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Deconstruction is an approach used to understand the relationship between text and meaning. It was originated by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who defined the term in various ways throughout his career. In its simplest form, it can be seen as a critique of Platonism and the idea of true forms, or essences, taking precedence over appearances. Deconstruction, in contrast, places the emphasis on appearance, or at least suggests, that the essence is found in the appearance. Derrida would say that the difference is 'undecidable', in the sense that it cannot be discerned in everyday experiences.
Deconstruction perceives that language, especially ideal concepts such as truth and justice, is irreducibly complex, unstable, or impossible to determine. Many debates in continental philosophy around ontology or metaphysics, epistemology or epistemology, ethics or morality, aesthetics, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of language refer to Derrida's observations. Since the 1980s, these observations have inspired a number of theoretical endeavors in the humanities, including the disciplines of law, anthropology, historiography, linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychoanalysis, LGBT studies, and feminism. Deconstruction also inspired deconstructivism in architecture and remains important in art, music, and literary criticism.
Overview
Deconstruction is based on the study of the implicit method in the analyzes of the thinker Martin Heidegger, mainly in his etymological analyzes of the history of philosophy. The concept of deconstruction is part of both loose philosophy and literature and has been very much in vogue, especially in the United States. While it is true that the term was first used by Martin Heidegger, it is Derrida's work that has systematized its use and theorized its practice.
The term deconstruction is Derrida's translation of the German term Destruktion, which Heidegger uses in his book Being and Time. Derrida considers this translation to be more pertinent than the classical translation of "destruction" insofar as it is not so much a question, within the deconstruction of metaphysics, of reduction to nothing, as of showing how metaphysics has collapsed.
In Heidegger, destruktion leads to the concept of time; it must watch over some successive stages of the experience of time that has been covered by metaphysics, making us forget the original meaning of being as a temporary being.
The three stages of this deconstruction are followed in search of history:
- the Kantian doctrine of schematism and time as stage Prealable of a problem of temporality;
- the ontological foundation of cogito ergo sum of Descartes and the retouching of medieval ontology within the problem of the res cogitans;
- Aristotle's treatise on time as a discrime of the phenomenical base and the limits of ancient ontology.
However, if Heidegger announces this deconstruction at the end of the introduction to Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, § 6, p. 46 of the edition of Jorge Eduardo Rivera, Editorial Universitaria), this part —which was to constitute, according to the 1927 plan, the second of the work— has never been written as such. Other works or conferences can at least be considered to outline it partially, beginning with the work Kant and the problem of metaphysics, published in 1929.
Derrida translates and recovers the notion of deconstruction; he understands that the meaning of a given text (essay, novel, newspaper article) is the result of the difference between the words used, and not the reference to the things they represent; it is an active difference, that she works in creux the meaning of each one of the words that she opposes, in a way analogous to Saussurian differential signification in linguistics. To mark the active character of this difference (instead of the passive character of the difference relative to a contingent judgment of the subject) Derrida suggests the term différance, 'difference' sort of a trunk word that combines difference and present participle of the verb "to differ". In other words, the different meanings of a text can be discovered by breaking down the structure of the language within which it is written.
Deconstruction should not be considered as a theory of literary criticism, much less as a philosophy. It is a strategy, a new reading practice, an archipelago of attitudes towards the text. It investigates the conditions of possibility of the conceptual systems of philosophy but should not be confused with a search for the transcendental conditions of the possibility of knowledge. Deconstruction revises and dissolves the canon in an absolute denial of meaning but does not propose an alternative organic model.
Until now, the traditional philosophy of the West (Platonic-Hegelian) had always presupposed a scenario of systematic rationality, a domination of speech over writing, a world in the last instance in which everything makes sense. Deconstruction rebels amidst this abuse of Hegelian heritage rationality, proposing precisely the opposite: the impossibility of literary texts having the slightest sense.
In this traditional philosophy, the literary work is considered as a rhetorical envelope inside which sleeps the hidden wisdom of the Idea to which the reader must awaken with the semiological kiss. The literary work was, in this sense, always considered as endowed with a totality of meaning.
Deconstruction will affirm that the rhetorical envelope is all there is and that for this reason the literary work of art is irreducible to an idea or a concept. In this sense, deconstruction will deny the literary work the concept of totality by affirming that the text cannot be apprehended in its entirety, since writing circulates in a constant movement of remission that makes the totality part of a totality. greater than ever is present.
In this way it is impossible to frame the text, that is to say, to create an interior and an exterior.
"Il n'y a pas de hors-texte", says Derridá.
As for the meaning, in the eyes of deconstruction it is endlessly allegorical and therefore lacks univocality and obviousness.
Language is recognized as having great complexity and equivocal richness, which is why two types of reading are accepted: the univocal one based on the transparent message and the deconstructive one, which refers to the plasticity and corporeity of the signifiers themselves.
Deconstruction denies the possibility of pure denotation, of the referentiality of the text.
Faced with the dictatorship of the canon, he proposes the democracy of polysemy, establishing that the act of reading generates infinite disseminations.
In front of a text it will be impossible to determine a good reading. The possible readings will thus be infinite because no reading will ever reach good sense.
Lastly, deconstruction is applied to all the factors that can function as the structural center of a text (transcendental meaning, context, content, theme...) in such a way that they cannot stop the free play of writing.
With all this, deconstruction will basically propose a hyperanalytic dissociation of the sign, proposing a subversive staging of the signifier, affirming that any type of text (literary or not) is presented not only as a phenomenon of communication, but also of signification. Deconstruction performs a chiasmic approach, that is, it moves between the denial-affirmation of the symbol.
The autonomy of the sign with respect to transcendental meanings is affirmed and it is denied that writing only refers to itself.