Deconstruction

Primarily a philosophical and literary method of critique developed by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (b. 1930), deconstruction aims to expose and destabilize attempts to systematically ground knowledge in an absolute, foundational meaning, logic, or referent. Deconstruction is used to criticize Western culture's search for ultimate meaning or truth, what is often referred to as the “transcendental signified,” and the supposed ability to translate this truth through language. The method of deconstruction entails discovering a fundamental binary opposition in an argument or text (such as presence/absence), exposing its hierarchical relationship, revealing the reliance of one concept upon the other, and subordinating the previously dominant idea. Through this method, the binary is relativized and displaced, rendering it meaningless.

Deconstructionists refer to the ambition to discover ultimate meanings and absolute foundations as “logocentrism,” which is inextricably linked to phonocentrism, or the favoring of speech over writing. Deconstructionists contend that all significations are a form of writing, thereby undermining the supposed unity of language and meaning in speech acts. Deconstruction finds terms or phrases that supposedly maintain a stable relationship referring to definite objects or ideas and then poses equally valid alternate relationships, destabilizing the system of definite reference. This constant undermining of language leads to Derrida's conception of sous rature, or “under erasure.” Here, he borrows principally from the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), who would often write the word Being like so, to demonstrate that the term is insufficient but needed. The remnant of the term visible after the erasure is called the trace. Important in the concept is the constancy of the erasure of the permanency of the trace, symbolizing the relentless play between presence and absence. Deconstruction does not aim to simply replace the metaphysical assumptions of Western culture with their perversions; it relentlessly undermines, revealing the ambivalence of language and impossibility of essential meaning.

Deconstruction developed largely in reaction to structuralist and phenomenological thinkers such as Claude LéviStrauss (b. 1908), Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), and Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), all of whom sought to discover universal, basic structures of all human life. In his structuralist anthropology, Lévi-Strauss claimed that speech had a kind of primal completeness and innocence. He followed with the claim that writing was a corrupt version of speech that led only to oppression and colonization. Derrida analyzes LéviStrauss's argument and shows that “primitive” societies quite often used the spoken word to dominate and that writing could very well be a precursor to verbal communication. Saussure based his theory of language in the stable relationship of signifier-signified, assuming that the signified was ultimate and could not refer to yet another object or idea. Deconstruction revealed the instability of Lévi-Strauss's and Saussure's structuralism, posing different referents, signifiers, and relationships, which opened up the doors to a textual analysis that favored inconsistency, metaphor, and an endless stream of referents and signification.

Deconstruction, as employed by Derrida and the Yale Critics (including Paul de Man, 1919–1983, and J. Hillis Miller, b. 1928), became the key element in poststructuralism and also helped give to rise postmodernism. Whereas previous thought portrayed language as centering on and constraining a definite subject, deconstruction celebrated decentering any such subject and therefore releasing it from any constraint or domination. When fully deconstructed, what lies at the base of any object, be it a text or social institution, is writing. By revealing the unstable and illogical nature of writing within the grand assumptions of Western philosophy since Plato, deconstruction embraces the marginalized worlds of the Other.

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