Deconstruction

Deconstruction: A Short History

In a letter to Toshihiko Isutsu, a Japanese scholar seeking assistance with translating déconstruction into Japanese, Derrida explained how he came to use the term, a word rarely used in French at the time, in De La Grammatologie (published in France in 1967 and later in English as Of Grammatology). Among other things, Derrida wanted to translate (and adapt to his own purposes) the German terms Destruktion and Abbau, as used by Martin Heidegger in a 1927 lecture series (later published as Basic Problems of Phenom-enology). In these lectures, Heidegger asserted that phenomenology is a method of doing philosophy that has three steps: reduction, construction, and destruction. Although Heidegger argued that construction in philosophy is necessarily Destruktion (destruction), he elaborated his understanding of philosophical destruction by using another German word, Abbau (literally “unbuild”).

In his letter to Isutsu in 1985, Derrida explained that in Heidegger's work both Destruktion and Abbau signified “an operation bearing on the structure or traditional architecture of the fundamental concepts of ontology or of Western metaphysics” (p. 2). But the French word destruction too obviously implied “an annihilation or a negative reduction much closer perhaps to Nietzschean ‘demolition’ than to the Heideggerian interpretation or to the type of reading that I proposed” (p. 2). Derrida recalled that the word déconstruction came to him somewhat spontaneously and that he checked to see whether it was “good French” by consulting “the Littré” (the common name for the four-volume Dictionnaire de la Langue Française by Émile Littré first published in 1877). Derrida was pleased to find that the grammatical, linguistic, and rhetorical associations of the term—for which there were several entries—were “fortunately adapted to what I wanted at least to

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