DECONSTRUCTION

Deconstruction is a method which developed by Jacques Derrida. He

developed the environment of his deconstructionist method based on the general
context of Heideggerian critique and the new existentialist phenomenon of Jean-
Paul Sartre. Derrida identifies that the chief object of philosophical analysis is the
metaphysics of presence. It causes the revolutionary idea that language does not
refer in some stable and predictable way to the world outside of it but rather
designates its own relationships of internal difference.
Derrida also criticized the Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory which stated
that it is importance lies not in designating an aspect of the material world but
rather in functioning as part of system. The significance of the sign is thus entirely
arbitrary. One of the important implications of deconstruction is that the signifier
is just as important as the signified, that the world is just as important as the world
it purports to designate. As a form of analysis, deconstruction emphasizes to the
failure of philosophy to achieve or describe presence. Deconstruction distrusts the
valorization of presence as the more authentic register of discourse.
In grammatology, Derrida argues that the priority of speech over writing
generally assumed by the theorist of language and human development has
obscured the problem of language and its relation to presence. On this view,
deconstruction emerged as both a critique of “phonocentrism” and “general
science of writing”. Writing itself refers to the play of differences within language
(DIFFERANCE), which marks the arbitrary condition of language in which
signifiers endlessly refer to each other.
Deconstruction demonstrates that Western thought has always already
been defined by inconsistency, paradox, contradiction, incommensurability.
Deconstruction is not nihilistic. To de-construct is not to destroy; it is rather to
unveil the seemingly hidden workings of language that constitute the very basis of
linguistic and textual meaning.
Though Deconstruction began as a critique of phenomenology, it very
soon became a valuable critical tool in the analysis of literature, film, and other
cultural phenomena. Derrida wrote several important works on literature, but it
was the work of the US theorists Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller that made
Deconstruction a popular tool for the analysis of literature. De Man and Miller
were, like Derrida, influenced by phenomenology, but they arrived at their
deconstructionist methodologies through their own understanding of the
implications of difference and contradiction within literary texts.
De Man’s Blindness and Insight is perhaps the best known text of
American deconstructionist criticism. De Man argues that becoming aware of the
“complexities of reading” is the necessary first step towards “theorizing about
literary language”. These complexities are the function of the critic’s “blindness”
with respect to a gap between practice and the theoretical precepts guiding it.
Literary critics are thus “curiously doomed to say something quite different from
what they meant to say”. And while critics may remain unaware of the
discrepancy that informs their work, “they seem to thrive on it and owe their best
insights to the assumptions these insights disprove”. For de Man, it is rarely
possible to decide, when reading a literary text, whether we are reading, or should
be reading, in a rhetorical or literal fashion. This critical “undecidability” is a
property of both literary and critical language.
Though Deconstruction is primarily understood as a theory of textuality
and as a method for reading texts, it constitutes for many a radically new way of
seeing and knowing the world. Deconstruction is the part of the foundation of
contemporary theories of sexuality, gender, race, history, and culture.