Deconstruction (Derrida)

Tr. Sp.-Eng. from a review in Shvoong

  Derrida belonged to the so-called philosophical movement of 68. The most important contribution of his thought is "deconstruction". The deconstructuvist discourse identifies the inability of philosophy of establishing a stable floor. Deconstruction is a type of thought that criticizes, analyzes, and heavily revises words and concepts. It is worth mentioning that most of Derrida's studies exposed a large dose of rebellion and criticism to the system, so he was described at a certain time as a left-wing thinker. 

 Deconstruction is related to vast tracks of Western philosophical tradition, but it is also linked to various academic disciplines such as Linguistics and Anthropology (called "Human Sciences" in France). The conceptual and historical review of the philosophical foundations of Anthropology, as well as his constant use of philosophical arguments (consciously or not), was an important aspect of his thought. Deconstruction is to show how one concept has been built based on historical processes and metaphorical accumulations (hence the name of deconstruction), showing that the clear and obvious is far from being so, since the tools of consciousness where "the true in-Itself has to be" are historical, relative and subjected to the paradoxes of the rhetorical figures of metaphor and metonymy. 

 Derrida translates and recovers on his own the concept of deconstruction; he understands that the significance of a given text (essay, novel, newspaper article) is the result of the difference between the words employed, and not the reference to the things they represent; it's an active difference, working in creux (hollow, emptiness), each meaning of each of the words that she opposes, in a manner analogous to the Sausserian differential meaning in Linguistics. To mark the active nature of this difference (instead of the passive nature of the difference related to a contingent judgement of the subject) Derrida suggests the term différance, "differance", a sort of chest-word that combines "difference" and the present participle of "differ". In other words, the different meanings of a text can be discovered by decomposing the structure of the language in which it has been drafted. In traditional philosophy, the literary work is considered as a rhetorical envelope inside which it sleeps the hidden wisdom of the Idea that the reader must wake up with the semiological kiss. The literary work was accordingly always considered as endowed with a whole of focused sense.

With Derrida, deconstruction will assert that the rhetorical envelope is all there is and that is why the literary work of art is irreducible to an idea or a concept. In that sense, deconstruction will deny in the literary work the concept of totality to affirm that the text may not be apprehended as a whole since writing circulates in a constant movement of referral that converts the whole in part of a larger whole that is never present. In this way, it is impossible to frame the text, i.e., create an interior and an exterior. "Il n' and hors du texte" says Derrida. (There is no outside of the text or there is no out the text). 

 With all this, deconstruction will basically raise a hyper-analitic dissociation of the sign proposing a subversive staging of the signifier stating that any kind of text, (literary or not) is not only a phenomenon of communication, but also of significance. Deconstruction executes a chiasmic approach, i.e., it moves between the negation-affirmation of the symbol (chiasmus: figure of speech that consists in presenting in reverse orders the members of two sequences; e.g., when I want to cry I do not cry, and sometimes I cry inadvertently). It is asserted the autonomy of the sign with respect to the transcendental meanings and it is refused that writing only refers to itself. 

 Deconstruction is a method strongly criticized, mainly in France, where it is associated with Derrida's personality. His style, often opaque, turns the reading of his texts dark. However, deconstruction offers a vision radically new and of a large force on the philosophy of the 20th century. Deconstruction should not be considered as a theory of literary criticism nor much less as a philosophy. Deconstruction is actually a strategy, a new practice of reading, an archipelago of attitudes towards the text. It investigates the conditions of possibility of conceptual systems of philosophy, but it should not be confused with a search for the transcendental conditions of the possibility of knowledge.