Derrida's Deconstructive Turn

Deconstruction is not destruction but it may be thought of in terms of a literary construction. The originator of this textual practise, Derrida (in the late 1960s and early 1970s), explains it in these terms:

Deconstruction is inventive or it is nothing at all; it does not settle for methodological procedures, it opens up a passageway, it marches ahead and marks a trail; its writing is not only performative, it produces rules -- other conventions -- for new performativities and never installs itself in the theoretical assurance of a simple opposition between performative and constative. Its process involves an affirmation, this latter being linked to the coming [venir] in event, advent, invention. ("Psyche: Invention of the Other," 1984.)

The key to deconstruction, according to Derrida, is that through a re-reading (of philosophy) one may more profoundly understand society as a complex and historical processes; sites of différance, much like philosophy and texts themselves. Derrida sees signifying force in the gaps, margins, figures, echoes, digressions, discontinuities, contradictions, and ambiguities of a text.

Derrida's writings on deconstruction refine poststructuralist and postmodern arguments which seek to re-evaluate ways of thinking of reality. For Derrida, as with other theorists, access to reality is no longer recognised as unmediated. Experienced through language, reality is never something we can know, just something we can experience as Pierce says. In an attempt to get at something other than language, Derrida asks us to deconstruct.

Deconstruction involves the dissolving or orders and hierarchies which allows for new structures to be composed and then recomposed. This "play" allows elements which originally may never have been thought of as similar to sit side by side and create new connections. For example a deconstructive reading focuses on binary oppositions (woman/man, black/white, high/low, rich/poor, signifier/signified, presence/absence) within a text first, to illustrate the hierarchy of their structure; second, to overturn that hierarchy (albeit temporarily), in order to see what the text was not saying; in order to see what was under erasure. Thirdly, a deconstructive reading of binaries would seek to displace and reassert both terms of the opposition within a non-hierarchical relationship of "difference."

Working within the idea of unfulfillness; even deconstruction does not aim to guarantee any "wholes", it only seeks to fragment them and in the fragmentation question the meaning of ideas such as "center," "man," "truth," and "reality." But to recognise the instability of these terms is to put them under "erasure." Although speaking in theoretical terms, Derrida signifies this graphically by writing: truth.

Go To Page: 1 2

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic