Derrida resisted attempts to label his work as "post-structuralist".[citation needed]
Etymology
Although he avoided defining the term directly, Derrida sought to apply Martin Heidegger's concept of Destruktion or Abbau, 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.[2] Derrida opted for deconstruction over the literal translation destruction to suggest precision rather than violence.[citation needed]
On deconstruction
Derrida's approach to literary criticism
Derrida's method consisted in demonstrating all the forms and varieties of the originary complexity of semiotics, 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
Deconstruction 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.[3] 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 foundedsupposedly 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.[4] 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."[5] He insists that meaning is made possible by the relations of a word to other words within the network of structures that language is.[6] 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.
Deconstruction 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. For example, the political influences that led one author to choose philosophy over poetry (or at least portray himself as having made such a choice), and another to make a different choice. The problem with Nietzsche, as Derrida sees it, is that he did not go far enough. That he missed the fact that this will to power is itself but a manifestation of the operation of writing. And so Derrida wishes to help us step beyond Nietzsches penultimate revaluation of all western values, to the ultimate, which is the final appreciation of the role of writing in the production of knowledge.
Deconstruction not only a question of synchrony with all the other terms inside a structure, but also of diachrony, with everything that was said and will be said, in History, difference as structure and deffering as genesis:[14] 2) "the a of diffrance also recalls that spacing is temporization, the detour and postponement by means of which intuition, perception, consummation in a word, the relationship to the present, the reference to a present reality, to a being are always deferred. Deferred by virtue of the very principle of difference which holds that an element functions and signifies, takes on or conveys meaning, only by referring to another past or future element in an economy of traces. This economic aspect of diffrance, which brings into play a certain not conscious calculation in a field of forces, is inseparable from the more narrowly semiotic aspect of diffrance. This confirms the subject as not present to itself and constituted on becoming space, in temporizing and also, as Saussure said, that "language [which consists only of differences] is not a function of the speaking subject."[15] Questioned this myth of the presence of meaning in itself ("objective") and/or for itself ("subjective") Derrida will start a long deconstruction of all texts where conceptual oppositions are put to work in the actual construction of meaning and values based on the subordination of the movement of "differance": At the point at which the concept of differance, and the chain attached to it, intervenes, all the conceptual oppositions of metaphysics (signifier/signified; sensible/intelligible; writing/speech; passivity/activity; etc.)- to the extent that they ultimately refer to the presence of something present (for example, in the form of the identity of the subject who is present for all his operations, present beneath every accident or event, self-present in its "living speech," in its enunciations, in the present objects and acts of its language, etc.)become non pertinent. They all amount, at one moment or another, to a subordination of the movement of differance in favor of the presence of a value or a meaning supposedly antecedent to differance, more original than it, exceeding and governing it in the last analysis. This is still the presence of what we called above the "transcendental signified." But, as Derrida also points out, these relations with other terms do not express only meaning but also values. The way elemental oppositions are put to work in all texts it is not only a theoretical operation but also a practical option. The first task of deconstruction, starting with philosophy and afterwards revealing it operating in literary texts, juridical texts, etc, would be to overturn these oppositions:[16] On the one hand, we must traverse a phase of overturning. To do justice to this necessity is to recognize 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. To deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn the hierarchy at a given moment. To overlook this phase of overturning is to forget the conflictual and subordinating structure of opposition. It is not that the final task of deconstruction is to surpass all oppositions, because they are structurally necessary to produce sense. They simply cannot be suspended once and for all. But this does not mean that they do not need to be analyzed and criticized in all its manifestations, showing the way these oppositions, both logical and axiological, are at work in all discourse for it to be able to produce meaning and values.[17] And it is not enough to deconstruction to expose the way oppositions work and how meaning and values are produced in speech of all kinds and stop there in a nihilistic or cynic position regarding all meaning, "thereby preventing any means of intervening in the field effectively".[18] To be effective, deconstruction needs to create new concepts, not to synthesize the terms in opposition, but to mark their difference and eternal interplay: That being said and on the other hand to remain in this phase is still to operate on the terrain of and from within the deconstructed system. By means of this double, and precisely stratified, dislodged and dislodging, writing, we must also mark the interval between inversion, which brings low what was high, and the irruptive emergence of a new concept that no longer be, and never could be, included in the previous regime. If this
Deconstruction interval, this biface or biphase, can be inscribed only in a bifurcated writing then it can only be marked in what I would call a grouped textual field: in the last analysis it is impossible to point it out, for a unilinear text, or a punctual position, an operation signed by a single author, are all by definition incapable of practicing this interval. This explains why Derrida always proposes new terms in his deconstruction, not as a free play but as a pure necessity of analysis, to better mark the intervals: Henceforth, in order better to mark this interval it 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 (for example, Mallarme), certain marks, shall we say (I mentioned certain ones just now, there are many others), 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: but which., however, inhabit philosophical oppositions, resisting and organizing it, without ever constituting a third term, without ever leaving room for a solution in the form of speculative dialectics Some examples of these new terms created by Derrida clearly exemplify the deconstruction procedure:[19] (the pharmkon is neither remedy nor poison, neither good nor evil, neither the inside nor the outside, neither speech nor writing; the supplement is neither a plus nor a minus, neither an outside nor the complement of an inside, neither accident nor essence, etc.; the hymen is neither confusion nor distinction, neither identity nor difference, neither consummation nor virginity, neither the veil nor unveiled, neither inside nor the outside, etc.; the gram is neither a signifier nor a signified, neither a sign nor a thing, neither presence nor an absence, neither a position nor a negation, etc.; spacing is neither space nor time; the incision is neither the incised integrity of a beginning, or of a simple cutting into, nor simple secondary. Nevertheless, perhaps Derrida's most famous mark was, from the start, differance, created to deconstruct the opposition between speech and writing and open the way to the rest of his approach: and this holds first of all for a new concept of writing, that simultaneously provokes the overturning of the hierarchy speech/writing, and the entire system attached to it, and releases the dissonance of a writing within speech, thereby disorganizing the entire inherited order and invading the entire field
Illustration of diffrance
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 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 signifier and signified) 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 diffrance. Deferral also comes into play, as the words that occur following "house" in any expression will revise the meaning of that word, sometimes dramatically so. This is true not only with syntagmatic succession in relation with paradigmatic simultaneity, but also, in a broader sense, between diachronic succession in History related with synchronic simultaneity inside a "system of distinct signs". 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 from different periods
Deconstruction in time, and such a process would never end. This is also true with all ontological oppositions and their many declensions, not only in philosophy as in human sciences in general, cultural studies, theory of Law, etc.: the intelligible and the sensible, the spontaneous and the receptive, autonomy and heteronomy, the empirical and the transcendental, immanent and transcendent, as the interior and exterior, or the founded and the founder, normal and abnormal, phonetic and writing, analysis and synthesis, the literal sense and figurative meaning in language, reason and madness in psychoanalysis, the masculine and feminine in gender theory, man and animal in ecology, the beast and the sovereign in the political field, theory and practice as distinct dominions of thought itself. In all speeches in fact (and by right) we can make clear how they were dramatized, how the cleavages were made during the centuries, each author giving it different centers and establishing different hierarchies between the terms in the opposition
Deconstruction
Deconstruction words, the same phrases, the same grammar, etc.)? This question is all the more indispensable since the rules, and even the statements of the rules governing the relations of "nonfiction standard discourse" and its fictional "parasites," are not things found in nature, but laws, symbolic inventions, or conventions, institutions that, in their very normality as well as in their normativity, entail something of the fictional. This dispute is well configured by Umberto Eco when, exposing the example of divergences about the concept of "Denotation" in Staurt Mill and Hjelmslev, concluded:[30] the reason for the confusions is not accidental, nor Esperanto full of goodwill will be able to solve it. It is that the semiotic thought presents itself, from the beginning, as always divided by a dilemma and marked by a choice, more or less implicit, that guides the thinker: is it his task when studying languages to know when and how to refer to things properly (problem of truth) or to ask how and when they are used to produce beliefs? Or, downstream of any terminological choice, there is a deeper choice between transparent systems of signification about things or systems of signification as producers of reality. Pathetic confidentiality of this division, the two sides of the fence, when the division is manifested, rate the opponent as idealist (at least in more recent times).
Deconstruction Not a method Derrida states that Deconstruction is not a method, and cannot be transformed into one.[33] 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 [method] because 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.[34] 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 ignores the empirical facticity of the text itself that is it becomes a prejudicial procedure that only finds what it sets out to find. To be responsible a deconstruction must carefully negotiate the empirical facticity of the text and hence respond to it. Deconstruction is not a method and this means that it is not a neat set of rules that can be applied to any text in the same way. Deconstruction is therefore not neatly transcendental because it cannot be considered separate from the contingent empirical facticity of the particular texts that any deconstruction must carefully negotiate. Each deconstruction is necessarily different (otherwise it achieves no work) and this is why Derrida states that Deconstruction takes place, it is an event.[35] On the other hand, deconstruction cannot be completely untranscendental because this would make it meaningless to, for example, speak of two different examples of deconstruction as both being examples of deconstruction. It is for this reason that Richard Rorty asks if Derrida should be considered a quasi-transcendental philosopher that operates in the tension between the demands of the empirical and the transcendental. Each example of deconstruction must be different, but it must also share something with other examples of deconstruction. Deconstruction is therefore not a method in the traditional sense but is what Derrida terms "an unclosed, unenclosable, not wholly formalizable ensemble of rules for reading, interpretation and writing." Not a critique Derrida states that deconstruction is not a critique 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. For Derrida 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. This transcending of the empirical facticity of the signifier by an ideally conceived signified is metaphysical. It is metaphysical in the sense that it mimics the understanding in Aristotle's metaphysics of an ideally conceived being as that which transcends the existence of every individually existing thing. In a less formal version of the argument it might be noted that it is impossible to use language without asserting being, and hence metaphysics, constantly through the use of the various modifications of the verb "to be". In addition Derrida asks rhetorically "Is not the idea of knowledge and of the acquisition of knowledge in itself metaphysical?"[36] 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 desediment dogmatism in general, but it cannot escape all dogmatism all at once.
Deconstruction Not an analysis Derrida states that deconstruction is not an analysis 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. This is 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 page on diffrance. Not post-structuralist Derrida states that his use of the word deconstruction first took place in a context in which "structuralism was dominant"[37] and its use is related to this context. Derrida states that deconstruction is an "antistructuralist gesture" because "Structures were to be undone, decomposed, desedimented." At the same time for Derrida deconstruction is also a "structuralist gesture" because it is concerned with the structure of texts. So for Derrida 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,"[38] and structure, "systems, or complexes, or static configurations."[39] An example of genesis would be the sensory ideas from which knowledge is then derived in the empirical epistemology. An example of structure would be a binary opposition such as good and evil where the meaning of each element is established, at least partly, through its relationship to the other element. For Derrida, Genesis and Structure are both inescapable modes of description, there are some things that "must be described in terms of structure, and others which must be described in terms of genesis," but these two modes of description are difficult to reconcile and this is the tension of the structural problematic. In Derrida's own words the structural problematic is that "beneath the serene use of these concepts [genesis and structure] is to be found a debate that...makes new reductions and explications indefinitely necessary."[40] The structural problematic is therefore what propels philosophy and hence deconstruction forward. Another significance of the structural problematic for Derrida is that while a critique of structuralism is a recurring theme of his philosophy this does not mean that philosophy can claim to be able to discard all structural aspects. It is for this reason that Derrida distances his use of the term deconstruction from post-structuralism, a term that would suggest 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." Derrida's deconstruction of Husserl Derrida actually argues for the contamination of pure origins by the structures of language and temporality and Manfred Frank has even referred to Derrida's work as "Neostructuralism."[41]
10
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 direct 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, "[i]t'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."[42] 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
Deconstruction as betraying, subverting, its purportedly 'essential' message."[43] (The word accidental is used here in the sense of incidental.) John D. Caputo attempts to explain deconstruction in a nutshell by stating: "Whenever deconstruction finds a nutshella secure axiom or a pithy maximthe 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 contradictory]...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) 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 deconstructions 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".[44] David B. Allison is an early translator of Derrida and states in the introduction to his translation of Speech and Phenomena: [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.[45] Paul Ricur defines deconstruction as a way of uncovering the questions behind the answers of a text or tradition.[46] Richard Ellmann defines 'deconstruction' as the systematic undoing of understanding. 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 that Derrida is working in relation to. These secondary works (e.g. Deconstruction for Beginners[47] and Deconstructions: A User's Guide[48]) have attempted to explain deconstruction while being academically criticized as too far removed from the original texts and Derrida's actual position.[citation needed] In an effort to clarify the rather muddled reception of the term deconstruction Derrida specifies what deconstruction is not through a number of negative definitions.
11
Deconstruction In other words, every structural or "synchronic" phenomenon has a history, and the structure cannot be understood without understanding its genesis.[50] At the same time, in order that there be movement, or potential, the origin cannot be some pure unity or simplicity, but must already be articulatedcomplexsuch that from it a "diachronic" process can emerge. This originary complexity must not be understood as an original positing, but more like a default of origin, which Derrida refers to as iterability, inscription, or textuality.[51] It is this thought of originary complexity, rather than original purity, which destabilises the thought of both genesis and structure, that sets Derrida's work in motion, and from which derive all of its terms, including deconstruction.[52]
12
Diffrance
Crucial to Derrida's work is the concept of diffrance, a complex term which refers to the process of the production of difference and deferral. According to Derrida, all difference and all presence arise from the operation of diffrance.[53] Diffrance is an infinitesimal difference that is not only a difference that is non-dualistic, but also it is a difference that is "undecidable"[54] (see Indeterminacy). To deconstruct philosophy is to think carefully within philosophy about philosophical concepts in terms of their structure and genesis. Deconstruction questions the appeal to presence by arguing that there is always an irreducible aspect of non-presence in operation. Derrida terms this aspect of non-presence diffrance. Diffrance is therefore the key theoretical basis of deconstruction. Deconstruction questions the basic operation of all philosophy through the appeal to presence and diffrance. Derrida argues that diffrance pervades all philosophy because "What defers presence [...] is the very basis on which presence is announced or desired in what represents it, its sign, its trace".[55] Diffrance therefore pervades all philosophy because all philosophy is constructed as a system through language. Diffrance is essential to language because it produces "what metaphysics calls the sign (signified/signifier)".[56] In one sense, a sign must point to something beyond itself that is its meaning so the sign is never fully present in itself but a deferral to something else, to something different. In another sense the structural relationship between the signified and signifier, as two related but separate aspects of the sign, is produced through differentiation. Derrida states that diffrance "is the economical concept", meaning that it is the concept of all systems and structures, because "there is no economy without diffrance [...] the movement of diffrance, as that which produces different things, that which differentiates, is the common root of all the oppositional concepts that mark our language [...] diffrance is also the production [...] of these differences." Diffrance is therefore the condition of possibility for all complex systems and hence all philosophy. Operating through diffrance, deconstruction is the description of how non-presence problematises the operation of the appeal to presence within a particular philosophical system. Diffrance is an a-priori condition of possibility that is always already in effect but a deconstruction must be a careful description of how this diffrance is actually in effect in a given text. Deconstruction therefore describes problems in the text rather than creating them (which would be trivial). Derrida considers the illustration of aporia in this way to be productive because it shows the failure of earlier philosophical systems and the necessity of continuing to philosophise through them with deconstruction.
Of Grammatology
Derrida first employs the term deconstruction in Of Grammatology in 1967 when discussing the implications of understanding language as writing rather than speech. Here Derrida introduces deconstruction to describe the manner that understanding language as writing (in general) renders infeasible a straightforward semantic theory. Derrida states that: [w]riting thus enlarged and radicalized, no longer issues from a logos. Further, it inaugurates the destruction, not the demolition but the de-sedimentation, the de-construction, of all the significations that have their source in that of the logos.[57] In this quotation Derrida states that deconstruction is what happens to meaning when language is understood as writing. For Derrida, when language is understood as writing it is realised that meaning does not originate in the
Deconstruction logos or thought of the language user. Instead individual language users are understood to be using an external system of signs, a system that exists separately to them because these signs are written down. The meaning of language does not originate in the thoughts of the individual language user because those thoughts are already taking place in a language that does not originate with them. Individual language users operate within a system of meaning that is given to them from outside. Meaning is therefore not fully under the control of the individual language user. The meaning of a text is not neatly determined by authorial intention and cannot be recreated without problem by a reader. Meaning necessarily involves some degree of interpretation, negotiation, or translation. This necessity for the active interpretation of meaning by readers when language is understood as writing is why deconstruction takes place.[citation needed] To understand this more fully, consider the difference for Derrida between understanding language as speech and as writing. Derrida argues that people have historically understood speech as the primary mode of language[58] and understood writing as an inferior derivative of speech.[59] Derrida argues that speech is historically equated with logos,[60] meaning thought, and associated with the presence of the speaker to the listener.[61] It is as if the speaker thinks out loud and the listener hears what the speaker is thinking and if there is any confusion then the speaker's presence allows them to qualify the meaning of a previous statement. Derrida argues that by understanding speech as thought, language "effaces itself."[62] Language itself is forgotten. The signified meaning of speech is so immediately understood that it is easy to forget that there are linguistic signifiers involved; but these signifiers are the spoken sounds (phonemes) and written marks (graphemes) that actually comprise language. Derrida therefore associates speech with a very straightforward and unproblematic theory of meaning and with the forgetting of the signifier and hence language itself. Derrida contrasts the understanding of language as speech with an understanding of language as writing. Unlike a speaker, a writer is usually absent (even dead) and the reader cannot rely on the writer to clarify any problems that there might be with the meaning of the text. The consideration of language as writing leads inescapably to the insight that language is a system of signs. As a system of signs the signifiers are present but the signification can only be inferred. There is effectively an act of translation involved in extracting a significaton from the signifiers of language. This act of translation is so habitual to language users that they must step back from their experience of using language in order to fully realise its operation. The significance of understanding language as writing rather than speech is that signifiers are present in language but significations are absent. To decide what words mean is therefore an act of interpretation. The insight that language is a system of signs, most obvious in the consideration of language as writing, leads Derrida to state that "everything [...] gathered under the name of language is beginning to let itself be transferred to [...] the name of writing."[63] This means that there is no room for the naive theory of meaning and forgetting of the signifier that previously existed when language was understood as speech. Later in his career, in 1980, Derrida retrospectively confirmed the importance of his observation on the devaluation of writing,[] which proved valid not only for classics of philosophy and the "socio-historical totality" of our civilization, but also for the deconstruction of a variety of modern scientific texts in linguistics, in anthropology, in psychoanalysis. Everywhere in these texts, such detection devaluation of writing showed to be "insistent, repetitive, even obscurely compulsive," and " the sign of a whole set of long-standing constraints. These constraints were practised at the price of contradictions, of denials, of dogmatic decrees." Here Derrida states that deconstruction exposes historical constraints within the whole history of philosophy that have been practised at the price of contradictions, denials, and dogmatic decrees. The unmasking of how contradictions, denials, and dogmatic decrees are at work in a given text is closely associated with deconstruction. The careful illustration of how such problems are inescapable in a given text can lead someone to describe that text as deconstructed.
13
Deconstruction
14
Deconstruction
15
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 forwarding his own challenging theories.[71]
Deconstruction
16
Criticisms
Derrida has been involved in a number of high profile disagreements with prominent philosophers including Michel Foucault, John Searle, Willard Van Orman Quine, Peter Kreeft, and Jrgen Habermas. Most of the criticism of deconstruction were first articulated by these philosophers and repeated elsewhere.
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault was the subject of Derrida's early paper "Cogito and the History of Madness" in which Derrida makes the controversial claim that: In this 673-page book (sc. History of Madness), Michel Foucault devotes three pages- and, moreover, in a kind of prologue to his second chapter to a certain passage from the first of Descartes's Meditations. [... in] alleging correctly or incorrectly, as will be determined that the sense of Foucault's entire project can be pinpointed in these few allusive and somewhat enigmatic pages, and that the reading of Descartes and the Cartesian Cogito proposed to us engages in its problematic the totality of this History of Madness...[73] The audacity of Derrida's claim to problematise the whole of the History of Madness by working with such a small section of the text outraged Foucault. Foucault responds in the new preface to the 1972 edition of the History of Madness by complaining that after the initial publication of the text "fragments of it pass into circulation and are passed off as the real thing."[74] This comment may form the basis of the allegation that deconstruction does not adhere to conventional academic standards by failing to deal substantially with the texts it appears to criticise. Foucault also states in the appendix to the 1972 edition titled "My Body, This Paper, This Fire" that Derrida's deconstruction is a: [H]istorically well-determined little pedagogy, which manifests itself here in a very visible manner. A pedagogy which teaches the student that there is nothing outside the text, but that in it, in its interstices, in its blanks and silences, the reserve of the origin reigns; that it is never necessary to look beyond it, but that here, not in the words of course, but in words as crossings-outs [sic], in their lattice, what is said is "the meaning of being". A pedagogy that inversely gives to the voice of the masters that unlimited sovereignty that allows it indefinitely to re-say the text.[75] This rebuke by Foucault caused a rift between the two thinkers and they did not speak to each other for ten years. Foucault refers in this passage to certain claims that Derrida makes in Of Grammatology, though without quotation
Deconstruction or citation to indicate that he is doing so. Foucault's mention of "crossings-outs" refers to the return to problematic terms under erasure (see the section on Derrida's negative descriptions of deconstruction). Foucault also alludes critically to the problematisation of presence in deconstruction as a reading of what is not there in the text. This aspect of Foucault's argument may have encouraged Derrida to strongly emphasise the importance of fidelity to the text being deconstructed. Foucault's reference to Derrida's assertion that "there is nothing outside the text" is the basis of much criticism of deconstruction as being nihilistic, relativistic, apolitical, or confined to the ivory tower of academia.Wikipedia:No original research In fact, this infamous quote is subtly but essentially mistranslated (as Foucault well knew, and thus this acknowledgement does not necessarily confute his argument), and literally reads "there is no outside-text (il n'y a pas hors-texte)," or, as Derrida himself paraphrased it in Limited Inc., "there is nothing outside context." Thus, Derrida does not argue that only what is written in the text is relevant to it, but rather that no text can or should be interpreted without considering the various "external" factors (historical, biographical, material, ideological, etc.) that contributed to its production. At the same time, according to Derrida, these allegedly "external" phenomena (e.g. "humanism," "the age of enlightenment," "logic," and, perhaps most importantly, "human nature") need to be considered as historically contingent (i.e. as subject to contextualization and thus critical reading) rather than as immutable and inevitable facts of life.
17
John Searle
Derrida wrote "Signature Event Context", a paper in which he critically engages with Austin's analytic philosophy of language. John Searle is a prominent supporter of Austin's philosophy and objected to "the low level of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity by making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial."[76] In 1983, Searle told to The New York Review of Books a remark on Derrida allegedly made by Michel Foucault in a private conversation with Searle himself. Searle's quote was:[77] Michel Foucault once characterized Derrida's prose style to me as "obscurantisme terroriste." The text is written so obscurely that you can't figure out exactly what the thesis is (hence "obscurantisme") and when one criticizes it, the author says, "Vous m'avez mal compris; vous tes idiot' (hence "terroriste") In 1988, Derrida wrote "Afterword: Toward An Ethic of Discussion", to be published with the previous essays in the collection Limited Inc. Commenting this critics in a footnote he questioned:[78] I just want to raise the question of what precisely a philosopher is doing when, in a newspaper with a large circulation, he finds himself compelled to cite private and unverifiable insults of another philosopher in order to authorize himself to insult in turn and to practice what in French is called ajugement d'autorite, that is, the method and preferred practice of all dogmatism. I do not know whether the fact of citing in French suffices to guarantee the authenticity of a citation when it concerns a private opinion. I do not exclude the possibility that Foucault may have said such things, alas! That is a different question, which would have to be treated separately. But as he is dead, I will not in my turn cite the judgment which, as I have been told by those who were close to him, Foucault is supposed to have made concerning the practice of Searle in this case and on the act that consisted in making this use of an alleged citation. In the main text he argued that Searle avoided reading him[78] and did not try to understand him and even that, perhaps, he was not able to understand, and how certain practices of academic politeness or impoliteness could result in a form of brutality that he disapproved of and would like to disarm, in his fashion.[79] Much more important in terms of theoretical consequences, Derrida criticized Searle's work for pretending to talk about "intention" without being aware of traditional texts about the subject and without even understanding Husserl's work when talking about it.[80] Because he ignored the tradition he rested blindly imprisoned in it, repeating its most problematic gestures, falling short of the most elementary critical questions.[81]
Deconstruction Derrida would even argue that in a certain way he was more close to Austin, than Searle that, in fact, was more close to Continental philosophers that himself tried to criticize.[82]
18
Jrgen Habermas
In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Jrgen Habermas criticized what he considered Derrida's opposition to rational discourse.[83] Further, in an essay on religion and religious language, Habermas criticized Derrida's insistence on etymology and philology[citation needed] (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 in Hegelian "unhappy consciousness."[84]
In popular media
Popular criticism of deconstruction also intensified following the Sokal affair, 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.
Notes
[1] Derrida first used the term "Deconstruction" in his work Of Grammatology, French version, p. 25 (Les Editions de Minuit, 1967, ISBN 978-2-7073-0012-6). On this page Derrida states that the occidental history of sign is essentially theological with reference to Logocentrism. Derrida starts a metaphysical approach of semiology. He states that the concept of sign and deconstruction work are always exposed to misunderstanding. He uses the term "mconnaissance" probably in reference to Jacques Lacan who rejected the belief that reality can be captured in language. In the same page Derrida states that he will try to demonstrate that there is no linguistic sign without writing. [2] Martin Heidegger (1927) Being and Time, Introduction (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=S57m5gW0L-MC), part II.5, 21-23 [3] Rodolphe Gasch, "Infrastructures and Systematicity," in John Sallis (ed.), Deconstruction and Philosophy (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 34: [4] Marian Hobson, Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines (http:/ / books. google. gr/ books?id=Kl146cNpzNQC& vq=), Routledge, 2012, p. 51. [5] Mark Currie, The Invention of Deconstruction (http:/ / books. google. gr/ books?id=i3ecdVgknGkC& source=gbs_navlinks_s), Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, p. 80. [6] Ramberg, Bjrn and Kristin Gjesdal, "Hermeneutics" (http:/ / plato. stanford. edu/ entries/ hermeneutics/ #Semiotics), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2003, 2005. [7] Post-Modern Platos by Catherine H. Zuckert, Chigago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, chapter 7. [8] Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by R.J. Hollisdale. Cambridge University Press, 1997. [9] Royle, Nicholas (2004) Jacques Derrida (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=nNaSdb9VMTwC), Routledge, 2003, pp. 6263 [10] Derrida and Ferraris (1997), p. 76: [11] Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Interview with Julia Kristeva" in Positions (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 21: [12] Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Interview with Julia Kristeva" in Positions (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 27: [13] Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Interview with Julia Kristeva" in Positions (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 2830: [14] Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Interview with Julia Kristeva" in Positions (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 2830 [15] Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Interview with Julia Kristeva" in Positions (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 2830: [16] Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta," in Positions (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 4244 [17] Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta," in Positions (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 42: [18] Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta," in Positions (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 42: [19] Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta," in Positions (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 43 [20] Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta," in Positions (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 43:
Deconstruction
[21] Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta," in Positions (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 43. [22] Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta," in Positions (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 44. [23] Derrida (1988), Afterword, p. 136. [24] Pidgen, Charles R. (1990) On a defence of derrida, in The Critical review (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=M71ZAAAAMAAJ) (1990) Issues 3032, pp. 4041. [25] Sullivan, Patricia (2004) Jacques Derrida Dies; Deconstructionist Philosopher (http:/ / www. washingtonpost. com/ wp-dyn/ articles/ A21050-2004Oct9. html), in Washington Post, October 10, 2004, p. C11, accessed August 2, 2007. [26] Reilly, Brian J. (2005) Jacques Derrida, in Kritzman (2005), p. 500. [27] Jacques Derrida, Afterwords" in Limited, Inc. (Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 133: [28] Jacques Derrida, Afterwords" in Limited, Inc. (Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 133: [29] Jacques Derrida, Afterwords" in Limited, Inc. (Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 133. [30] Umberto Eco, "Signos" in Enciclopdia Einaudi, Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, p. 108. [31] Derrida, 1985, p.4 [32] Derrida [1983], p. 1 [33] Derrida [1983], p. 3 [34] Beardsworth, R. 1996. Derrida and the Political. London and New York: Routledge, p. 4. [35] Derrida [1983], p. 4 [36] Derrida, J., 1973. Speech and Phenomena. Trans. D.B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern UP, p. 5. [37] Derrida [1983], p. 2 [38] Derrida, J., 1978. "'Genesis and Structure' and Phenomenology" from Writing and Difference trans. Alan Bass. London & New York: Routledge, p. 194. [39] Derrida, J., 1978. "'Genesis and Structure' and Phenomenology" from Writing and Difference trans. Alan Bass. London & New York: Routledge, p. 194. [40] Derrida, J., 1978. "'Genesis and Structure' and Phenomenology" from Writing and Difference trans. Alan Bass. London & New York: Routledge, p. 196. [41] Frank, M., 1989. What is Neostructuralism? Trans. S. Wilke & R. Gray. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [42] De Man, in Moynihan 1986, p. 156. [43] Rorty 1995 [44] Niall Lucy, A Derrida Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). [45] Introduction by Allison, in Derrida, 1973, p. xxxii, n. 1. [46] Klein 1995 [47] Powell, James and Lee, Joe, Deconstruction for Beginners (Writers & Readers Publishing, 2005) [48] Royle, Nicholas, Deconstructions: A User's Guide (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) [49] Jacques Derrida, "'Genesis' and 'Structure' and Phenomenology," in Writing and Difference (London: Routledge, 1978), paper originally delivered in 1959 at Cerisy-la-Salle, and originally published in Gandillac, Goldmann & Piaget (eds.), Gense et structure (The Hague: Morton, 1964), p. 167: [50] If in 1959 Derrida was addressing this question of genesis and structure to Husserl, that is, to phenomenology, then in "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" (also in Writing and Difference), he addresses these same questions to Lvi-Strauss and the structuralists. This is clear from the very first line of the paper (p. 278):
19
Between the two papers is staked Derrida's philosophical ground, if not indeed his step beyond or outside philosophy.
[51] Cf. Derrida, Positions (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 956:
On the phrase "default of origin" as applied to Derrida's work, cf. Bernard Stiegler, "Derrida and Technology: Fidelity at the Limits of Deconstruction and the Prosthesis of Faith," in Tom Cohen (ed.) Jacques Derrida and the Humanities (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Stiegler understands Derrida's thinking of textuality and inscription in terms of a thinking of originary technicity, and in this context speaks of "the originary default of origin that arche-writing constitutes" (p. 239). See also Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
[52] On this destabilisation of both "genesis" and "structure," cf. Rodolphe Gasch, The Tain of the Mirror (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 146:
And note that this complexity of the origin is thus not only spatial but temporal, which is why diffrance is a matter not only of difference but of delay or deferral. One way in which this question is raised in relation to Husserl is thus the question of the possibility of a phenomenology of history, which Derrida raises in Edmund Husserl's Origin of
20
Deconstruction
21
Further reading
Breckman, Warren, Times of Theory: On Writing the History of French Theory, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 71, no. 3 (July 2010), 339361 ( online (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jhi/)). Critchley, Simon. The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, Third Edition, 2014. ISBN 978-0-7486-8932-3. Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, Cornell University Press, 1982. ISBN 978-0-8014-1322-3. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction, University of Minnesota Press, 1996. ISBN 978-0-8166-1251-2 Ellis, John M.. Against Deconstruction, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989. ISBN 978-0-691-06754-4. Johnson, Barbara. The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. ISBN 978-0-801-82458-6 Reynolds, Simon, Rip It Up and Start Again, New York: Penguin, 2006, pp.316. ISBN 978-0-143-03672-2.
(Source for the information about Green Gartside, Scritti Politti, and deconstructionism.)
Stocker, Barry, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Derrida on Deconstruction, Routledge, 2006. ISBN 978-1-134-34381-2 Wortham, Simon Morgan, The Derrida Dictionary, Continuum, 2010. ISBN 978-1-847-06526-1
Deconstruction
22
External links
The dictionary definition of deconstruction at Wiktionary Video of Jacques Derrida attempting to define "Deconstruction" (http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=vgwOjjoYtco) "Deconstruction" in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/derrida/#Dec) "Deconstruction" in Stanford Presidential Lectures in the Humanities and Arts (http://prelectur.stanford.edu/ lecturers/derrida/deconstruction.html) "Deconstruction" in Encyclopedia Britannica" (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/155306/ deconstruction) "Deconstructing History" by Alun Munslow (http://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/4397/1/ Deconstructing_History_by_Alun_Munslow___Institute_of_Historical_Research.pdf) "Deconstruction" in "Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy" (http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida/#H2) "Deconstructionist Theory" (http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/rorty.html) by Richard Rorty "German Law Journal special number about Derrida and Deconstruction" (http://www.germanlawjournal.com/ index.php?pageID=13&vol=6&no=1) "Critical Legal Studies Movement" and the use of Deconstruction" (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/bridge/ CriticalTheory/critical2.htm) "Deconstruction: Some Assumptions" (http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/deconstruction.php) by John Lye A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism, and Philology (http://www.unizar.es/departamentos/ filologia_inglesa/garciala/bibliography.html) by Jos ngel Garca Landa (Deconstruction found under: Authors & Schools - Critics & Schools - Poststructuralism - On Deconstruction) Ten ways of thinking about deconstruction (http://www.alansondheim.org/old/DECON) by Willy Maley Archive of the international conference "Deconstructing Mimesis - Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe" (http:// lacoue-labarthe.cjb.cc/) 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 (http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr. html) 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 (http://www.sens-public.org/article.php3?id_article=312) by Carole Dely, English translation by Wilson Baldridge, at Sens Public Ellen Lupton on deconstruction in Graphic Design (http://www.elupton.com/index.php?id=11) Deconstruction of fashion; La moda en la posmodernidad (http://www.enfocarte.com/5.26/moda.html) by Adolfo Vasquez Rocca An alternative look at deconstruction, from a perspective of its use in popular culture (http://tvtropes.org/ pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Deconstruction)
23
License
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 //creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/