Deconstruction (Derrida)

Why did "deconstruction" spread beyond philosophy?

Deconstruction is one of the most widely used and most misunderstood words in late twentieth-century humanities. Literary criticism, law, anthropology, historiography, feminism and queer theory, even architecture (deconstructivism) borrowed it. In everyday language it is sometimes used to mean "taking anything apart", but the deconstruction Derrida spoke of is not destruction but extremely careful reading. It finds the gap between the meaning a text claims for itself and what the structure of that text actually does.

Derrida coined the word in rendering Martin Heidegger's Destruktion into French. For Heidegger this was the work of exploring a concept by clearing away the categories and history that tradition had laid over it. Derrida applied it to reading texts. In the single year 1967 he published Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference and Speech and Phenomena, setting out the main ideas of deconstruction.

What does deconstruction do?

According to Derrida, Western metaphysics has believed that meaning is fully "present" somewhere: the speaker's voice holds thought as it is, while writing is a secondary and dangerous supplement that merely transcribes speech. He called this belief the "metaphysics of presence" and "logocentrism". If, following Saussure, the meaning of a sign comes from its differences from other signs, meaning is never fully in one place but is endlessly deferred to other signs. Derrida expressed this with the coinage différance, which fuses "to differ" and "to defer".

In the interviews collected as Positions (1972), Derrida explained the procedure. In a classical philosophical opposition we are dealing not with the peaceful coexistence of a pair but with a violent hierarchy: "one of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), occupies the commanding position. To deconstruct the opposition is first, at a given moment, to overturn the hierarchy."

Un des deux termes commande l'autre (axiologiquement, logiquement, etc.), occupe la hauteur. Déconstruire l'opposition, c'est d'abord, à un moment donné, renverser la hiérarchie.

To skip this phase of overturning and leap straight beyond the opposition, he warned, "is to pass too quickly, without keeping any hold on the previous opposition, to a neutralisation that in practice would leave the previous field as it was and deprive itself of any means of intervening in it effectively". But since merely overturning only repeats the same hierarchy upside down, deconstruction puts forward "undecidables" that belong to neither side (différance, the supplement, the pharmakon and others) to unsettle the system of oppositions itself.

C'est donc passer trop vite, sans garder aucune prise sur l'opposition antérieure, à une neutralisation qui, pratiquement, laisserait le champ antérieur en l'état, se priverait de tout moyen d'y intervenir effectivement.

What does "there is no outside-text" mean?

The sentence "there is no outside-text" (il n'y a pas de hors-texte), from the essay on Rousseau in Of Grammatology, became the emblem of misunderstandings about deconstruction. It is often mistranslated as "there is nothing outside the text" and read as though Derrida claimed that nothing exists but words. Derrida himself explained that it means the unavoidability of context: no meaning is given purely, outside the web of other signs and contexts.

Deconstruction also differs from Hegel's dialectic. As the English Wikipedia puts it, one of Derrida's main concerns was not to collapse into a Hegelian dialectic that reduces oppositions to contradictions in order to resolve them into a synthesis. In late twentieth-century France, the Hegel of Kojève and Hyppolite, the Marxists' dialectic of contradiction and Sartre's existentialism all stood under Hegel's strong influence, and Derrida held that oppositions cannot be resolved into a synthesis free from the original contradiction.

What place does Nietzsche hold in deconstruction?

Derrida drew the motive for deconstruction largely from Nietzsche. Nietzsche's way of stressing the fluidity of language over static forms, treating truths as hardened metaphors and reading in every value the force and perspective that posited it was the model for deconstructive reading. In Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles (1978), based on a lecture at the 1972 Cerisy conference, Derrida made the plurality of meaning in Nietzsche's texts itself his theme. Against Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche as the culmination of metaphysics, Derrida read Nietzsche as plural styles that cannot be gathered into one truth.

In the United States, from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, the "Yale school" of Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller spread deconstruction as a method of literary criticism. As the German Wikipedia notes, Derrida critically distinguished deconstruction from dogmatic "deconstructionism". Within the academy, though, deconstruction often hardened into a technique for making every meaning in a text slip endlessly.

How did Marxism view deconstruction?

Derrida sometimes called deconstruction a radicalisation of a certain spirit of Marxism. In Positions he said that his work could be read as a critique of idealism and that, insofar as it carries out that critique, nothing in dialectical materialism gave him any reluctance. In 1993, as the "end of history" was being proclaimed after the Soviet collapse, he published Specters of Marx (English 1994), arguing that Marx's legacy is not dead but returns like a spectre and denouncing the injustices of the neoliberal world order.

Marxist responses were mixed. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the English translator of Of Grammatology, criticised Derrida's understanding of Marx, and Terry Eagleton mocked the portentous style of Specters of Marx. The long-standing Marxist suspicion is that by unsettling every opposition and foundation, deconstruction also dissolves concepts such as class and mode of production and so loses the ground for political practice. Jürgen Habermas, too, criticised what he saw as Derrida's opposition to rational discourse in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985). On the other hand, theorists such as Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek drew deconstruction into the critique of ideology. Deconstruction is thus a strand of late twentieth-century thought that began with Nietzsche and both confronted and mingled with Marxism.