Deconstruction

Deconstruction is famously associated with the Algerian-born French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). One of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, Derrida is also known as one of the leading voices of what is loosely called post-structuralism. Over a distinguished career that began in the 1960s, he produced a large body of work that has irrevocably unmoored many of the most securely anchored ideas in Western [Page 293]philosophical thinking. Through careful and ingenious readings of key texts in philosophy and literature, both ancient and modern, Derrida managed to uncover in them a set of hidden contradictions that work against the best intentions of their authors. According to Derrida's critical readings, philosophical arguments are no different from those in literature and, like them, are subject to all sorts of alternative interpretations, equivocations, paradoxes, even unacknowledged mistakes, in other words, various “accidents” caused by what he called the loose play of language traditionally considered to be the standard, even desirable, form of literary writing.

After the publication of Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology, and Speech and Phenomenon in 1967, Derrida was quickly recognized as a uniquely iconoclastic critic of Western philosophy, and his ideas, now called deconstructionism, began to circulate widely, crossing disciplinary boundaries and wielding ever-increasing influence in the humanities, social sciences, and beyond.

The result was a sizable quake under philosophers' feet, a violent shaking that weakened philosophy's boasting claim to being the first science of all sciences. Derrida showed that philosophy is not immune from the figurative exuberance of language and is essentially textual—a kind of writing no more and no less serious than nonphilosophical ones—and, as a result, the long-accepted tenet that philosophy is the most logical and judicious path to truth, goodness, and beauty is shown to be one of disillusionment and misconception.

It is important to note that Derrida hardly used the word deconstruction in his early writings and expressed his disfavor toward the term because of its negative semantic associations. However, after this term gained wide circulation and began to take root in contemporary critical vocabulary, he came to accept its currency and often commented on the word's negative associations in an effort to clarify what deconstruction means and how it ought to be understood. One of the points he made repeatedly is that deconstruction does not affirm or assert a thesis of its own per se. Instead, Derrida prefers to define the term by saying what it is not, instead of stating straightforwardly what it is. Here he intends to impart two things.

First, in principle and in practice deconstruction does not and cannot affirm any position in relation to its object of analysis. Instead of attempting to ground philosophy on a single unifying principle, as philosophers always do, deconstruction, by design, proposes no unifying principle on which to build anything new. Having no position to call its own, deconstruction is a kind of reading, which consists of reading with a fidelity that finally betrays the contradictions hidden within the text—fundamental contradictions that cause what is built on them to falter and collapse. This studied way of reading can properly be called deconstructive rather than destructive; in fact, this way of reading is as far from being destructive as the text is from achieving its claims in that it follows the text in good faith, teasing out through this faithful following the warring forces that are within the text. Deconstructive reading, therefore, is parasitic; it is always dependent on the text to which it is applied for meaning.

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