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Deconstruction (French: déconstruction) is a post-structuralist[1] literary theory[2][3][4] and philosophy of language[5][6][7] derived principally from the work of Jacques Derrida. The premise of deconstruction is that all of Western literature and philosophy implicitly relies on a metaphysics of presence.[8][9]Cite error: The <ref> tag has too many names (see the help page). Metaphysics of presence—as understood by Derrida—refers to the notion that consciousness can be completely oriented towards the present such that concepts—unmediated by prior knowledge, future expectations or language, i.e. self-sufficient concepts—become available as knowledge to the conscious subject.[10] That is to say that instrinsic meaning exists and that it is accessible by virtue of pure presence.[11][12] Deconstruction denies the possibility of a pure presence and thus of essential or instrinsic meaning.Cite error: The <ref> tag has too many names (see the help page).[13] Derrida terms the philosophical commitment to pure presence as a source of self-sufficient meaning logocentrism.[14] Given the impossibility of pure presence and consequently of instrinsic meaning any given concept is constituted and comprehended linguistically and in terms of its opposite, e.g. perception/reason, speech/writing, mind/body, interior/exterior, marginal/central, sensible/intelligible, intution/signification, nature/culture.[15] 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.[16][17][18][19] 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 différance is revealed (rather than proposed as an alternative[20]) according to Derrida. Différance is a Derridaean neologism that is the antithesis of logocentrism, it is a perpetual series of interactions between presence and absence—where a concept is constituted, comprehended and identified in terms of what it is not and self-sufficient meaning is never arrived at[21][22]—and thus a relinquishment of the notions of intrinsic and stable meaning, absolute truth, unmediated access to "reality" and consequently of conceptual hierarchy.[23][24][25][26]

To situate deconstruction within philosophy in general, it is a critique of Idealism[27] and a form of antifoundationalism.[28][29] In terms of heritage, style and conceptual framework (namely phenomenological[30][31]), deconstruction is within the Continental—as opposed to analytic—tradition of philosophy.[32]





References

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  1. ^ Sarup, Madan (1993). "2 Derrida and deconstruction". An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Post-Modernism (2nd ed.). Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf. pp. 32–57. ISBN 0820315311.
  2. ^ Cuddon, John Anthony (1999). The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. revised by C. E. Preston (5th ed.). New York: Penguin Books. pp. 209–212. ISBN 0631202714.
  3. ^ Habib, M.A. Rafey (2005). "Chpater 25: Deconstruction". A History of Literary Criticism: From Plato to the Present (1st ed.). MA: Blackwell Publishing. pp. 649–666. ISBN 0631232001.
  4. ^ Bertens, Hans (2007). "Chapter 5: The postructuralist revolution: Derrida, deconstruction, and postmodernism". Literary Theory: The Basics (2nd ed.). London: Taylor & Francis. pp. 91–114. ISBN 978-0203939628.
  5. ^ Gasché, Rodolphe (1986). The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and tbe Philosophy of Reflection (1st ed.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. pp. 1–2. ISBN 0674867017. If philosophy is understood as constituted by a horizon of problematization exclusively determined by the traditional desiderata of a canon of issues, and if, in particular, such problematization is identified with one special technique of argumentation, then Derrida's writings are certainly not philosophical. If philosophy is understood in this manner, the purpose of this book cannot be simply to reappropriate Derrida for philosophy. Yet my exposition of Derrida's writings is manifestly philosophical...what Dertida has to say is mediated by the canon of the traditional problems and methods of philosaophical problem solving, as well as by the history of these problems and methods, even if his work cannot be fully situated within the confines of that canon and history. My interpretation is philosophical insofar as it focuses on Derrida's relation to the philosophical tradition, and emphasizes the manner in which his writings address not only particular philosophical problems and their tradirional formulations, but, more important, the philosophical itself.
  6. ^ Haddad, Samir (2010). "Chpater 5: Jacques Derrida". In Schrift, Alan D. (ed.). The History of Continental Philosophy. Vol. 6 (1st ed.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. pp. 111–132. ISBN 978-0226740492.
  7. ^ Haddad, Samir (2010). "Chpater 5: Jacques Derrida". In Schrift, Alan D. (ed.). The History of Continental Philosophy. Vol. 6 (1st ed.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. pp. 113–114. ISBN 978-0226740492. Other institutions at which Derrida was a visiting professor included Cornell University, New York University, and the New School for Social Research. With the exception of the New School, these appointments were in departments other than philosophy – the humanities, French, English, and comparative literature. These institutional facts go beyond biographical interest, and are significant for reflection on the meaning and legacy of Derrida's work. For after his initial training, Derrida's publishing and professional affiliations, both in France and the United States, were predominately located at philosophy's margins, sometimes occurring well outside its officially sanctioned boundaries. This suggests that one should not try too hard to claim that Derrida belongs in philosophy, at least as it is traditionally conceived.
  8. ^ Derrida, Jacques (1973). "Introduction". Speech and Phenomena And Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs. translated with an Introduction by David B. Allison and Preface by Newton Garver (1st ed.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. pp. 4–5. ISBN 0810103974. We have thus a prescription for the most general form of our question: do not phenomenological necessity, the rigor and subtlety of Husserl's analysis, the exigencies to which it responds and which we must first recognize, nonetheless conceal a metaphysical presupposition? Do they not harbor a dogmatic or speculative commitment which, to be sure, would not keep the phenomenological critique from being realized, would not be a residue of unperceived naivety, but would constitute phenomenology from within, in its project of criticism and in the instructive value of its own premises? This would be done precisely in what soon comes to be recognized as the source and guarantee of all value, the "principle of principles": i.e., the original self-giving evidence, the present or presence of sense to a full and primordial intuition. In other words, we shall not be asking whether such and such metaphysical heritage has been able, here or there, to restrict the vigilance of the phenomenologist, but whether the phenomenological form of this vigilance is not already controlled by metaphysics itself.
  9. ^ Lawlor, Leonard (2002). Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology (1st ed.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. p. 2. ISBN 0253340497. "The metaphysics of presence" then, for Derrida, consists in the valorization of presence (as defned in this way, which can account for both ancient and modern philosophy as well as Husserl's phenomenology), that is, it consists in the validation of presence as a foundation.
  10. ^ Derrida, Jacques (1981). Positions. translated and annotated by Alan Bass (1st ed.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. pp. 28–29. ISBN 0226143317. Nothing-no present and in-different being-thus precedes differance and spacing. There is no subject who is agent, author, and master of diffcrance, who eventually and empirically would be overtaken by differance. Subjectivity-like objectivity-is an effect of differance, an effect inscribed in a system of differance. This is why the a of differance also recalls that spacing is temporizalion, 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.
  11. ^ Derrida, Jacques (1981). "Semiology and Grammatology: Interview with Julia Kristeva". Positions. translated and annotated by Alan Bass (1st ed.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. p. 19. ISBN 0226143317. Now, "everyday language" is not innocent or neutral. It is the language of Western metaphysics, and it carries with it not only a considerable number of presuppositions of all types, but also presuppositions inseparable from metaphysics, which, although little attended to, are knotted into a system...the equation of the signatum and the concept (p. 99),[by Saussure] inherently leaves open the possibility of thinking a concept signified in and of itself, a concept simply present for thought, independent of a relationship to language, that is of a relationship to a system of signifiers. By leaving open this possibility-and it is inherent even in the opposition signifier/signified, that is in the sign-Saussure contradicts the critical acquisitions of which we were just speaking. He accedes to the classical exigency of what I have proposed to call a "transcendental signified," which in and of itself, in its essence, would refer to no signifier...
  12. ^ Evans, J. Claude (1991). Strategies of Deconstruction: Derrida and the Myth of the Voice (1st ed.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. pp. xix–xx. ISBN 0816619255. There is no primal experience we can simply turn to, no neutral language, no neutral critical tools. We thus have to dismantle an understanding of Being that determines our entire epoch, an understanding that has covered over the originary experience of Being to be retrieved. This understanding of Being Heidegger calls the "metaphysics of presence," a prejudice that operates on two levels. On the level of our own self-understanding, it leads us to understand ourselves in terms of the present and neglect our being-toward-the-future...And...to a second level: we identify Being itself with presence. What is real is what is present to us in the present. What is past is not any more; what is future is not yet. Being is experienced as what is available and thus manipulable in the present. Heidegger, however, claims that the very presence of something as something is conditioned by an absence (Being) that makes that presence itself possible. The task of deconstruction is the task of retrieving the experience of this absence that makes presence possible. Derrida takes up this Heideggerian project, but radicalizes it. Unlike Heidegger, Derrida does not appeal to a more primordial living experience or to Being, for to speak of such an experience is inevitably to appeal to a kind of presence...
  13. ^ Glendinning, Simon (2004). "Chapter Two: Language". In Reynolds, Jack; Roffe, Jonathan (eds.). Understanding Derrida (1st ed.). New York: Continuum. p. 7. ISBN 0826473164. What Derrida aims to show is that there never was nor could there be such an order of pure intelligibility, no logos or meaning that would be an ideal presence, pre-existing and occult...
  14. ^ Derrida, Jacques (1997). "Chapter 1 The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing". Of Grammatology. translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Corrected ed.). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 12. ISBN 0801858305. We already have a foreboding that phonocentrism merges with the historical determination of the meaning of being in general as presence, with all the subdeterminations which depend on this general form and which organize within it their system and their historical sequence (presence of the thing to the sight as eidos, presence as substance/essence/existence [ousia, temporal presence as point [stigme] of the now or of the moment [nun], the self-presence of the cogito, consciousness, subjectivity, the co-presence of the other and of the self, intersubjectivity as the intentional phenomenon of the ego, and so forth). Logocentrism would thus support the determination of the being of the entity as presence. To the extent that such a logocentrism is not totally absent from Heidegger's thought, perhaps it still holds that thought within the epoch of onto-theology, within the philosophy of presence, that is to say within philosophy itself.
  15. ^ Derrida, Jacques (1981). Positions. translated and annotated by Alan Bass (1st ed.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. p. 9. ISBN 0226143317.
  16. ^ Derrida, Jacques (1997). "Chapter 1 The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing". Of Grammatology. translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Corrected ed.). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 7. ISBN 0801858305. The secondarity that it seemed possible to ascribe to writing alone affects all signifieds in general, affects them always already, the moment they enter the game. There is not a single signified that escapes, even if recaptured, the play of signifying references that constitute language.
  17. ^ Derrida, Jacques (1997). "Chapter 1 The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing". Of Grammatology. translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Corrected ed.). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 48. ISBN 0801858305. ...the genetic root-system refers-from sign to sign. No ground of nonsignification-understood as insignificance or an intuition of a present truth-stretches out to give it foundation under the play and the coming into being of signs.
  18. ^ Derrida, Jacques (1997). "Chapter 1 The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing". Of Grammatology. translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Corrected ed.). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 50. ISBN 0801858305. From the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs. Which amounts to ruining the notion of the sign at the very moment when, as in Nietzsche, its exigency is recognized in the absoluteness of its right. One could call play the absence of the transcendental signified as limitlessness of play, that is to say as the destruction of ontotheology and the metaphysics of presence.
  19. ^ Derrida, Jacques (1997). "Chapter 1 The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing". Of Grammatology. translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Corrected ed.). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 62. ISBN 0801858305. On the one hand, the phonic element, the term, the plenitude that is called sensible, would not appear as such without the difference or opposition which gives them form...Without a retention in the minimal unit of temporal experience, without a trace retaining the other as other in the same, no difference would do its work and no meaning would appear. It is not the question of a constituted difference here, but rather, before all determination of the content, of the pure movement which produces difference.
  20. ^ Derrida, Jacques (2002). "Chapter 5 Force of Law: The "Mystical Foundation of Authority"". In Anidjar, Gil (ed.). Acts of Religion. introduction by Gil Anidjar. New York: Routledge. p. 264. ISBN 0415924006. This deconstruction does not apply itself to such a text, however. It never applies itself to anything from the outside. It is in some way the operation or rather the very experience that this text, it seems to me, first does itself, by itself, on itself.)
  21. ^ Derrida, Jacques (2005). "Chapter 7: Freud and the Scene of Writing". Writing and Difference. translated, with an introduction and additional notes, by Alan Bass (Taylor & Francis e-Library ed.). London: Routledge. p. 276. ISBN 0203991788. The model of hieroglyphic writing assembles more strikingly—though we find it in every form of writing—the diversity of the modes and functions of signs in dreams. Every sign—verbal or otherwise—may be used at different levels, in configurations and functions which are never prescribed by its "essence," but emerge from a play of differences.
  22. ^ Derrida, Jacques (2005). "Chapter 10: Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences". Writing and Difference. translated, with an introduction and additional notes, by Alan Bass (Taylor & Francis e-Library ed.). London: Routledge. p. 354. ISBN 0203991788. This was the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse—provided we can agree on this word—that is to say, a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely.
  23. ^ Derrida, Jacques (1981). Positions. translated and annotated by Alan Bass (1st ed.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. p. 26. ISBN 0226143317. The play of differences supposes, in effect, syntheses and referrals which forbid at any moment, or in any sense, that a simple element be present in and of itself, referring only to itself. Whether in the order of spoken or written discourse, no element can function as a sign without referring to another element which itself is not simply present. This interweaving results in each "element"-phoneme or grapheme-being constituted on the basis of the trace within it of the other elements of the chain or system. This interweaving, this textile, is the text produced only in the transformation of another text. Nothing, neither among the elements nor within the system, is anywhere ever simply present or absent. There are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces.
  24. ^ Derrida, Jacques (1981). Positions. translated and annotated by Alan Bass (1st ed.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. p. 41. ISBN 0226143317. ...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.
  25. ^ Derrida, Jacques (1981). Positions. translated and annotated by Alan Bass (1st ed.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. p. 27. ISBN 0226143317. Differance is the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other. This spacing is the simultaneously active and passive (the a of difterance indicates this indecision as concerns activity and passivity, that which cannot be governed by or distributed between the terms of this opposition)production of the intervals without which the "full" terms would not signify, would not function.
  26. ^ Derrida, Jacques (1997). Of Grammatology. translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Corrected ed.). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 62–63. ISBN 0801858305. The (pure) trace is differance. It does not depend on any sensible plentitude, audible or visible, phonic or graphic. It is, on the contrary, the condition of such a plenitude. Although it does not exist, although it is never a being-present outside of all plenitude, its possibility is by rights anterior to all that one calls sign (signified/ signifier,content/expression, etc.), concept or opeartion, motor or sensory. This differance is therefore not more sensible than intelligible and it permits the articulation of signs among themselves within the same abstract order-a phonic or graphic text for example-or between two orders of expression. It permits the articulation of speech and writing-in the colloquial sense-as it founds the metaphysical opposition between the sensible and the inteligible, then between signifier and signified, expression and content, etc. If language were not already, in that sense, a writing, no derived "notation " would be possible; and the classical problem of relationships between speech and writing could not arise.
  27. ^ Derrida, Jacques (1988). Limited Inc. edited by Gerald Graff (1st ed.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. pp. 93–94. ISBN 0810107880. Metaphysics in its most traditional form reigns over the Austinian heritage: over his legacy and over those who have taken charge of it as his heirs apparent. Two indications bear witness to this: 1. The hierarchical axiology, the ethicalontological distinctions which do not merely set up value-oppositions clustered around an ideal and unfindable limit, but moreover subordinate these values to each other (normal/abnormal, standard/parasite, fulfilled/void, serious/nonserious, literal/nonliteral, briefly: positive/negative and ideal/non-ideal); and in this,...there is metaphysical pathos (infelicity, nonserious,etc....). 2. The enterprise of returning "strategically," ideally, to an origin or to a "priority" held to be simple, intact, normal, pure, standard, self-identical, in order then to think in terms of derivation, complication, deterioration, accident, etc. All metaphysicians, from Plato to Rousseau, Descartes to Husserl, have proceeded in this way, conceiving good to be before evil, the positive before the negative, the pure before the impure, the simple before the complex, the essential before the accidental, the imitated before the imitation, etc. And this is not just one metaphysical gesture among others, it is the metaphysical exigency, that which has been the most constant, most profound and most potent. In Sec (as in its entire context) this force is not ignored but rather put into question, traced back to that which deploys it while at the same time limiting it. Although this "exigency" [requete] is here essentially "idealistic" I do not criticize it as such, but rather ask myself what this idealism is, what its force and its necessity are, and where its intrinsic limit is to be found. Nor is this idealism the exclusive property of those systems commonly designated as "idealistic." It can be found at times in philosophies that proclaim themselves to be anti-idealistic, in "materialisms." Or in discourses that declare themselves alien to philosophy. All discourse involves this effect of idealism in a certain manner.
  28. ^ Brint, Michael; Weaver, William G.; Garmon, Meredith (1995). "What Difference Does Anti-Foundationalism Make to Political Theory?". New Literary History. 26 (2). The Johns Hopkins University Press: 225–237. doi:10.1353/nlh.1995.0021. JSTOR 20057280.
  29. ^ M. Gottdiener, M. (November 1993). "Ideology, Foundationalism, and Sociological Theory". The Sociological Quarterly. 34 (4). Wiley: 653–671. doi:10.1111/j.1533-8525.1993.tb00111.x. JSTOR 4121373.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
  30. ^ Derrida, Jacques (1981). Positions. translated and annotated by Alan Bass (1st ed.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. pp. 9–10. ISBN 0226143317.
  31. ^ Braver, Lee (2007). A Thing of this World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism (1st ed.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. p. 433. ISBN 978-0810123793.
  32. ^ Braver, Lee (2007). A Thing of this World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism (1st ed.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. pp. 431–434. ISBN 978-0810123793.
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