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Structuralism proved that meaning evolves out of differences from other signs in a semantic
chain. Post structuralists too it to its extreme and claimed that this chain is endless. Hence
the final meaning is impossible. The process of finding difference is always deferred as
well. Derrida coined the portmanteau term Differance. The term suggests to differ' and 'to
defer'. Deconstructionists hold that communicating through language is rather impossible. In
"The Deconstructive Angel", Abrams defend the ability of traditional historical criticism to
discover what literary works might have meant to their contemporaries. They can also grasp
what they mean today. To prove this, he compares his own interpretation to those of other
interpretations. These combined approximations will "confirm the 'objectivity' of his own
interpretation". Abrams admits the ambiguity of literary language, sharing the ideas of
Barthes. Abram is comfortable with linguistic theories that see language as pluralistic or
ambiguous. But he cannot agree with the violent claims of Deconstruction. To quote
him: "deconstruction goes beyond the limits of pluralism, by making impossible anything
that we would account as literary and cultural history".
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.
Abrams has made essential premises that he shares with traditional historians of Western
culture, about the entire body of traditional inquiries in the human sciences. They are:
1. The basic materials of history are written text and the authors who wrote this
text with exaggerated language assumed that the readers would be able to understand
what they wrote.
2. The historian interprets the passages he cites by combining his own language
and the language of his author in order to approximate what the author meant.
3. The historian realizes that it is possible that some of his interpretation contains
some errors. However, if they are only small errors, they will not seriously affect the
soundness of his overall history, but if the errors are the greater part, his book is not to
be accounted a history but an historical fiction.