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For "deconstruction" in theoretical physics, see dimensional deconstruction.
See also Deconstruction Records, Deconstruction (album), Deconstruction (other than literary and physics).

Deconstruction is a term in philosophy and literary criticism most closely associated with the work of Jacques Derrida, although the term does not originate in Derrida in a strict sense. Perhaps the two most formative influences on deconstruction are the work of Martin Heidegger and Sigmund Freud. Derrida's earliest work was a series of essays printed in the early 1960s which were collected into the book L'écriture and le difference (Writing and Difference), which appeared in 1967 with two monographs, De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology) and La voix and la phénomène (Speech and Phenomena). These works (in particular the essays "Force and Signification," "Cogito and the History of Madness," and "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences") included a major re-evaluation of the structuralist movement then dominant in French academe and may be considered poststructuralism avant la lettre.

As Derrida explained in his "Letter to a Japanese Friend" (Derrida and Differance, eds. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood) the French word "déconstruction" was his attempt both to translate and re-appropriate for his own ends the Heideggerian terms 'Destruktion' and 'Abbau' via a word from the French language, the varied senses of which seemed consistent with his requirements. Nicholas Royle's essay "What is Deconstruction?" provides a survey of definitions of the term in such sources as English language dictionaries. Royle commends the following definition from the Oxford English Dictionary, while noting that he does not find it unproblematic:

a. The action of undoing the construction of a thing.
b. Philos. and Lit. Theory. A strategy of critical analysis associated with the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (b. 1930), directed towards exposing unquestionable metaphysical assumptions and internal contradictions in philosophical and literary language.

Royle further cites a remark from Derrida that declares what deconstruction is not: "Deconstruction is neither a theory nor a philosophy. It is neither a school nor a method. It is not even a discourse, nor an act, nor a practice." Royle goes on to offer his own definition:

deconstruction n. not what you think: the experience of the impossible: what remains to be thought: a logic of destabilization already on the move in 'things in themselves': what makes every identity at once itself and different from itself: a logic of spectrality: a theoretical and practical parasitism or virology: what is happening today in society, politics, diplomacy, economics, historical reality, and so on: the opening of the future itself

As virtually all of Royle's definition directly incorporates remarks by Derrida and his commentator Geoffrey Bennington, it is necessary to recall a number of remarks by Derrida to provide context for the definition just cited. Royle's approval of the OED definition is granted in part because deconstruction is called a strategy (and not a method or theory). Derrida outlines a "strategic bet" in his 1968 essay "The Ends of Man" which may in turn help unpack Royle's definition:

A radical trembling can only come from the outside. Therefore the radical trembling of which I speak derives no more than any other from some spontaneous decision or philosophical thought after some internal maturation of its history. This trembling is played out in the violent relationship of the whole of the West to its other, whether a "linguistic" relationship (where very quickly the question of the limits of everything leading back to the question of the meaning of Being arises) or ethnological, economic, political, military, relationships, etc. Which does not, however, mean that military or economic violence is not in structural solidarity with "linguistic" violence. But the "logic" of every relation to the outside is very complex and surprising. It is precisely the force and efficiency of the system that regularly change transgressions into "false exits." Taking into account these effects of the system, one has nothing from the inside where "we are," but the choice between two strategies:
a. To attempt an exit and a deconstruction without changing terrain, by repeating what is implicit in the founding concepts and the original problematic, by using against the edifice the instruments or stones available in the house, that is, equally, in language. Here, one risks ceaselessly confirming, consolidating, relifting (relever) [the French verb relever is Derrida's proposed translation for the German aufheben, which is the verb Hegel uses for the action of the dialectic], at an always more certain depth, that which one allegedly deconstructs. The continuous process of making explicit, moving toward an opening, risks sinking into the autism of the closure.
b. To decide to change terrain, in a discontinuous and irruptive fashion, by brutally placing oneself outside, and by affirming an absolute break and difference. Without mentioning all the other forms of trompe-l'oeil perspective in which such a displacement can be caught, thereby inhabiting more naively and more strictly than ever the inside one declares one has deserted, the simple practice of language ceaselessly reinstates the new terrain on the oldest ground. The effect of such a reinstatement or of such a blindness could be shown in numerous precise instances.
It goes without saying that these effects do not suffice to annul the necessity of a "change of terrain." It also goes without saying that the choice between these two forms of deconstruction cannot be simple and unique. A new writing must weave and interlace these two motifs of deconstruction. Which amounts to saying that one must speak several languages and produce several texts at once. I would like to point out especially that the style of the first deconstruction is mostly that of the Heideggerian questions, and the other is mostly the one which dominates France today. I am purposely speaking in terms of a dominant style because there are breaks and changes of terrain in texts of the Heideggerian type; because the "change of terrain" is far from upsetting the entire French landscape to which I am referring; because what we need, perhaps, as Nietzsche said, is a change of "style"; and if there is style, Nietzsche reminded us, it must be plural.

Theorists who are unsympathetic to Derrida's writings often view deconstruction as a movement or a field, which they sometimes call deconstructionism. Deconstructionism, in their view, is a form of relativism or nihilism, and a strategy of textual criticism which scrutinizes the superficial features of the author's language, rather than his or her deeper arguments.

Although deconstruction has been criticized as elevating text over meaning, in Derrida's view, meaning itself was a form of text. The "deep" arguments of a text, he believed, were as "textual" as its superficial form. Derrida famously made the statement il n'y a pas d'en dehors du texte ("there is nothing outside textuality"). Many people ascribe a meaning to textuality far less expansive than proposed in his essay, leading to confusion. To Derrida, textuality is not simply the language of philosophy, but rather philosophy itself since without language there would be no philosophy. For similar reasons, Derrida argued that the intention remains an important tool in textual interpretation but that intention itself is a textual phenomenon in the broad sense just outlined, thus no concept can be more basic than textual phenomena.

Deconstruction has a number of important consequences in a number of fields, including literary theory, philosophy, political science, religion, and cultural studies.

As early as 1968 Derrida lectured in the United States of America and formed a number of relationships which led to visiting appointments at American universities including Johns Hopkins, Yale University, and University of California, Irvine. It is often accepted that Derrida's influence was greatest in America, whereas in France Derrida was never granted any formal position of the greatest prestige. Derrida's early association with Paul de Man, established in 1968, led to the latter's consideration as the leading practitioner of "American deconstruction". De Man's student Gayatri Spivak helped provide early exposure of Derrida's work to English-language readers. Derrida collaborated closely with his translators, many of whom went on to be prominent commentators and interlocutors, including Samuel Weber, Peggy Kamuf, Geoffrey Bennington, and Avital Ronell. In France, Derrida's early students Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe became important practitioners of deconstruction in their own right, while Derrida's occasionally vexed friendship with Jean-François Lyotard occasioned some of the most vigorous debates about the kernel of deconstruction and its obligations to Heidegger. Despite a tremendous respect for the work of Jacques Lacan, Derrida had a vexed relationship with the man, forming more stable relations with Nicholas Abraham, René Major, and Elisabeth Roudinesco (the latter two were also prominent non-orthodox Lacanians) in his work on psychoanalysis. Much of Derrida's influence in the United States came through departments of French and Comparative Literature and, particularly after much of his work became available in English translation, among English literature faculties, with a version of deconstruction becoming a prominent American school of poststructuralism.

Deconstructive readings have been somewhat controversial both in academia, where they have been accused of being nihilistic, parasitic, and silly, and in the popular press, where they are often seized upon as a sign that academia had become out of touch with reality. Much criticism of deconstructive readings comes from the political right; however, some of its harshest criticism comes from the political left. Despite this controversy, deconstruction remains a major force in contemporary philosophy and literary criticism and theory.

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[edit] The difficulty in defining deconstruction

The term deconstruction in the context of Western philosophy is highly resistant to formal definition. Martin Heidegger was perhaps the first to use the term (in contrast to Nietzschean demolition), although the form we recognize in English is an element in a series of translations (from Heidegger's Abbau and Destruktion to Jacques Derrida's déconstruction), and it has been explored by others, including Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Paul de Man, Jonathan Culler, Barbara Johnson, J. Hillis Miller, Jean-François Lyotard, and Geoffrey Bennington. These authors, however, have actively resisted calls to define the word succinctly. When asked what deconstruction is, Derrida once stated, "I have no simple and formalizable response to this question. All my essays are attempts to have it out with this formidable question." (Derrida 1985, at 4.) There is a great deal of confusion as to what kind of thing deconstruction is — whether it is a school of thought (it is certainly not so in the singular), a method of reading (it has often been reduced to this by various attempts to define it formally), or, as some call it, a "textual event" (a characterization implied by the Derrida quote just given) — and determining what authority to accord to a particular attempt at delimiting it.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of pages devoted to attempts to define deconstruction or demonstrate why various attempts at delimitation are misconceived. Most of these texts (including at least those whose signatories are considered deconstructionist) are difficult reading and resistant to summary. On the other hand, there is a cottage industry of writers of variably explicit sympathy or antipathy to deconstruction as they understand it who offer what they believe are programmatic characterizations in an effort to help those reluctant to read deconstructive texts understand it. Surveying a selection of such texts, one is further confronted with arguments ranging from claims that deconstruction is a sort of philosophical Velvet Revolution that would sort out the Western tradition in its entirety by systematically displacing unjustified privileges accorded to white males and other hegemonists at the expense of others or to claims that it is in fact a dangerous nihilism that wishes the utter destruction of Western scientific and ethical values. If one already senses political implications in the air, let it be said immediately that, while deconstruction is, as a rule, ridiculed by members of the right of just about any stripe, its reception on the left varies from hostility to co-optation. While there is no doubting that principal figures associated with deconstruction in France have been "leftist" in their political positions, Heidegger's place in deconstruction complicates matters considerably, as do the politics of Paul de Man in early adulthood (all of which are rightly matters of immense importance for concern, even if that importance is a matter of sharp, deep and often profound misunderstanding and misinformation). Similarly, from a religious perspective, deconstruction has no clear religious identity in a sectarian sense. Derrida's views on religion, taken as a perhaps privileged example, are anything but sectarian (Derrida was raised in a Catholicized Jewish milieu, rejected what he regarded as the countersignature of anti-Semitism by Algerian Jewish institutions of the 1940s, is almost certainly an atheist in terms of dogmatic theology, and wrote about religion in terms of what was shared among the Mosaic monotheisms). Those writing sympathetically about deconstruction tend to use an "idiosyncratic" (sometimes in fact imitative) style building upon a long tradition of difficult Western philosophy, with the addition of numerous neologisms, a bent toward playfulness and irony, and a massive amount of allusion across many corners of the Western Canon. This may reasonably reflect the heterogeneity in which deconstruction is [always, already] composed, which would therefore be "proper" to it. Others think this discourse to be needlessly obscurantist, but this is almost certainly tied to a general rejection of what is to be found in other formalation and formulations of deconstruction.

In addition, deconstruction is not the same as nihilism or relativism. It is not the abandonment of meaning, but a demonstration that Western thought has not satisfied its quest for a "transcendental signifier" that will give meaning to all other signs. According to Derrida, "Deconstruction is not an enclosure in nothingness, but an openness to the other" (Derrida 1984, at 124), and an attempt "to discover the non-place or non-lieu which would be [that] 'other' of philosophy" (Id. at 112). Thus, meaning is "out there", but it cannot be located by Western metaphysics, because text gets in the way. Deconstruction emphasises the way that presentism leaves us with no more than a chain of relations.

Part of the difficulty in defining deconstruction arises from the fact that the act of defining deconstruction in the language of Western metaphysics requires one to accept the very ideas of Western metaphysics that are thought to be the subject of deconstruction. Nevertheless, various authors have provided a number of rough definitions. The philosopher David B. Allison (an early translator of Derrida) stated:

"[Deconstruction] signifies a project of critical thought whose task is to locate and 'take apart' those concepts which serve as the axioms or rules for a period of thought, those concepts which command the unfolding of an entire epoch of metaphysics. 'Deconstruction' is somewhat less negative than the Heideggerian or Nietzschean terms 'destruction' or 'reversal'; it suggests that certain foundational concepts of metaphysics will never be entirely eliminated...There is no simple 'overcoming' of metaphysics or the language of metaphysics." (Introduction by Allison, in Derrida, 1973, p. xxxii, n. 1.)

Another rough-but-concise explanation of deconstruction is by Paul de Man, who explained, "It's possible, within text, to frame a question or to 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).

In the context of religious studies Paul Ricoeur (1983) defines deconstruction as a way of uncovering the questions behind the answers of a text or tradition (Klein 1995).

[edit] Phallogocentrism and the critique of binary oppositions

Deconstruction's central concern is a radical critique of the Enlightenment project and of metaphysics, including in particular the founding texts by such philosophers as Plato, Rousseau, and Husserl, but also other sorts of texts, including literature. Deconstruction identifies in the Western philosophical tradition a "metaphysics of presence" (also known as logocentrism or sometimes phallogocentrism) which holds that speech-thought (the logos) is a privileged, ideal, and self-present entity, through which all discourse and meaning are derived. This logocentrism is the primary target of deconstruction.

One typical form of deconstructive reading is the critique of binary oppositions. A central deconstructive argument holds that, in all the classic dualities of Western thought, one term is privileged or "central" over the other. The privileged, central term is the one most associated with the phallus and the logos. Examples include:

  • speech over writing
  • presence over absence
  • identity over difference
  • fullness over emptiness
  • meaning over meaninglessness
  • mastery over submission
  • life over death

Derrida argues in Of Grammatology (translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and published in English in 1976) that, in each such case, the first term is classically conceived as original, authentic, and superior, while the second is thought of as secondary, derivative, or even "parasitic." These binary oppositions, and others of their form, he argues, must be deconstructed.

This deconstruction is effected in stages. First, Derrida suggests, the opposition must be inverted, and the second, traditionally subordinate term must be privileged. He argues that these oppositions cannot be simply transcended; given the thousands of years of philosophical history behind them, it would be disingenuous to attempt to move directly to a domain of thought beyond these distinctions. So deconstruction attempts to compensate for these historical power imbalances, undertaking the difficult project of thinking through the philosophical implications of reversing them.

Only after this task is undertaken (if not completed, which may be impossible), Derrida argues, can philosophy begin to conceive a conceptual terrain outside these oppositions: the next project of deconstruction would be to develop concepts which fall under neither one term of these oppositions nor the other. Much of the philosophical work of deconstruction has been devoted to developing such ideas and their implications, of which différance may be the prototype (as it denotes neither simple identity nor simple difference). Derrida spoke in an interview (first published in French in 1967) about such "concepts," which he called merely "marks" in order to distinguish them from proper philosophical concepts:

...[I]t has been necessary to analyze, to set to work, within the text of the history of philosophy, as well as within the so-called literary text,..., certain marks, shall we say,... that by analogy (I underline) I have called undecidables, that is, unities of simulacrum, "false" verbal properties (nominal or semantic) that can no longer be included within philosophical (binary) opposition, resisting and disorganizing it, without ever constituting a third term, without ever leaving room for a solution in the form of speculative dialectics. (Positions, trans. Alan Bass, pp. 42-43)

As can be seen in this discussion of its terms' undecidable, unresolvable complexity, deconstruction requires a high level of comfort with suspended, deferred decision; a deconstructive thinker must be willing to work with terms whose precise meaning has not been, and perhaps cannot be, established. (This is often given as a major reason for the difficult writing style of deconstructive texts.) Critics of deconstruction find this unacceptable as philosophy; many feel that, by working in this manner with unspecified terms, deconstruction ignores the primary task of philosophy, which they say is the creation and elucidation of concepts. This deep criticism is a result of a fundamental difference of opinion about the nature of philosophy, and is unlikely to be resolved simply.

[edit] Text and deconstruction

According to deconstructive readers, one of the phallogocentrisms of modernism is the distinction between speech (logos) and writing, with writing historically being thought of as derivative to logos. As part of subverting the presumed dominance of logos over text, Derrida argued that the idea of a speech-writing dichotomy contains within it the idea of a very expansive view of textuality that subsumes both speech and writing. According to Jacques Derrida, "There is nothing outside of the text" (Derrida, 1976, at 158). That is, text is thought of not merely as linear writing derived from speech, but any form of depiction, marking, or storage, including the marking of the human brain by the process of cognition or by the senses.

In a sense, deconstruction is simply a way to read text (as broadly defined); any deconstruction has a text as its object and subject. This accounts for deconstruction's broad cross-disciplinary scope. Deconstruction has been applied to literature, art, architecture, science, mathematics, philosophy, and psychology, and any other disciplines that can be thought of as involving the act of marking.

In deconstruction, text can be thought of as "dead", in the sense that once the markings are made, the markings remain in suspended animation and do not change in themselves. Thus, what an author says about her text doesn't revive it, and is just another text commenting on the original, along with the commentary of others. In this view, when an author says, "You have understood my work perfectly," this utterance constitutes an addition to the textual system, along with what the reader said was understood in and about the original text, and not a resuscitation of the original dead text. The reader has an opinion, the author has an opinion. Communication is possible not because the text has a transcendental signification, but because the brain tissue of the author contains similar "markings" as the brain tissue of the reader. These brain markings, however, are unstable and fragmentary...

[edit] The terminology of deconstruction

Deconstruction makes use of a number of terms, many of which are coined or repurposed, that illustrate or follow the process of deconstruction. Among these words are différance, trace, écriture, supplement, hymen, pharmakon, slippage, marge, entame, parergon, text, and same.

[edit] Différance

Main Article: différance

Against the metaphysics of presence, deconstruction brings a (non)concept called différance. This French neologism is, on the deconstructive argument, properly neither a word nor a concept; it names the non-coincidence of meaning both synchronically (one French homonym means "differing") and diachronically (another French homonym means "deferring"). Because the resonance and conflict between these two French meanings is difficult to convey tersely in English, the word différance is usually left untranslated.

In simple terms, this means that rather than privileging commonality and simplicity and seeking unifying principles (or grand teleological narratives, or overarching concepts, etc.) deconstruction emphasizes difference, complexity, and non-self-identity. A deconstructive reading of a text, or a deconstructive interpretation of philosophy (for deconstruction tends to elide any difference between the two), often seeks to demonstrate how a seemingly unitary idea or concept contains different or opposing meanings within itself. The elision of difference in philosophical concepts is even referred to in deconstruction as a kind of violence, the idea being that theory's willful misdescription or simplification of reality always does violence to the true richness and complexity of the world. This criticism can be taken as a rejection of the philosophical law of the excluded middle, arguing that the simple oppositions of Aristotelian logic force a false appearance of simplicity onto a recalcitrant world.

Thus the perception of différance has two sides, both a deferment of final, unifying meaning in a unit of text (of whatever size, word or book), and a difference of meaning of the text upon every act of re-reading a work. Repetition, and the impossibility of final access to a text, of ever being at the text's "ground zero" so to speak, are emphasized, indefinitely leaving a text outside of the realm of the knowable in typical senses of "mastery". A text can, obviously, be experienced, be read, be "understood" -- but that understanding, for all its deep feeling or lack of it, is marked by a quintessential provisionality that never denies the possibility of rereading. Indeed it requires this. If the text is traditionally thought to be some perdurable sequence of symbols (letters) that go through time unchanged in the formal sense, différance moves the concept toward the realization that for all the perdurability of the text, experience of this structure is impossible and inconceivable outside of the realm of the unique instance, outside of the realm of perception.

A text cannot read itself, therein lies the provisionality of différance.

[edit] Trace

The idea of différance also brings with it the idea of trace. A trace is what a sign differs/defers from. It is the absent part of the sign's presence. In other words, through the act of différance, a sign leaves behind a trace, which is whatever is left over after everything present has been accounted for. According to Derrida, "the trace itself does not exist" (Derrida 1976, at 167)", because it is self-effacing. That is, "[i]n presenting itself, it becomes effaced" (Id. at 125.) Because all signifiers viewed as present in Western thought will necessarily contain traces of other (absent) signifiers, the signifier can be neither wholly present nor wholly absent.

[edit] Écriture

In deconstruction, the word écriture (usually translated as writing in English) is appropriated to refer not just to systems of graphic communication, but to all systems inhabited by différance. A related term, called archi-écriture, refers to the positive side of writing, or writing as an ultimate principle, rather than a derivative of logos (speech). In other words, whereas the Western logos encompasses writing, it is equally valid to view archi-écriture as encompassing the logos, and therefore speech can be thought of as a form of writing: writing on air waves, or on the memory of the listener or recording device.

[edit] Supplement, originary lack, and invagination

The word supplement is taken from the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, who defined it as "an inessential extra added to something complete in itself." According to Derrida, Western thinking is characterized by the "logic of supplementation", which is actually two apparently contradictory ideas. From one perspective, a supplement serves to enhance the presence of something which is already complete and self-sufficient. Thus, writing is the supplement of speech, Eve was the supplement of Adam, and masturbation is the supplement of "natural sex".

But simultaneously, according to Derrida, the Western idea of the supplement has within it the idea that a thing that has a supplement cannot be truly "complete in itself". If it were complete without the supplement, it shouldn't need, or long-for, the supplement. The fact that a thing can be added-to to make it even more "present" or "whole" means that there is a hole (which Derrida called an originary lack) and the supplement can fill that hole. The metaphorical opening of this "hole" Derrida called invagination. From this perspective, the supplement does not enhance something's presence, but rather underscores its absence.

Thus, what really happens during supplementation is that something appears from one perspective to be whole, complete, and self-sufficient, with the supplement acting as an external appendage. However, from another perspective, the supplement also fills a hole within the interior of the original "something". Thus, the supplement represents an indeterminacy between externality and interiority.

[edit] Hymen

The word hymen refers to the interplay between inside and outside. The hymen is the membrane of intersection where it becomes impossible to distinguish whether the membrane is on the inside or the outside. And in the absence of the hymen (as in, once the hymen is penetrated), the distinction between inside and outside disappears. Thus, in a way, the hymen is neither inside nor outside, and both inside and outside.

[edit] Pharmakon

The word pharmakon refers to the play between cure and poison. It derives from the ancient Greek word, used by Plato in Phaedrus and Phaedo, which had an undecidable meaning which could translated to mean anything ranging from a drug, recipe, spell, medicine, or poison.

[edit] An illustration: Derrida's reading of Lévi-Strauss

A more concrete example, drawn from one of Derrida's most famous works, may help to clarify the typical manner in which deconstruction works.

Structuralist analysis generally relies on the search for underlying binary oppositions as an explanatory device. The structuralist anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that such oppositions are found in all cultures, not only in Western culture, and thus that the device of binary opposition was fundamental to meaning.

Deconstruction challenges the explanatory value of these oppositions. This method has three steps.

  1. The first step is to reveal an asymmetry in the binary opposition, suggesting an implied hierarchy.
  2. The second step is to reverse the hierarchy.
  3. The third step is to displace one of the terms of the opposition, often in the form of a new and expanded definition.

In his book Of Grammatology, Derrida offers one example of deconstruction applied to a theory of Lévi-Strauss. Following many other Western thinkers, Lévi-Strauss distinguished between "savage" societies lacking writing and "civilized" societies that have writing. This distinction implies that human beings developed verbal communication (speech) before some human cultures developed writing, and that speech is thus conceptually as well as chronologically prior to writing (thus speech would be more authentic, closer to truth and meaning, and more immediate than writing).

Although the development of writing is generally considered to be an advance, after an encounter with the Nambikwara Indians of Brazil, Lévi-Strauss suggested that societies without writing were also lacking violence and domination (in other words, savages are truly noble savages). He further argued that the primary function of writing is to facilitate slavery (or social inequality, exploitation, and domination in general). (This claim has been rejected by most later historians and anthropologists as strictly incorrect. There is abundant historical evidence that many hunter-gatherer societies and later non-literate tribes had significant amounts of violence and warfare in their cultures.)

Derrida's interpretation begins with taking Lévi-Strauss's discussion of writing at its word: what is important in writing for Lévi-Strauss is not the use of markings on a piece of paper to communicate information, but rather their use in domination and violence. Derrida further observes that, based on Lévi-Strauss's own ethnography, the Nambikwara really do use language for domination and violence. Derrida thus concludes that writing, in fact, is prior to speech. That is, he reverses the opposition between speech and writing.

Derrida was not making fun of Lévi-Strauss, nor did he mean to supersede, replace, or proclaim himself superior to Lévi-Strauss. (A common theme of deconstruction is the desire to be critical without assuming a posture of superiority.) He was using his deconstruction of Lévi-Strauss to question a common belief in Western culture, dating back at least to Plato: that speech is prior to, more authentic than, and closer to "true meaning" than writing.

[edit] Criticisms of deconstruction

Deconstruction is the subject of at least three main types of criticism. Critics take issue with what they believe is a lack of seriousness and transparency in deconstructive writings, and with what they interpret as a political stance against traditional modernism. In addition, critics often equate deconstruction with nihilism or relativism and criticize deconstruction accordingly.

[edit] Lack of usefulness

Many critics wonder what is the usefulness of deconstruction. They see it as little more than an academic word-game, a clever way to discredit a text without having to refute any of the text's arguments. They say that it doesn't seem to help scientists or philosophers nor does it seem to have any scientific value. They also point out that no one seems to benefit from deconstruction except the deconstructionists themselves.

[edit] Unintelligibility

Deconstructive readings have been criticized both academically and popularly as largely nonsensical and unintelligible. Few would argue that such discourse is nonsensical to those who do not understand it, and that just because something is unintelligible to one doesn't mean it is unintelligible to another reader. But there remains a question as to whether deconstruction is so superficial that, after peeling away the often dense and complicated language, anything remains.

The question of whether deconstruction really "means something" was explored by an experiment conducted by Alan Sokal, a liberal-modernist physicist who published an article in a leading (though not peer-reviewed) journal using some of the language, vocabulary, and rhetorical devices of deconstruction, but which he deliberately designed to be what he considered "self-indulgent nonsense". See Sokal affair. This parody was not truly nonsensical, however, as it had its own internal logic.

A truly nonsensical parody, however, was created later by some artificial intelligence researchers, who wrote a program they called The Postmodernism Generator, which produces a superficially realistic article on a postmodern theme, using much of the textual genre of deconstruction. Overall, however, the generated article is incoherent, and not an actual deconstructive reading.

Therefore, the question of critics is whether there is a substantive difference between "real" deconstruction and these parodies, and whether deconstruction is so lacking in "substance" that it could be done by a machine. In other words, is deconstruction a genre with no plot, and is deconstruction its own hoax or parody?

These parodies of deconstruction have been criticized as not being "true" deconstruction. Ironically, though, there are those within the postmodern community who view the Sokal affair and the Postmodern Generator as an affirmation of what they have been asserting all along: that there is no strict binary opposition between a parody and a "serious" academic work, that all academic work is its own parody and all parodies have serious points to make, and that the reader is not confined by the views of the author, even if the author is a machine or the author does not himself agree with his work.

[edit] Lack of seriousness and transparency

As part of the tradition of modernism and the Enlightenment, matters of Western philosophy and literary criticism have generally been framed within a particular standard of formality, transparency, earnestness, rationality, and high-mindedness. As a critique of modernism, however, deconstruction is usually rational at least to an extent; but deconstruction is also critical of Western rationality, which to modernist thinkers appears irrational. In addition, deconstruction tends to be comparatively opaque, eccentric, playful, derivative, and often crass. As a result, deconstruction takes place on the margins of modernist discourse, which invites criticism by modernists. There is a particular expectation of seriousness in Western philosophy. Therefore, many critics find it irreverent to deconstruct Western metaphysics using puns, wordplay, poetry, book reviews, fiction, or the analysis of pop culture.

In addition, deconstruction sprang in part as a critique of such philosophers as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. While the style of Husserl and Heidegger was dense and opaque, Derrida's criticism of their writings was for some readers even more difficult to understand. Similarly, most deconstructive writings are relatively opaque and dense, and are full of not only the terminology of the text being critiqued, but additional neologisms that many find hard to follow. This opaqueness in texts of the broader movements of postmodernism and post-structuralism has led to criticism of those movements, and implicitly of deconstruction, by many modernists such as Noam Chomsky, himself a noted linguist, who stated:

I have spent a lot of my life working on questions such as these, using the only methods I know of--those condemned here as "science," "rationality," "logic," and so on. I therefore read the papers with some hope that they would help me "transcend" these limitations, or perhaps suggest an entirely different course. I'm afraid I was disappointed. Admittedly, that may be my own limitation. Quite regularly, "my eyes glaze over" when I read polysyllabic discourse on the themes of poststructuralism and postmodernism; what I understand is largely truism or error, but that is only a fraction of the total word count. True, there are lots of other things I don't understand: the articles in the current issues of math and physics journals, for example. But there is a difference. In the latter case, I know how to get to understand them, and have done so, in cases of particular interest to me; and I also know that people in these fields can explain the contents to me at my level, so that I can gain what (partial) understanding I may want. In contrast, no one seems to be able to explain to me why the latest post-this-and-that is (for the most part) other than truism, error, or gibberish, and I do not know how to proceed.

Noam Chomsky on Rationality/Science - From Z Papers Special Issue

[edit] Anti-essentialist criticism

Anti-essentialist philosophers, such as Richard Rorty, have criticized Derrida's assertion that essentialism is not a method, but something that is "already, all the time" occurring in texts. Anti-essentialists allege that Derrida's position is close to positing something which is intrinsic to the text, and thus close to positing an "essential" privileged reading of a text. Anti-essentialists still accept the validity of deconstructive readings, but view them as the result of subjective interaction with a text that is one of many possible readings, rather than an excavation of something "within" the text, and should not be privileged as reading the "truth" of the text. However, one might counter that this "reading" of deconstruction is itself a deconstruction, putting the anti-essentialist in the tricky situation of having to admit that his "reading" of deconstruction is not privileged.

[edit] Political criticisms

Deconstruction has also been criticized for its perceived political stance, in that it is perceived as advocating particular movements or points of view. An argument can be made that deconstruction is apolitical. Indeed, Jacques Derrida consistently denied any simple political aspect to deconstruction, and his later texts were concerned with complicating the relationship between deconstruction and politics. Despite these denials Derrida made numerous statements supporting the spirit of Marxism, for instance:

"Now these problems of the foreign debt - and everything that is metonymized by this concept - will not be treated without at least the spirit of the Marxist critique, the critique of the market, of the multiple logics of capital, and of that which links the State and international law to this market". Spectres of Marx, 1994.

So différance can also be understood as part of the revolutionary dialectic that destroys the established order to permit the adoption of some new world order. A new world order that, with the death of Marxism, could take any form that political fashion might dictate. In this sense deconstruction can be seen as a Marxist concept that is persisting after the death of Marxism. In general the deconstructive writers are much more closely associated with the political left and various elements of academia than with the political right but their work may benefit either faction.

Thus, some critics view deconstruction as means of academic empire-building; they see deconstruction as elevating the practice of reading and deconstructing a text to the same status as the original act of writing the text. For example, critics have taken issue with deconstructive writings which seem to elevate the criticism of Western science, metaphysics, and philosophy, such as quantum mechanics and the writings of Aristotle, to the same political status as the original scientific and philosophical writings. This seems to give deconstructive writings a privileged position with respect to other writings. This, critics suggest, is arrogant.

While there are numerous left-leaning political forces at work within postmodernism as a whole, deconstructive writers such as Derrida argued that deconstruction is not simply political. For example, while deconstruction criticizes the binary opposition between presence and absence, and the tendency to favor presence, deconstruction does not go a step further and advocate absence, or argue that the Western favoritism of presence is simply a bad thing. This further step, deconstructive writers argue, would not be deconstruction at all, but construction or reconstruction. Nor, deconstructive writers argue, does deconstruction necessarily imply an advocacy of one type of text over another. They agree, however, that critics of deconstruction ascribe that stance of advocacy to the deconstructive writer, because (they argue) of the critics' own logocentrism.

Undoubtedly, however, everything that deconstructive writers do is not deconstructive, and deconstructive writers hold political views and take the role of advocating aspects of Western metaphysics. Deconstructive writers do not view this as inconsistent with deconstruction. They do not see a paradox in advocating a point of Western metaphysics with self-conscious irony. Derrida stated, "Deconstruction is not an enclosure in nothingness, but an openness to the other" (Derrida 1984, at 124).

[edit] Criticisms classifying deconstruction as nihilism or relativism

Especially in non-academic forums, deconstruction is criticized for the same reasons as nihilism and relativism, which many view as equivalent to deconstruction. For example, critics commonly argue that deconstruction denies that authors have an intention, or that text has any meaning. Therefore, deconstruction is criticized because of the belief that deconstruction is a form of nihilism or extreme relativism.

Deconstructive writers generally disagree that deconstruction is a destruction of all meaning and authorial intentionality. Rather, they say, meaning exists, as does authorial intent; however, Western philosophy has failed to locate or situate that meaning and that intent outside the realm of text. If one tries through metaphysics to find meaning or intent outside text, they say, one only finds a web of text from which one cannot escape using Western metaphysics. However, there is value, according to some deconstructive writers, in following the textual threads of Western metaphysics, which is something like wordplay. And one may hope, they suppose, to transcend Western metaphysics. This is quite different, in their view, from the nihilist assertion that meaning and intent do not exist, and that it is futile to seek them.

Critics have also criticized deconstruction as a form of solipsism, arguing that deconstruction implies that there is no reality "out there", or that one cannot know its true nature. Deconstructive writers do not agree with this assertion. They acknowledge that there is a reality "out there", and that one may discover knowledge or true nature, but state that Western metaphysics has not provided a mechanism whereby these ideals may be located outside the bounds of text.

Nor do deconstructive writers allege that it is impossible to learn authoritative information. However, authoritative text, they say, is still text, and while Western metaphysics has established methods to establish and perpetuate authority, it has not located the source of that authority as a transcendental signifier.

[edit] History of deconstruction

During the period between the late 1960s and the early 1980s many thinkers influenced by deconstruction, including Derrida, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller, worked at Yale University. This group came to be known as the Yale school and was especially influential in literary criticism, as de Man, Miller, and Hartman were all primarily literary critics. Several of these theorists were subsequently affiliated with the University of California Irvine. (At a faculty meeting of the Department of English, Professor Martin Price, the chairman, while observing the surfeit of deconstructionists flooding the Universtity with more hires in sight, asked his colleagues, "I can understand hiring a few deconstructionists here and there. But do we really need to corner the market?")

(More detailed institutional history could be added here.)

[edit] Precursors

Deconstruction has significant ties with much of Western philosophy; even considering only Derrida's work, there are existing deconstructive texts about the works of at least many dozens of important philosophers. However, deconstruction emerged from a clearly delineated philosophical context:

  • Derrida's earliest work, including the texts that introduced the term "deconstruction," dealt with the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl: Derrida's first publication was a book-length Introduction to Husserl's The Origin of Geometry, and Speech and Phenomena, an early work, dealt largely with phenomenology.
  • A student and prior interpreter of Husserl's, Martin Heidegger, was one of the most significant influences on Derrida's thought: Derrida's Of Spirit deals directly with Heidegger, but Heidegger's influence on deconstruction is much broader than that one volume.
  • The psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud is an important reference for much of deconstruction: The Post Card, important essays in Writing and Difference, Archive Fever, and many other deconstructive works deal primarily with Freud.
  • The work of Friedrich Nietzsche is a forerunner of deconstruction in form and substance, as Derrida writes in Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles.
  • 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.

[edit] Deconstruction in popular media

In popular media, deconstruction has been seized upon by conservative 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 pro-Nazi 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, despite Sokal's insistence that his hoax proved nothing of the sort.

Deconstruction is also used by many popular sources as a synonym for revisionism - for instance, the CBS miniseries The Reagans was described by some as a "deconstruction" of the Reagan administration.

[edit] See also

Concepts:

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  • Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. ISBN 0-8014-1322-2
  • Derrida, Jacques, "Letter to A Japanese Friend," Derrida and Différance, ed. David Wood & Robert Bernasconi, Warwick: Parousia Press 1985, p. 1.
  • Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. ISBN 0-8018-5830-5
  • Derrida, Jacques, Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1981. ISBN 0-226-14331-7
  • Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs. Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern U.P., 1973. ISBN 0-8101-0590-X
  • Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. ISBN 0-8166-1251-X
  • Ellis, John M. (1989). Against Deconstruction Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-06754-6
  • Johnson, Barbara, The Critical Difference (1981).
  • Klein, Anne Carolyn (1995). Meeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists, and the Art of the Self. Beacon Press: Boston. ISBN 0-8070-7306-7.
  • Moynihan, Robert, Recent Imagining: Interviews with Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartmen, Paul DeMan, J. Hillis Miller (Shoe String Press 1986). ISBN 0-208-02120-5.
  • Rorty, Richard, "From Formalism to Poststructuralism", in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol.8, Cambridge University Press, 1995.
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