Deconstruction (literature)

Deconstruction is a name commonly associated with philosopher Jacques Derrida's critical outlook over the relationship between text and meaning.

Derrida's approach consists in conducting readings of texts with an ear to what runs counter to the structural unity or intended sense of a particular text. The purpose is to expose that the object of language and what upon which any text is founded is irreducibly complex, unstable, or impossible. Throughout his readings, Derrida hoped to show deconstruction at work, i.e., the ways that this originary complexity—which by definition cannot ever be completely known—works its structuring and destructuring effects.

Many debates in continental philosophy surrounding ontology, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, hermeneutics, and philosophy of language refer to Derrida's observations. In the 1980s, they inspired a range of theoretical entreprises in the humanities in the United States, including in law anthropology, historiography, linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychoanalysis, feminism, and LGBT studies. Deconstruction also inspired deconstructivism in architecture and remains important within art, music, and literary criticism.

Jacques Derrida's 1967 work Of Grammatology introduced the majority of ideas influential within deconstruction. According to Derrida and taking inspiration from the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, language as a system of signs and words only has meaning because of the contrast between these signs. As Rorty contends, "words have meaning only because of contrast-effects with other words...no word can acquire meaning in the way in which philosophers from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell have hoped it might—by being the unmediated expression of something non-linguistic (e.g., an emotion, a sense-datum, a physical object, an idea, a Platonic Form)". As a consequence meaning is never present, but rather is deferred to other signs. Derrida refers to the — in this view, mistaken — belief that there is a self-sufficient, non-deferred meaning as metaphysics of presence. A concept then must be understood in the context of its opposite, such as being/nothingness, normal/abnormal, speech/writing, etc.

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