Deconstruction

Overview

Deconstruction involves elements of destruction, tearing down assumptions about what the world is like, as well as elements of construction, creating new ways of seeing the world. Deconstruction intentionally highlights the paradox of simultaneous destruction and construction. Indeed, paradoxes such as these are typical of deconstruction; it could even be said that they animate deconstruction. By showing how concepts that seem to refer to one thing are also referring to their opposites, deconstruction rattles conventional views and forces a reconfiguration of how the world is viewed.

The method of deconstruction mirrors the claims of deconstruction. It often proceeds through critique of a particular text, demonstrating how the language of the text challenges the explicit message of the text. As this approach to reading implies, deconstruction does not give any special regard to the intentions of an author. Even the distinction between author and text is challenged in deconstruction. Derrida famously claimed there is nothing outside a text (il n'y a pas de hors-texte). Although sometimes understood as deemphasizing the role of an author, Derrida's remark is more often taken to mean that the whole world can be regarded as a text, or a network of texts. In other words, the method of deconstruction can be applied to everything, whether it is an article or a cultural event or a flower arrangement. The claims of deconstruction apply not only to literary interpretation; they are general philosophical claims.

Derrida was trained as a philosopher, and his early work applied the deconstructive method to philosophical texts. This work challenged the primacy of presence through critical engagement with the phenomenological tradition. Phenomenologists attempt to discard conventionally accepted concepts and categories in order to access experience directly. Experience is deemed irrefutable; it is the attempt to represent experience that always goes wrong. Deconstruction differs from phenomenology because, for deconstruction, any concept of direct access to experience is flawed.

More generally, deconstruction opposes all claims to directly access truth. Opposition to the phenomenologist's claim to such direct access through experience is a special case of this general claim. Rather than trying to find a better way to access truth, deconstructionists criticize and reformulate the claims that others make, often implicitly, to access truth. There are two important corollaries to this stance. First, deconstructionists oppose claims that there are foundations to scholarly inquiry, for such foundations presuppose access to truth. Second, with the search for truth no longer animating inquiry, deconstruction is playful rather than serious, a self-understanding reflected in the frequent wordplay in the writings of those associated with deconstruction. Instead of imagining scholarly inquiry as searching depths or ascending to heights, deconstructionists imagine scholarly inquiry as joyfully exploring a flat surface, a plane of immanence.

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