Deconstruction

Deconstruction, the demonstration of multiple, competing, and often contradictory meanings within seemingly stable univocal positions, came to prominence in the mid-1960s and continues to exert a powerful influence across a broad range of disciplines. Although Jacques Derrida coined the term deconstruction in his early works, a history of deconstructive analysis can be traced to Friedrich W. Nietzsche and beyond, connecting with Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl along the way. Deconstructive analysis, as practiced by Derrida, demonstrates that the substance and coherence of a text—broadly conceived from the traditional notion of a written text to social practice—is as much related to assumptions and derivative ideas that are excluded, as it is to those that that are included. In other words, meaning is inextricably linked to the constitutive other—silences and exclusions—of the text. Deconstruction aims to render the constitutive other explicit. The exposure of silences and exclusions, together with the contradictions that may ensue, draws sites for activism into clear relief.

The term deconstruction, however, has been pejoratively equated with destruction. Environmentalists Gary Lease and Michael Souléexemplify this view, claiming that deconstruction is as destructive to the environment as chainsaws and bulldozers. More generally, however, the charge of destruction is abstract;critics claim that deconstruction shatters unities and leaves it to others to pick up the pieces. As a result, many critics of deconstruction and proponents who are influenced by them emphasize the importance of reconstruction. Derrida has repudiated the claim of destruction in numerous interviews and rejected the binary opposition of deconstruction to reconstruction. His rejection of the binary opposition is twofold: first, the opposition invites the misreading that deconstruction is destructive;and second, while supporting the importance of generative analysis, he argues that reconstruction is inadequate. Derrida argues that reconstruction maintains the status quo by simply making something again in the same image. In terms of activism and social justice, the reconstruction of human rights, for example, would replicate existing states of affairs. Derrida insists, however, that deconstruction aims to go further, to displace, change, and improve the current state of affairs. Deconstruction, then, is a deeply political enterprise that has an overt ethical agenda.

Derrida's deconstructive works can be read as posing questions to, eliciting complex responses from, and going beyond the initial formulations of key Western thinkers, including Marx, Saussure, Freud, and Heidegger, and Derrida openly acknowledges that deconstruction is indebted to each. The term deconstruction owes its name to Derrida's critical appropriation and translation of Heidegger's terms Destruktion and Abbau, and questioning, responding to, and going beyond Marx, Saussure, and Freud illuminated leading and interrelated motifs in deconstructive analysis. [Page 437]The first of these motifs, the critique of the “meta-physics of presence,”problematizes the notion of a direct relationship, or immediacy, between speech and writing, thought and consciousness, or the word and the world. The critique of the metaphysics of presence disrupts the purported stability and unity of a text. This argument is, perhaps, best understood through Derrida's deconstruction of Ferdinand de Saussure's structural linguistics. Saussure identified language as a system of signs, which consist of two indissociable elements: spoken words or their written equivalents (signifiers) and concepts (signifieds). For Saussure, signs are arbitrary;they derive their meaning from their opposition to each other rather than through a relationship with a referent, thus, severing the link between the word and the world. Language, then, is a floating system of differences. Consequently, signifieds do not possess meaning in and of themselves. Meaning is continuously differed and deferred, which challenges notions of unity, stability, and truth. Derrida, however, demonstrates that Saussure's argument unavoidably admits the possibility of signifieds without signifiers. In other words, Saussure's argument admits that meaning is not necessarily transacted relationally through a system of differences, but that pockets of pure meaning can exist. This surreptitiously reinstates the metaphysics of presence. Thus, Derrida replaces Saussure's signifier-signified complex with the signifier-signifier, which ensures the endless play of difference that cannot be resolved into a positivity. Derrida introduces the term différance to refer to this irrepressible difference.

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