In 1985 Derrida stated that he preferred to describe "what deconstruction is not, or rather ought not to be. Derrida states that deconstruction is not an analysis, a critique, or a method. In 1983 he described the motivation behind deconstruction as follows:

[F]rom about 1963 to 1968, I tried to work out - in particular in the three works published in 1967 - what was in no way meant to be a system but rather a sort of strategic device, opening its own abyss, an unclosed, unenclosable, not wholly formalizable ensemble of rules for reading, interpretation and writing. This type of device may have enabled me to detect not only in the history of philosophy and in the related socio-historical totality, but also in what are alleged to be sciences and in so-called post-philosophical discourses that figure among the most modern (in linguistics, in anthropology, in psychoanalysis), to detect in these an evaluation of writing, or, to tell the truth, rather a devaluation of writing whose insistent, repetitive, even obscurely compulsive, character was the sign of a whole set of long-standing constraints. These constraints were practised at the price of contradictions, of denials, of dogmatic decrees

Though Derrida himself denied that deconstruction is 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. The greatest influence on Derrida in terms of the formulation of the notion of "deconstruction" was Heidegger's notion of Destruktion, but he drew as well on the work of other thinkers.

History

Precursors

• 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. Heidegger wrote extensively on the temporal and linguistic components of existence, aspects of Socratic philosophy that were not adequately incorporated in contemporary western philosophies, and a reinterpretation of Nietzschean existentialism through an eastern (particularly Buddhist) lens.
• 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 André Leroi-Gourhan is important to the formulation of deconstruction and grammatology. Not only does Derrida refer the thought of grammè to Leroi-Gourhan's use of the concepts of "exteriorization" and "program," but he also makes use of Leroi-Gourhan'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 grammè, and in this context Derrida states that life—in the sense of the great evolving movement of the inscription of difference in which the history of life consists—is "what I have called différance.
• The structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure, and other forms of post-structuralism 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.

Theory

An example is the sentence “Socrates was a good person.” In reading this text the reader cannot help but question in what way Socrates was good, and why this needed stating. “Badness” as well as “goodness” is brought to mind, and in this sense, the text becomes “undecidable.”

The notion of "absence" also comes into play when reading a text. Through deconstruction, the reader can attempt to read what a text does not say, for example, texts written by a dominant group may not make mention of minorities. Deconstruction can therefore have political applications, although it does not have to. One of the things that Derrida feels history has slighted is writing itself: he says that western philosophy has always favoured speech over writing.

A further idea of “absence” applies to writing. Letters can function without the presence of either the writer or the intended reader. Where speech requires the presence of both speaker and listener, writing requires absence and delay and therefore ambiguity. Written words are “abandonable to their essential drifting”.

Derrida’s deconstruction is an attempt to shake the foundations of philosophy. He draws on and expands the opposing metaphysical philosophies of phenomenology and structuralism. Derrida rejected the phenomenologist idea that humans have an interior central consciousness that does not relate to something exterior. He used Saussure’s idea of the signifier and the signified and the differential nature of signs. Linked to this is the idea of différance, a neologism which is used to refer to absences and disruption in meaning. Derrida said that absence and presence interplay at the very origin of the sign so that all language is unstable.

Methods of deconstruction

Deconstruction has also been applied to architecture, in particular the works of Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi.

Definition

There are many secondary texts attempting straightforward explanation of the philosophy of deconstruction; however, these works (e.g. Deconstruction for Beginners and Deconstructions: A User's Guide) have been academically criticized for being too removed from the original texts, and contradictory to the concepts of deconstruction.

Nevertheless, writers have provided a number of rough definitions. One of the most popular definitions of deconstruction is by Paul de Man, who explained, "It'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." (de Man, in Moynihan 1986, at 156.) Thus, viewed in this way, "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" (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:

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).

A survey of deconstruction texts and secondary literature reveals a wide range of heterogeneous arguments, including claims that deconstruction can entirely sort the Western tradition 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, the destruction of Western scientific and ethical values.

Criticisms

In a book review and subsequent exchange with Louis H. Mackey, John Searle criticized "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. In the original review, Searle noted that Derrida "gives bullshit a bad name."

Michel Foucault once called Derrida's prose "obscurantisme terroriste." The text is written so obscurely that one cannot understand it, and if one criticizes it, the author responds, "You misunderstand me, you're stupid.

Criticisms in popular media

In popular media, deconstruction has been seized upon by conservative and libertarian writers as a central example of what is wrong with modern academia. Editorials and columns come out with some frequency pointing to deconstruction as a sign of how self-evidently absurd English departments have become, and of how traditional values are no longer being taught to students. Conservatives frequently treat deconstruction as being equivalent to Marxism. These criticisms became particularly prevalent when it was discovered that Paul de Man had written anti-Semitic articles during World War II, due to what was seen as the inadequate and offensive response of many deconstructionist thinkers, especially Derrida, to this revelation. Popular criticism of deconstruction also intensified following the Sokal affair, which many people took as an indicator of the quality of deconstructionism as a whole.

Deconstruction has been directly used and also parodied in a large number of literary texts. Native American novelist Gerald Vizenor claims an extensive debt to deconstructionist ideas in attacking essentialist notions of race. Writer Percival Everett goes further in satire, actually incorporating fictional conversations between a number of leading deconstructionists within his fictions. Comic author David Lodge’s work, such as his novel Nice Work, contains a number of figures whose belief in the deconstructionist project is undermined by contact with non-academic figures.

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 Différance, 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 978-0-8101-0590-4.
• Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. ISBN 978-0-8166-1251-2
• Ellis, John M. Against Deconstruction Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989. ISBN 978-0-691-06754-4.
• 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 978-0-208-02120-5.
• Reynolds, Simon, Rip It Up and Start Again. New York: Penguin, 2006, p316. ISBN 978-0-143-03672-2. (Source for the information about Green Gartside, Scritti Politti, and deconstructionism.)
• Rorty, Richard, "From Formalism to Poststructuralism". The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 8. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Notes

External links

• "Deconstruction: Some Assumptions" by John Lye
• A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism, and Philology by José Ángel García 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