The Invention of Deconstruction

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The Extraordinary Story of Mary Elmes. A Theology of the Sublime. Lectures on Don Quixote. Two Existential Theories of Knowledge. The Time of Our Lives. The Politics of Regional Identity. The Philosophy of the Limit. Kant, Foucault, and Forms of Experience. Phenomenology and The Social Science: Literature, Ethics, and Decolonization in Postwar France.

From Hegel to Derrida. Sexuality, Iconography, and Fiction in French. The New Woman Gothic. Beyond the Analytic-Continental Divide. Theory of the Political Subject.

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Close Report a review At Kobo, we try to ensure that published reviews do not contain rude or profane language, spoilers, or any of our reviewer's personal information. 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. 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. 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. Derrida states that deconstruction is not an analysis in the traditional sense.

Derrida argues that there are no self-sufficient units of meaning in a text, 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. Derrida states that his use of the word deconstruction first took place in a context in which " structuralism was dominant" and deconstruction's meaning is within this context.

Derrida states that deconstruction is an "antistructuralist gesture" because "[s]tructures were to be undone, decomposed, desedimented".

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At the same time, deconstruction is also a "structuralist gesture" because it is concerned with the structure of texts. So, deconstruction involves "a certain attention to structures" [26]: 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. It is for this reason that Derrida distances his use of the term deconstruction from post-structuralism , a term that would suggest that 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". Manfred Frank has even referred to Derrida's work as "Neostructuralism".

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 summary of Derrida's actual position. 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. Have we not run up against a paradox and an aporia [something contradictory] 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' ".

There is no simple 'overcoming' of metaphysics or the language of metaphysics. 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.

These secondary works e. Derrida's method consisted of 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 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. 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 founded—supposedly 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. Derrida refers to this point as an "aporia" in the text; thus, deconstructive reading is termed "aporetic. 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. Derrida's deconstruction strategy is also used by postmodernists to locate meaning in a text rather than discover meaning due to the position that it has multiple readings. There is a focus on the deconstruction that denotes the tearing apart of a text to find arbitrary hierarchies and presuppositions for the purpose of tracing contradictions that shadow a text's coherence.

Derrida's lecture at Johns Hopkins University , " Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences ", often appears in collections as a manifesto against structuralism. Derrida's essay was one of the earliest to propose some theoretical limitations to structuralism, and to attempt to theorize on terms that were clearly no longer structuralist.

Structuralism viewed language as a number of signs, composed of a signified the meaning and a signifier the word itself. Derrida proposed that signs always referred to other signs, existing only in relation to each other, and there was therefore no ultimate foundation or centre.

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Between the late s and the early s, many thinkers were influenced by deconstruction, including Paul de Man , Geoffrey Hartman , and J. This group came to be known as the Yale school and was especially influential in literary criticism.

Miller has described deconstruction this way: Its apparently solid ground is no rock, but thin air. Arguing that law and politics cannot be separated, the founders of the "Critical Legal Studies Movement" found it necessary to criticize the absence of the recognition of this inseparability at the level of theory. To demonstrate the indeterminacy of legal doctrine, these scholars often adopt a method, such as structuralism in linguistics , or deconstruction in Continental philosophy , to make explicit the deep structure of categories and tensions at work in legal texts and talk.

The aim was to deconstruct the tensions and procedures by which they are constructed, expressed, and deployed. For example, Duncan Kennedy , in explicit reference to semiotics and deconstruction procedures, maintains that various legal doctrines are constructed around the binary pairs of opposed concepts, each of which has a claim upon intuitive and formal forms of reasoning that must be made explicit in their meaning and relative value, and criticized. Self and other, private and public, subjective and objective, freedom and control are examples of such pairs demonstrating the influence of opposing concepts on the development of legal doctrines throughout 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 articulating his own theoretical challenges. Jean-Luc Nancy argues, in his book The Inoperative Community , for an understanding of community and society that is undeconstructable because it is prior to conceptualisation.

Nancy's work is an important development of deconstruction because it takes the challenge of deconstruction seriously and attempts to develop an understanding of political terms that is undeconstructable and therefore suitable for a philosophy after Derrida. Simon Critchley , an English philosopher, argues, in his book The Ethics of Deconstruction , [45] that Derrida's deconstruction is an intrinsically ethical practice. Critchley argues that deconstruction involves an openness to the Other that makes it ethical in the Levinasian understanding of the term.

Jacques Derrida has had a great influence on contemporary political theory and political philosophy. Derrida's thinking has inspired Slavoj Zizek , Richard Rorty , Ernesto Laclau , Judith Butler and many more contemporary theorists who have developed a deconstructive approach to politics.

Because deconstruction examines the internal logic of any given text or discourse it has helped many authors to analyse the contradictions inherent in all schools of thought; and, as such, it has proved revolutionary in political analysis, particularly ideology critiques. Richard Beardsworth, developing from Critchley's Ethics of Deconstruction , argues, in his Derrida and the Political , that deconstruction is an intrinsically political practice.

He further argues that the future of deconstruction faces a perhaps undecidable choice between a theological approach and a technological approach, represented first of all by the work of Bernard Stiegler. Most of the criticism of deconstruction were first articulated by these philosophers and repeated elsewhere.

In the early s, Searle had a brief exchange with Jacques Derrida regarding speech-act theory. The exchange was characterized by a degree of mutual hostility between the philosophers, each of whom accused the other of having misunderstood his basic points. Searle did not consider Derrida's approach to be legitimate philosophy, or even intelligible writing, and argued that he did not want to legitimize the deconstructionist point of view by paying any attention to it.

Consequently, some critics [47] have considered the exchange to be a series of elaborate misunderstandings rather than a debate, while others [48] have seen either Derrida or Searle gaining the upper hand. The level of hostility can be seen from Searle's statement that "It would be a mistake to regard Derrida's discussion of Austin as a confrontation between two prominent philosophical traditions", to which Derrida replied that that sentence was "the only sentence of the 'reply' to which I can subscribe".

Austin's theory of the illocutionary act. While sympathetic to Austin's departure from a purely denotational account of language to one that includes "force", Derrida was sceptical of the framework of normativity employed by Austin. Derrida argued that Austin had missed the fact that any speech event is framed by a "structure of absence" the words that are left unsaid due to contextual constraints and by "iterability" the constraints on what can be said, imposed by what has been said in the past. Derrida argued that the focus on intentionality in speech-act theory was misguided because intentionality is restricted to that which is already established as a possible intention.

He also took issue with the way Austin had excluded the study of fiction, non-serious, or "parasitic" speech, wondering whether this exclusion was because Austin had considered these speech genres as governed by different structures of meaning, or hadn't considered them due to a lack of interest. In his brief reply to Derrida, "Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida", Searle argued that Derrida's critique was unwarranted because it assumed that Austin's theory attempted to give a full account of language and meaning when its aim was much narrower.

Searle considered the omission of parasitic discourse forms to be justified by the narrow scope of Austin's inquiry. Some critics [52] have suggested that Searle, by being so grounded in the analytical tradition that he was unable to engage with Derrida's continental phenomenological tradition, was at fault for the unsuccessful nature of the exchange.

Derrida, in his response to Searle "a b c Searle did not reply. Later in , Derrida tried to review his position and his critiques of Austin and Searle, reiterating that he found the constant appeal to "normality" in the analytical tradition to be problematic. In the debate, Derrida praised Austin's work, but argued that Austin is wrong to banish what Austin calls "infelicities" from the "normal" operation of language.

One "infelicity", for instance, occurs when it cannot be known whether a given speech act is "sincere" or "merely citational" and therefore possibly ironic. Derrida argues that every iteration is necessarily "citational", due to the graphematic nature of speech and writing, and that language could not work at all without the ever-present and ineradicable possibility of such alternate readings.

Derrida takes Searle to task for attempting to get around this issue by grounding final authority in the speaker's inaccessible "intention". Derrida argues that intention cannot possibly govern how an iteration signifies, once it becomes hearable or readable. All speech acts borrow from a language whose significance is determined by historical-linguistic context, and by the alternate possibilities that this context makes possible. This significance, Derrida argues, cannot be altered or governed by the whims of intention.

Derrida argued against the constant appeal to "normality" in the analytical tradition of which Austin and Searle were paradigmatic examples. In the description of the structure called "normal," "normative," "central," "ideal,"this possibility must be integrated as an essential possibility. The possibility cannot be treated as though it were a simple accident-marginal or parasitic.

It cannot be, and hence ought not to be, and this passage from can to ought reflects the entire difficulty. In the analysis of so-called normal cases, one neither can nor ought, in all theoretical rigor, to exclude the possibility of transgression. Not even provisionally, or out of allegedly methodological considerations. It would be a poor method, since this possibility of transgression tells us immediately and indispensably about the structure of the act said to be normal as well as about the structure of law in general. Derrida argued that it was problematic to establish the relation between "nonfiction or standard discourse" and "fiction," defined as its "parasite, "for part of the most originary essence of the latter is to allow fiction, the simulacrum, parasitism, to take place—and in so doing to "de-essentialize" itself as it were".

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.

He called Derrida's conclusion "preposterous" and stated that "Derrida, as far as I can tell, does not have an argument. He simply declares that there is nothing outside of texts Further, in an essay on religion and religious language, Habermas criticized Derrida's insistence on etymology and philology [60] see Etymological fallacy.

The American philosopher Walter A. Davis , in Inwardness and Existence: Popular criticism of deconstruction 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. Chip Morningstar holds a view critical of deconstruction, believing it to be epistemologically challenged. He claims the humanities are subject to isolation and genetic drift due to their unaccountability to the world outside academia.

During the Second International Conference on Cyberspace Santa Cruz, California, , he reportedly heckled deconstructionists off the stage. We made fun of them. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For deconstruction of buildings, see Deconstruction building. For the approach to post-modern architecture, see Deconstructivism. For other uses, see Deconstruction disambiguation. Retrieved 8 September A decision that did not go through the ordeal of the undecidable would not be a free decision, it would only be the programmable application or unfolding of a calculable process Archived from the original on 16 May Annual Review of Anthropology.

Institute of Historical Research.

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Retrieved 16 September University of Toronto English Library. The New York Times. Retrieved 1 June Johns Hopkins University Press. New York Philosophical Library. Freud and the Scene of Writing". Writing and Difference New ed. 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. University of Chicago Press. Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, Derrida. Jacques Derrida Reprint ed.

reviewed by Niall Gildea

A Taste for the Secret. I take great interest in questions of language and rhetoric, and I think they deserve enormous consideration; but there is a point where the authority of final jurisdiction is neither rhetorical nor linguistic, nor even discursive. The notion of trace or of text is introduced to mark the limits of the linguistic turn.

This is one more reason why I prefer to speak of 'mark' rather than of language. In the first place the mark is not anthropological; it is prelinguistic; it is the possibility of language, and it is every where there is a relation to another thing or relation to an other. For such relations, the mark has no need of language.

Being and Time 1st ed. Metaphor and Religious Language Paperback ed. Limited Inc 4th ed. University of Minnesota Press. Hillis Miller, Paul De Man 1st ed. The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: From Formalism to Poststructuralism 1st ed. Deconstruction in a Nutshell:

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