Deconstruction is a philosophical-critical approach to textual analysis that is most closely associated with the work of Jacques Derrida in philosophy and the Yale School (Paul DeMan, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman) in literary theory and criticism. Derrida draws the term déconstruction from his interpretation of Martin Heidegger as a way to translate two Heideggerian terms: Destruktion, which means not destruction but a destructuring that dismantles the structural layers in a system; and Abbau, which means to take apart an edifice in order to see how it is constituted or deconstituted. For Derrida, then, deconstruction, in the context of philosophy, refers to a way to think the structured genealogy of philosophy's concepts while exposing what the history of these concepts has been able to obscure or exclude. By displaying those concepts that the philosophical tradition both authorizes and excludes, a deconstructive reading seeks to work within the closed field of metaphysical discourse without at the same time confirming that field. Instead, it allows a text to dismantle itself by exposing the internal inconsistencies and implicit significations that lie concealed within the language of the text.
One way to understand deconstruction is in terms of a critique of the binary, oppositional thinking that, for Derrida, is central to the history of philosophy. This is to say, each term in the Western philosophical/cultural lexicon is accompanied by its binary opposite: intelligible/sensible, truth/error, speech/writing, reality/appearance, mind/body, culture/nature, good/evil, male/female, and so on. These oppositions do not peacefully coexist, however: one side of each binary opposition has been privileged and the other side devalued. A hierarchy has been established within these oppositions, as the intelligible has come to be valued over the sensible, mind has come to be valued over body, and so on. The task of deconstruction is to dismantle or deconstruct these binary oppositions: to expose the foundational choices of the philosophical tradition and to bring into view what the tradition has repressed, excluded, or—to use the Derridean terminology—marginalized.
As a critical practice, the deconstruction of these oppositions involves a double movement of overturning and displacement. The first phase initiates an overturning of the hierarchy that valorizes the term traditionally subordinated by the history of philosophy: for example, privileging writing over speech, signifier over signified, or the figurative over the literal. But this privileging is temporary and strategic, for in overturning a metaphysical hierarchy, deconstruction seeks to avoid reappropriating the same hierarchical structure; it is the hierarchical oppositional structure itself that underwrites the metaphysical tradition, and to remain within the binary logic of metaphysical thinking will only reestablish and affirm these oppositions. The second phase of deconstruction destabilizes the inversion by showing the arbitrary nature of the process of hierarchical valorization itself and displaces the hierarchy altogether by intervening with a new "undecidable" term—for example, difference, trace, pharmakon, supplement—that resists the formal structure imposed by the binary logic of philosophical opposition. Much of Derrida's early work involves elucidating the play of these undecidables: the play of différence, which both differs and defers; the play of the trace, which is both present and absent; the play of the pharmakon, which is both poison and cure; the play of the supplement, which is both surplus and lack. By displaying the choices by means of which the philosophical tradition constitutes itself as a tradition, Derridean deconstruction opens the possibility to think difference other than as opposition and hierarchy.
Within literary criticism, the deconstructive method is used to show that the meaning of a literary text is not fixed and stable. Instead, by exploring the dynamic tension within a text's language, literary deconstruction reveals the literary work to be not a determinate object with a single correct meaning but an expanding semantic field that is open to multiple, sometimes conflicting interpretations.
Bloom, Harold, Paul DeMan, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller. Deconstruction and Criticism. London: Continuum, 1979.
Culler, Jonathan D. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism in the 1970s. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982.
DeMan, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979.
DeMan, Paul. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Originally published as La Dissémination (Paris: Du Seuil, 1972).
Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Originally published as Marges de la Philosophie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972).
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Originally published as De la Grammatologie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967).
Derrida, Jacques. Positions. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Originally published as Positions: Entretiens avec Henri Ronse, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Louis Houdebine, Guy Scarpetta (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972).
Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs. Translated by David B. Allison. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Originally published as La voix et le phénomène: Introduction au problème du signe dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967).
Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Originally published as L'écrituré et la difference (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1967).
Gasche, Rodolphe. The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Hartman, Geoffrey. Criticism in the Wilderness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982.
Miller, J. Hillis. The Ethics of Reading: Kant, De Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
Miller, J. Hillis. The Linguistic Moment: From Wordsworth to Stevens. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Norris, Christopher. Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. London: Methuen, 1982.
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